Introduction

The Networking and Telecommuniations Group of the Division of the Chief Information Officer (DotCIO) provides software and hardware support for Rensselaer-owned faculty and staff UNIX workstations located on-campus through the Campus UNIX Systems Support Program (CUSSP) for software and the Rensselaer Computer Repair for hardware maintainence.

CUSSP offers workstation support tailored for your computing outlook and needs. If you want DotCIO to completely maintain your software, create accounts, backup your files, automatically update your software, and more, then the main CUSSP program, is for you. It's like having the DotCIO Networking and Telecommunications group work directly for you. You can automatically take advantage of all Rensselaer Computing System (RCS) developments right in your own office, with no system administration on your part! Best of all, this program is FREE!

If you prefer to administer your system yourself, or you already have a system administrator, but want the advantages of professionally-installed operating system upgrades, the ability to use RCS software if you wish, the expertise of DotCIO systems staff, and an electronic mail answer line, then the Time & Materials service, is for you.

This document describes the two CUSSP programs, including what kinds of systems each program supports, what services each provides, the respsonsibilities the customer has under each program, and each program's fees. This docuement also describes related DotCIO services that are available to existing and potential CUSSP customers.

Please note that while some or all of the administration may be free, there may be fees associated with operating systems, specialized software and licensing of software.

Program Descriptions

Program I: DotCIO-Managed Systems

This program is available to faculty and staff whose workstations are substantially similar to those DotCIO manages in its workstation labs.

The distinguishing feature of this program, from the customer's perspective, is that DotCIO assumes virtually full responsibility for software support of the system.

Supported Systems

DotCIO guarantees support for any of the following system configurations for the length of the contract. This support will be in place at least as long as one or more DotCIO-administered RCS labs are populated with this hardware.

• Sun SPARC systems (all models) with at least 48 megabytes of memory and at least one 2 gigabyte hard disk. Solaris 2.5 is now fully supported.

• IBM RISC System 6000 (all PCI models) with at least 128 megabytes of memory (256+mb recommended) and at least a single 2 gigabytes hard disk.

• Some SGI IRIX systems running IRIX 6.2 or 6.3. Check with the CUSSP support people to find out exactly which machines are supported.

A customer may have the following additional devices attached to the workstation, while still remaining eligible for Program I:

• Any Sun or IBM supported add-in and add-on cards or devices

• Additional non-vendor drives conforming to the Small Computer Systems Interface (SCSI) standard of the following types:

  • Hard disk drives (which the customer backs up)

  • CD ROM drives

  • Magneto-optical drives

  • Tape drives (DAT, 8mm, 1/4" cartridge, 1/2" reel)

  • network attached printers

Note: For any hardware component, if that component has not previously been installed and integrated into an existing RCS lab or CUSSP Program I system, then the component must undergo a period of "integration testing" within DotCIO facilities, and/or installed on an DotCIO system before it can be added to the customer's system at the customer's location. This is the only way in which we can guarantee that a given component will work in the RCS environment.

Detailed Program Features

• Your system has full access to all RCS software with no further effort or license fees required.

• Your system will automatically receive all software upgrades (applications and operating systems) as they are installed in the course of day-to-day software maintenance of the RCS labs. This will include new releases, bug fixes, and security patches.

• Any non-RCS software desired will count against the 5 hrs of yearly work granted by the contract to install. Contact Jeff Burdyl (burdyj@rpi.edu) for University software and licensing costs.

• You will receive notification of system and application software changes via the "System Bulletins" window at login time.

• All UNIX accounts on the system are regular RCS userids. The burden of creating, expiring and backing up customer accounts falls to DotCIO. Additionally, your users' home directories (private data) are available to them from any RCS public workstation facility. While your users can access any DotCIO system, it is not true that any RCS user can access your system. Access can be restricted. You control the list of which RCS userids may log into your machine.

• All DotCIO printers (at the VCC and in each of the public workstation facilities) are available from your system. Again, DotCIO will handle the administrative accounting and billing for individuals' printing usage.

