Lab Policies

 

• Do not allow anyone to use your account, and do not give your lab door combination to anyone. Nobody without a Newton Lab account should be allowed in the lab at any time (faculty guests excepted). If you violate this rule, you will lose your account.

   

• No food or drink shall be placed near the computers or keyboards: park it near the door, or in the trash can. If you violate this rule, you will lose your account.

   

• Multiple (large) programs running on a single computer can slow down all the programs. Lab courtesy dictates that priority should go to the work being done by the person actually sitting at the monitor, doing ``face time'' with the computer.

  Thus, when you run a computation-intensive job in the background or remotely -- running at length in your absense -- "nice" the job so that it runs at a lower priority and doesn't interfere with work being done by the person actually sitting at the workstation console. Read the manual pages for ``nice'' and ``renice''.

  For running large Mathematica or Matlab jobs in the background, use the command mathbg or matlabbg.

  Don't generate huge data files in your home directory; use a subdirectory in /scratch. (Read about disk limits and /scratch space.)

   

• Log off a workstation when you leave it. Do not use ``screenlock'' unless you will return to the workstation in 15 minutes or less. If you violate this rule, somebody will send crank email in your name, then log you out. (Screenlock can be killed!)

   

• To save paper,
  • print to "richard2" (two-sided printing) unless you really need 1-sided printout ("richard1")
  • don't print large documents unless you are nearby to monitor the printer's progress
  • whenever possible, print your text files using enscript or 2up or 2upframe or psnup
  • Print PostScript files with the command lp, and
  • don't try to print non-PostScript files (esp. PDF or PNG or JPEG files) with the command lp, because you will only get dozens/hundreds of pages of gibberish. PDF files should be printed using acroread.
  • don't print scanned handwritten homework solutions! Stop the madness!!

   

• If you login remotely, try to choose the least-busy client on which to run any computationally intensive jobs. How to choose: log on to newton, run the command ``rlab'' to see the load levels for all the Newton Lab workstations. Note which one is least busy, log off newton, and log back on to that one. Run your job using ``nice'' (see above). Editing text files and reading email are not computationally intensive.

   

• If you encounter problems with hardware or software and can't handle it yourself, email ``trouble@babbage.colorado.edu''

   

• 50 ways to confuse, worry, or just scare people in the computer lab (courtesy of rec.humor.funny)