Frontier General Policies

These policies are in addition to other University and/or IT policies.

Disk Quotas

Users' disk space in their home directories is controlled by quotas. At this time the default disk quota is 50 Megabytes per user; if more space is needed please contact your user consultant to discuss an increase. Such increases should be for UW-related purposes such as research or class projects.

Long-Running CPU-Intensive Processes

In general, long-running CPU-intensive processes can impact other users' ability to work on Frontier. Such processes should be niced, which runs them at a lower priority than other processes running on the system, giving preference to interactive type processes. Details on the use of the nice command may be found on the How To Manage Job Control in UNIX How-To in the Process Priority section.

We also require that any person only run one CPU-intensive process, not several.

User processes which are discovered to have consumed more than 5 minutes of CPU time will be niced, and those that are discovered to have consumed more than 60 minutes of CPU time without being niced will be killed.

/tmp Usage

/tmp, /var/tmp, and /usr/tmp (which are all the same storage area) are for storage of temporary files only. It is cleaned nightly, and any files that have not been accessed for 2 days will be deleted.

User-created directories will be deleted without notice.

If available disk space becomes low on /tmp, /var/tmp, or /usr/tmp, files will be deleted starting with large files until sufficient space is recovered, even if those files are less than 2 days old.

/var/preserve Files

If you are editing a file with an editor such as vi, or one of many similar editors (e.g. elvis), and suffer a disconnect or system failure, a recovery file is kept in /var/preserve so that you can recover the lost editing session (see for example the -r option of vi).

To keep this directory from becoming clogged with old recovery journals, it is cleaned daily by removing all files that have not been accessed in 7 days. Therefore you have at most 7 days to recover an aborted edit session.

core Files

Occasionally programs will crash. On UNIX when this happens, there is usually an attempt made to save a copy of the program's state as it was executing in a file. These are saved in your current directory in a file named core.

Because it is a copy of a program plus any memory it had allocated, these files can be quite large, and may cause you to exceed your quota.

If a file named core already exists, it will be overwritten without notice. For this reason, do not name any of your files core.

Any core files, found in user directories, that have not been accessed in more than 7 days will automatically be deleted.

irc, eggdrop, and related programs

Users should not run clients or servers such as irc (internet relay chat), eggdrop, MUD, tf, or related programs. These are typically resource hogs that can significantly impact performance of other users, and/or use techniques to attempt to hide their presence and bypass normal quotas and security policies.