• RCS administration uses the Andrew File System (AFS) to join the campus file system and your local disk space. This is what gives you access to RCS applications and services without your needing the extra local disk space (several Gigabytes!) to hold them. Like NFS, AFS provides access to files stored on remote file servers. With AFS, however, once a file is fetched, a copy of it is stored on the local disk in a disk cache. Because accessing locally cached files is usually considerably faster than accessing files over the network, software performance improves.

• If you have no private data on local disk -- the simplest case -- you will enjoy two additional benefits:

  1. You do not need to perform any backups (because your private files reside on DotCIO file servers which are backed up daily by DotCIO Operations staff).

  2. If you suffer some catastrophic system failure, your system can be rebuilt quickly and easily once the failing hardware components are fixed or replaced.

• If you require additional disk space, you have two options:
  1. Rent DotCIO-managed AFS disk space. The advantages of this form of disk space are that DotCIO automatically backs it up and that you may expand and contract the amount of space you are renting as your needs change. See the DotCIO UNIX disk space document for plan details and units of charge.

  2. Attach additional disk(s) of your own. In this case, however, you are responsible for backing up the extra space. Privately-owned, locally-attached disk space can be made available (i.e., visible) to all DotCIO-managed RCS systems if that is deemed desirable.

Additional Features

In addition to the benefits listed above, the CUSSP Program has the following features:

• Initial system installation and configuration (Note, however, that network connection is not included; see the section "Conditions of Service" below.)

• Access to CUSSP office hours

• Access to the CUSSP E-mail answer line

• Subscription to the DotCIO newsletter, The Kiosk, which contains news and information of interest to CUSSP customers

• Five hours of on-site visits per 12-month period

• Lower hourly charge for all additional work (as compared to straight Time and Materials charges)

Program Fees

There is NO annual fee associated with CUSSP Program, although the Customer must fill out and sign a contract annually. In addition, there is a $30 per hour rate applied for work beyond the five-hour allowance. (This rate covers software support only.) For information on hardware support, see the section "CUSSP-related DotCIO Services" in this document.

Conditions of Service

To qualify for this program, the system must be continuously powered up and connected to the RPI campus TCP/IP network. You should obtain a network connection before, or at the same time as, applying for CUSSP support. For information on obtaining a network connection see the section "CUSSP-related DotCIO Services" in this document.

Program Caveats

• DotCIO will have exclusive access to superuser capabilities on your system. You or your designated system administrator may be granted access to certain system control commands, using the "sudo" program facility.

• Under this program there is no prior notification of system software upgrades. It is your responsibility (presumably in conjunction with the software's vendor) to maintain any applications installed on private local disk in working condition. DotCIO support personnel will make every effort to assist customers whose applications do not work due to a system change; however software changes will not be reverted because of this condition. If you have "mission critical" non-RCS applications, you are strongly advised to obtain software support from the vendor so that a new version of the failing application can be obtained if it will not work with the upgraded system software. Of course, you retain the right to terminate this program support and to contract with DotCIO to become a Time & Materials customer running a previous release of the operating system.

• At this time DotCIO has no applications-level contract programming to port applications from one operating system version to another for customers.

Program II: Customer-Managed Systems

This program is available to RPI faculty and staff whose workstations do not qualify for Program I or who prefer to do their own system administration.

There are several features that make this program different from Program I. First and foremost, you retain control of superuser access to your system. You may keep your own account names and home directories separate from any DotCIO-administered accounts. DotCIO will perform periodic, scheduled maintenance of system software and certain applications. DotCIO will assist with installation and will be available to help with problem determination when software-related problems arise. You continue to perform day-to-day operations.

Within Program II you will need to make an important decision: Do you want the Andrew File System (AFS) installed on your system? With AFS commands and a cache installed, your system will be joined to the RCS campus file system containing all the RCS userids, home directories, and, more importantly, RCS applications. All you need to do to participate in the campus file system through AFS is dedicate a modest amount of local disk space to serve as an AFS cache partition.

