Last updated 21.07.08

Computing Facilities

• Who maintains the facilities?
• Remote Access to CSE
• What facilities do we provide?
  
  • For Undergraduate Students
  • For Staff and Postgraduate Students
  • Servers and Peripherals
  • Quotas and Allocation
• Undergraduate Laboratory Opening Times
• Help Desk Opening Times
• Undergraduate Laboratory Locations
• Undergraduate Laboratory Hardware

Facilities for Undergraduate Students

Undergraduate students are essentially provided with:

• A UNIX or WinXP account as required by their course(s);
• Access to appropriate workstations in various student laboratories;
• Access and quotas relating to:
  
  
  • Disk space
  • Printers
  • Modems access
  • The internet
  • Terminal bookings

Please Be Warned - misuse of the facilities provided by the School will result in disciplinary action (including fines). Details of the conditions of use are found in the Yellow Form which is acknowleged by every student when their account is first created.

Undergraduate Laboratory Opening Times

Table 1: Undergraduate Student Laboratory Opening Times (See Notes below for Swipe Access information)

Help Desk Opening Times

Table 2: Help Desk Opening Times

NOTE:

1. Strictly speaking, the opening times listed in Table 1 above refer to the times when users are permitted to log into the workstation consoles in our undergraduate labs. This presumes that:
   • the user can gain physical access to the workstations in the lab.
   • the user has the appropriate permissions (usually determined by class membership) to use the workstations in the lab.
   Labs with restricted physical access generally require swipe card access at certain times of the day (possibly all day). General purpose labs in the Electrical Engineering and Mechanical Engineering Buildings as well as the Windows labs in the Old Main Building are in FREE access (no swipe-card access required) from 09:00 to 19:00 M-F only. Consult Help Desk for more details.
2. The only exception to the student lab opening times listed above is the banjo lab, which are considered special labs made available on a 24 hour basis. The banjo lab is available to CSE Thesis students only. Thesis students should:
   • See Help Desk on how to obtain a thesis account.
   • Access is issued automatically to students enrolled in thesis classes at the start of each session. See the Help Desk's webpage on swipe access
3. All labs except the thesis lab are closed during the University shutdown period from Christmas Day to the New Year's Day public holiday inclusive.

Undergraduate Laboratory Location and Hardware Type

The School of CSE provides and supports a large number of workstation laboratories around the University which are made available to their undergraduate students. These labs may be located using the maps at /people/helpdesk/cse_maps.html, and are identified in the table below by the following references:

• G17-UC Rm LGxx: Labs in the Undercroft (Lower Ground Floor) of the Electrical Engineering Building (map reference G17).
• J17-UC Rm Gxx: Labs in the Undercroft (Ground floor) of the Mechanical Engineering Building (map reference J17).
• K17 Rm Gxx: Labs in the Ground Floor of the "K17" building (formerly known as the GAS (Geography and Surveying) Building) (map reference K17).
• J17-BUC: Labs in the Undercroft of the "Bridge" building between K17 and Mech eng, adjacent to the Mech Eng cafeteria (map reference J18). These labs are also known as the "eatery" labs.
• K14-UC: Labs in the Undercroft below the Burrows Theatres in the Physics building (map reference J15). These labs are also known as the "dungeon" labs.

Table 3: Undergraduate Laboratory Location and Hardware Type

NOTE:

1. The HCI (Human Computer Interaction) Lab is currently only for use by COMP3511 students. It is not available for use as a general-purpose Mac lab and cannot be used just because a student has an unix account).
    
2. Access and use of the banjo and oud lab will only be available to students enrolled in a CSE Thesis (either undergraduate or postgraduate).
    
3. The K17 labs are restricted access labs at all times. Swipe card access to K17, J17, K14 undercroft and to the Electrical Engineering building will automatically be issued to all students enrolled in a CSE program (as distinct to a CSE course). After the session's HECS census date, those enrolled in a CSE 2nd Year course or higher will be manually programmed).
    
4. The lyre lab is an advanced networks lab restricted to students enrolled in COMP9332, or COMP9333.

Using the Windows Operating System

All Lab computers provide access to Windows XP in a virtual machine via vmware player.

Undergraduate Allocations and Quotas

All undergraduate students who are doing a program or course run by the School are given an account on the School computers. The account will last for the duration of the program or course, and will usually be subject to quotas restrictions which are meant to be proportional to the academic (ie: assignment and coursework based) needs of the student.

To this end, most of the quotas described below have a component that depend on the number of courses that the student is enrolled in. Be aware however, that some courses provide higher or lower quota increments to the ones listed below, depending on the estimated academic requirements of the course.

Disk quota:

• Base allocation of 50Mb for CSE-program students, 12Mb otherwise.
• An additional 10Mb per course.
• Thesis students receive an additional allocation of 100Mb.

Print quota:

• 100 pages base allocation.
• An additional 150 pages per course
• Thesis students receive an additional allocation of 1000 pages.
• Students may purchase additional printer allocation from the helpdesk.

