scadblog

Cool - I just started iTunes 4 on the PU network and found a Rendezvous share of someone with good taste! I feel bad streaming from a random person’s computer thought. I wonder what’s the best way to discover who and where they are - a netstat and hostmaster lookup can only take you so far. I’ll just take a walk down to the room as its in an adjoining EQUAD department… as soon as this song is over;)

I read a question that a SCAD person had recently regarding the practice of sharing passwords. They wanted to know whether or not an employee could be instructed by their supervisor to share an account password either with the supervisor or other workers. Not knowing the answer I thought I would sift through the University’s published Guidelines for Use of computing technologies on campus. In my view, there seems to be a contradiction at play. The owner of an account seems to be responsible for its lawful use. But while sharing access information is acceptable, there seems to be no guideline to address transferred or shared responsibility if an account is indeed shared.

http://www.princeton.edu/~policy/Ware/Abouttheguidelines.shtml

I just did a quick once over and pulled all of the relevant quotes.
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Not too long ago I posted instructions for enabling incoming SSH connections on your Windows machine without shelling out the big bucks. Its a great alternative to having people mount their Windows shares from home, which can be flaking and slow at times. But two things troubled me once I had it set up: the strange pathname for C:/ and the fact that Windows domain users were not able to log in. Well, not any more.
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A professor sent an undergraduate my way interested in running CPLEX and AMPL on arizona. I pointed him to the software in /usr/princeton/bin but soon after he was back on my doorstep. He reinterated that he wished to run CPLEX and AMPL, not CPLEX or AMPL. Apparently his attempts at launching the solver of one of the applications from the other were unsuccessful. Knowing little to nothing about the usage of either AMPL or CPLEX, I surmised that it was a functionality that was either missing entirely, or one he wasn’t calling correctly. After a few command-line iterations, we finally hit upon the solution illustrated below. In other words, this is how you call CPLEX from within AMPL:
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I like to think I’m the godfather of this cluster in my department. I don’t actually do anything for it but watch from a distance, occasionally providing supplies and minimal troubleshooting. It really has its own admin, but it does provide an opportunity for me to learn all about cluster computing without actually venturing out on my own:

http://denali.princeton.edu

I was cruising the OIT Internal Links page this morning and thought it might be useful to have the links SCAD/DCS can and cannot access on-hand.
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When I first came on the job, my records in the Hostmaster database all needed to be updated with my contact information. What a hassle as for months afterwards I went back and forth in email with the former SCAD who was kind enough to put up with all the change requests. Eventually I decided to nag the Hostmaster admins for a better solution, and the one they came up with could have saved me hours of pointless email correspondence. The admin ran a script that changed all instances of the former SCAD’s email address to mine as technical contact.

So when I’m met with the need to change a single tech contact these days I have always defaulted to contacting whomever officially admins Hostmaster. With the noticable absence of a detete button, I knew of no other way to clear a tech contact. What’s more, I figured since the admins wield such power in changing contacts en-masse, surely they wouldn’t be too bothered by an individual change once in a while.

I need not bug them anymore. And neither should you. If you need to remove a tech contact on a Hostmaster entry, simply type one that already exists in place of the one you’d like to delete. Since there always has to be at least one technical contact, and the form doesn’t like duplicates, it just eliminates the one you want to overwrite. The directions provided with Hostmaster never made this clear as far as I can tell and just confused me more. Well, confusion be gone!