Supported Systems

CUSSP Program II support is available for a variety of hardware platforms. Currently, this list includes:

• Sun Microsystems Sun3 and Sun4 (SPARC) models

• IBM RS6000 (all models)

• Silicon Graphics (all models)

Please note that this list of supported vendors and models is subject to change. Support for a given model or vendor will only be dropped, however, at the time of contract renewal. In general, the list of DotCIO supported models will continue to include some models that the vendor has recently declared obsolete.

Supported Operating System Releases

The list of operating system releases supported under CUSSP Program II includes:

• SunOS 5.x (a.k.a. Solaris 2.x)

• IBM AIX 4.1.5, 4.3

The list above highlights a principal difference between Programs I and II in that, as a Program II customer, you may continue using an older version of your operating system if you so choose, so long as DotCIO still supports it. In some cases, however, you may be informed that a specific problem you are experiencing cannot be fixed without an operating system upgrade.

Detailed Program Features

• You or someone you designate acts as the system administrator. Your system administrator retains superuser privileges.

• You may elect to set up and maintain userids that are separate from those on the RCS systems. Or, you may choose to use RCS userids on your system if you have AFS installed.

• DotCIO will perform operating system upgrades in a timely manner, and will work with you to determine when to upgrade your system so as to minimize service outage. (Please note, however, that DOtCIO may elect not to install minor operating system revisions, or those known to be unstable.) Operating system upgrades may include some or all of the following services as deemed necessary by DotCIO:
  • Generation of a performance-optimized kernel

  • Installation of your selection of unbundled, site-licensed packages (e.g., Sun Fortran, IBM graPHIGS, etc.) supplied by operating system vendor

  • Network configuration

  • Repartitioning of the system's hard disks (Note: It is your responsibility to have done a FULL backup of the system prior to the scheduled upgrade. Furthermore, if repartitioning is required, it will be your responsibility to restore any user data on relocated partitions.)

  • Restoration of system services in place before the upgrade:
    • Customer account information (not including user data)

    • Printing service

    • File system services (AFS, NFS)

    • You will have access to RPI-licensed applications installed in the campus file system. You may access these applications in one of two ways:
      1. DotCIO can install on your system the Andrew File System (AFS) client software and an AFS disk cache partition (approximately 64MB dedicated disk partition). This is a one-time procedure. As an AFS client, your system will have constant access to the entire suite (several gigabytes) of RCS applications, which are always being expanded and updated.

      2. You can install the software on your system in the standard way from whatever media the software's vendor supplies, or you can contract with DotCIO to have the software installed. If DotCIO has been contracted to install the software, you or your system administrator should contact CUSSP to agree on a day and time for installing the software. This negotiation is necessary to protect you from unexpected service outages when an existing version of a heavily used system software component is to be replaced or upgraded.

      Although the second method for accessing RCS applications does not require AFS and may therefore seem the simpler of the two, the first method has several advantages:

      • There is no separate installation step involved for each application as for the second method.

      • The applications made available include not only RPI-licensed software but also the many public domain packages, such as TeX, which are available on the RCS system. To make these available by the second method your system administrator would typically have to copy the source code to the your system and rebuild it.

      • Your users can access their RCS disk space, e.g. their home directory, their departmental or course-related space in addition to the RCS applications.

      If you do choose the second method, you or your system administrator should request (via e-mail) that the particular media be available on the day you would like to do the installation. You should supply the name of the product, the version, the type of machine on which it is to be installed and the level of the operating system currently running on that machine. You are wholly responsible for the safety of the media while it is in your possession. Your system must have whatever type of media drive is required to read the vendor's distribution media. At this time DotCIO does not loan any type of drive (tape or CD) to customers. Also, at this time DotCIO does not offer a transcription service for converting software from one format to another which your system might be able to use.

      Some applications will incur a license fee when installed locally on a standalone system (i.e., applications NOT accessed via AFS). For information on RCS applications' media availability and supplemental license fees or contact DotCIO Software License Coordinator Jeff Burdyl at ext. 8187.