Modem access:

• The school provides each undergraduate student (or postgraduate coursework student) enrolled in a course run by the school, with funds to log into the University Dial Up Service (UDUS). Students are allocated 2 hours per week per course calculated over 16 weeks each session (This allows for the midsession break, and stuvac).
  Usually, an initial allocation is made for the first 6 weeks of session based on the official pre-HECS census enrolment. Shortly after the HECS census date, this allocation is increased to include the remaining 10 weeks based on official enrolments at that time.
• Students may purchase additional UDUS allocation from DisConnect .

Internet Access (IP) quota

• A base allocation per session of 200Mb if the student is enrolled in at least one COMP or SENG course.
• An additional 50 Mb per session for every COMP or SENG course enrolled.
• Thesis students receive an additional 200Mb.
• The daily IP quota is set at 20% the total session quota.
• Students may purchase additional IP allocation from the helpdesk, but they will not be permitted to purchase any more than the school's original IP allocation to them.
  See IP quota purchases for more details.
• For more details, refer to IP Quota

Booking Token Allocation:

Note: Booking token allocations were changed in early 2004.

Course enrolments entitle their students to the following token allocations:

Course Level	Tokens
First year	4 yr1tokens
Second year	5 yr2tokens
Third year	6 yr3tokens
Fourth year	6 yr4tokens

Under the new booking token allocation scheme (which has been in place since week 6 of session 1 2004), the number of tokens allocated to a student depends simply on the highest level of course in which the student is enrolled for the current session, and no longer depends on the specific number of courses in which the student is enrolled.

For example, a student enrolled in one second year course and two third year courses for the current session would be given the third year token allocation of 6 yr3tokens, as would another student enrolled in just one third year course.

Different tokens enable students to book different sets of labs, for (potentially) different sets of days or times. The labs and/or times associated with each token is given below:

Token	Labs
yr1token	meng eatery ee_uc
yr2token	meng eatery phys
yr3token	meng eatery phys
yr4token	meng eatery phys
thesistoken	k17

There are also postgraduate tokens (pgNtoken) which are identical to the undergraduate tokens (yrNtoken) except that unlike the undergraduate tokens, they permit their owners to book the leaf and spoons labs (in the mech-eng undercroft) after 6pm. This is in an attempt to cater to those postgraduate coursework students who typically cannot attend (or book) labs before 6pm, due to their work commitments during the day.

Thesis students are allocated 4 thesis tokens in addition to the basic allocation of tokens described above

Note:

• In addition to the personal bookings that students can make with their quota of tokens, many computing courses also book laboratory sessions for their students to attend. These lab sessions are usually intended to be used by specific tutorial classes.

  See booking summary page to get a summary of these class bookings.

• The new token allocation scheme is intended to defeat a common misuse of the booking system prevalent under the old booking token allocation scheme. The problem with the old scheme was that it would often allocate large numbers of tokens to students, many of whom would make large slabs of bookings which they never intended to use, except as a means of guaranteeing a lab machine whenever they felt like using one. This selfish misuse of tokens was so pervasive that it had made true (honoured) bookings rare, and had subverted the booking system into a preemptive terminal reservation system for use by those with large token allocations.

Facilities for Staff and Postgraduate Students

Postgraduate students who are doing their degree by coursework:

• Use the workstations in the undergraduate labs;
• Are not allocated their own workstation;
• Have the same quotas apply to them, as apply to other (undergraduate) coursework students.
• Are allocated tokens that allow them (and only them) to book the postgraduate labs (currently leaf and spoons) after 6pm on weekdays, and on the weekends.

Postgraduate students who are doing their degree by research and all full-time staff, are allocated a computer by the School for the duration of their tenure with the school. Staff computers are guaranteed to be no more than 3 years old and are usually supplied installed with one of the standard operating systems that the school supports (pc.i86.solaris, sun.sparc.solaris, pc.i86.linux (debian) or Windows XP). Staff or postgraduates requiring non-standard installations will usually need to make special arrangements with the Computing Support Group.

Disk and printer quotas also apply to staff and postgraduates, although these are generally more generous than those that apply to other users:

Quotas assigned to staff can be increased (within reason) if a request is made to System Support . Quotas assigned to research postgraduates can be increased if a request is made to System Support by the student's supervisor, or with his/her explicit authorisation.

Remote Access to CSE

The CSE computers can by accessed using an ssh client.

Students wishing to have dial-up access the School's computers from outside the University must do so via UDUS, which is run by the Division of Information Services. The CSE's computers are not accessible from computer facilites belonging to other Schools on campus.

The School maintains a number of remotely accessible servers , including POP, Mail, FTP and WWW servers.

Who Maintains The Facilities?

The Computing Support Group

The computing facilities in the School of Computer Science and Engineering are managed on a day-to-day basis by the Computing Support Group. Problems or requests should be sent to System Support.

The Facilities Committee

Long-term planning for computing facilities is handled by the Computing Committee. They also advise the Head of School on matters of policy regarding computer usage within the School.

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