[Draft of July 9, 2015; revised July 13 and
July 23]
The Computer Science Department at Pomona College maintains its
own computer facilities to support the coursework and research of
students and faculty members. These facilities are managed
independently from the college's Information Technology Services.
There are four student laboratories, located in Edmunds Hall rooms
105, 219 (shared with Linguistics and Cognitive Science), 227, and
229. Some of these rooms may be reserved at times for scheduled
class laboratory sessions.
The laboratories are supported by several servers that maintain
files for all users, allow remote access to the facilities, and
provide computing support for large projects. See the department's
Facilities
page for a current list of resources. [Page
needs updating.]
Accounts: Accounts are available to students in Pomona
College Computer Science courses, to declared majors in Computer
Science, and to other members of the community with related
academic interests. Usually students who have pre-enrolled in
classes will have accounts and passwords ready for them at the
beginning of the semester. Alternatively, accounts may be
requested on our Request
an Account page.
Student accounts will remain active until one year after the
owner has left the college, provided that the password has not
been allowed to expire. The status of each account will be
reviewed periodically, usually at the end of each semester, and
inactive accounts will be removed from the system.
Security: Protect your password. Do not write it down, and
do not share it with anyone. You will be prompted to change your
password every six months, which you can do by visiting the Change
Password web page.
Store your files in your home directory, with the appropriate
protections against prying eyes. (If you need help, search the web
for “OS X file permissions” or “linux file permissions.”) Review
the department's Academic
Honesty Policy to be sure you are not inadvertently sharing
your coursework.
Sharing resources: We all share the computers, servers,
and network, and we want to rely on an acceptable level of
performance. Do not engage in any frivolous, excessive, or
inappropriate use of the systems that will degrade performance or
reliability for others. If you need to run large computations,
please discuss the situation with a faculty member or the system
manager. They can often find the computing power that you need on
a machine that is not heavily used.
Use only the programs, files, and other resources for which you
are authorized. Do not probe the network or execute programs that
are itended to disrupt the normal functioning of the systems or to
give you unfair advantages over other students.
Quotas: Each user is allocated 2 gigabytes of storage
space for files. Users with large projects may request an increase
in the quota by writing to sysadmin@cs.pomona.edu.
Please plan ahead; requests for increased quotas are never emergencies.
Remember that simply moving a file to the Trash does not get rid
of it—keep your file storage under quota by periodically emptying
the Trash.
Backup: Files on the Computer Science servers, including
users' home directories, are backed up periodically as protection
against system failure. We may be able to recover an
accidentally-deleted file, but we cannot guarantee it. Contact the
systems manager if you have a need to recover a file.
Laboratory etiquette:
General policies: Users of the Computer Science facilities
are subject to all of the rules that may be established by
Information Technology Services and other departments of the
college that apply to all computing facilities on campus. See the
section on Computing Policies in the Pomona
College Student Handbook and also the Policies web page at
ITS. Please pay particular attention to the Claremont
Colleges Policy Appropriate Use Policy.
Privileges on the Computer Science facilities and in the rest of
the college are not separable. If privileges are suspended or
terminated by Information Technology Services or another
department on campus, then the same suspension or termination will
apply to the Computer Science facilities. Conversely, a violation
of the rules on Computer Science facilities will be reported to
the dean’s office and the staff at Information Technology
Services.