      DotCIO will notify you of changes to the list of RCS applications.

Additional Program Features

The program fee for Program II is $40 per hour, though initial setup is free.

Conditions of Service

• To qualify for this program, the system must be continuously powered up and connected to the RPI campus TCP/IP network. You should obtain a network connection before, or at the same time as, applying for CUSSP support. For information on obtaining a network connection see the section on "CUSSP-related DotCIO Services" below.

• When filling out the contract you must supply the name of a designated system administrator and technical contact for the system.

• The "sudo" program, which allows and logs usage of superuser access by selected user accounts, must be installed on the system.

• Please note that DotCIO will not restore any system changes made by non-DotCIo personnel. As the Customer, you have the responsibility to restore any such changes. Furthermore, this program in no way covers the repair of system damage caused by non-DotCIO personnel.

• Once you have decided to upgrade to a new version of the operating system (OS), the following important information will apply. It is your responsibility to test and verify that any locally installed/maintained applications will continue to work with the new version of the OS. This is usually done by contacting the software vendor. If there are some "mission critical" applications which cannot be fixed before the scheduled OS upgrade, you may renegotiate a different schedule.

• The only time a customer must upgrade to a different level of the OS to remain in the CUSSP program is when their system software is no longer in the list of CUSSP-supported OS releases.

• At this time, DotCIO has no applications-level contract programming to port applications from one OS version to another for customers.

Time & Materials Services for UNIX Systems

This service, available to any Rensselaer faculty or staff, covers the same machine types and operating system release ranges as in the CUSSP Program above, and is designed for UNIX system owners who occasionally need some assistance. The program requires no formal contract between DotCIO and the customer. However, you should keep in mind that customers with contracts in the CUSSP program will receive higher priority than those who choose the Time and Materials service.

The Time & Materials hourly system support rate is $50/hour; this rate covers software support only. For information on hardware support, see the section "CUSSP-related DotCIO Services" below.

Typical Uses of CUSSP Service Time Allocation

A list of software maintenance tasks for which customers typically request CUSSP assistance appears below, providing examples of services for which a CUSSP Program customer might use some of their on-site service allowance hours. The list also includes things that Time & Materials customers may wish to contract CUSSP support for as well. (We do not intend this to be an exhaustive list; customers should feel free to request any type of system software assistance they require.)

• Attempting to recover lost data after a hard disk or power failure: determining the extent of the damage and providing advice on reformatting and restoring data after the disk is brought back up.

• Installation of customer's applications: CUSSP personnel will (re)install customer applications if the original tape, complete vendor instructions, and licensing mechanism information (applications passwords, etc.) are available.

• Tape backup planning: Spending some time with a customer's system administrator to develop a plan and schedule for performing periodic backups of local disks.

• User account creation: Showing a system administrator how to add/delete user accounts, and setting up user defaults that are appropriate for that system's users.

• System security/access issues: For Time & Materials customers, this might involve a lesson in how to take some basic security steps, e.g., how to disable accounts that you think may have been compromised, etc.

• NFS configuration: Showing the customer how to setup various system configuration files to allow a system to share local disk space with other systems via NFS.

CUSSP-Related DotCIO Services

Any RPI UNIX System Adminstrator is welcome to take advanatge of DotCIO's UNIX expertise. This service is aimed at helping System Administrators who are having a non-urgent system problems which they suspect will be easily solved by someone with more experience. The designated CUSSP representative will be available during office hours in their office location (they will not make site visits), or you may contact the representatives by phoning the numbers listed below, or by directing e-mail to cussp@rpi.edu.

Dave Bicknell is available at extension 6966 or in VCC 311.

Andy Mondore is available at extension 8156 or in VCC 311.

DotCIO Short Courses

From time to time, DotCIO will offer short courses on topics ranging from Introduction to UNIX to Shell Programming. Please check the ARC Short Courses page for details.