IMPORTANT INFORMATION FOR THE NEW PHYSICS-SUBNET NETIQUETTE
We expect every user to use the physics account in accordance with the netiquette. It must not be used for any kind of malicious action against any other user or the system itself. Disrespect might lead to the loss of access privileges and will be reported to the computing committee of the physics department. Also, CIT rules apply:

• keep passwords safe (password sharing is not allowed; it results in immediate and permanent closing of the account)
• use account only for physics related activities (no games, chat channels, any illegal activities) [we don't want phone calls from the feds]
• obey the rules for using 360: - must be a student, staff or faculty in physics department, - no food or drinks in 360, - no excessive noise

ACCOUNT CONTINUITY!
First of all, and most important: the account we set up for every physics graduate student with an NSM account is an ADDITIONAL account. NONE of your other accounts, e.g. acsu, nsm, is affected in any way. In order to access your other accounts open a terminal and connect to ubunix.acsu.buffalo.edu or nsm.buffalo.edu.

WHAT HAS HAPPENED?
All of the machines in room 360 have been updated to Solaris 8 and connected to the new file server maintained by us (for a certain period "bose", "feynman", "bohr" and "fermi" will remain in the NSM subnet to have a fall-back for those of you who desperately need it (but there shouldn't be any serious reason to do this)). These new accounts are referred to as the physics accounts in the following. To access the computers in 360 you will use the same userid and password as you did before. If you didn't have a NSM account your new account was not automatically set up, in this case please contact the administrator group. The new account allow you a quota of 100 Mb in comparison to the 30 Mb you have from NSM. Be aware of the fact that the home directory you will start with is a new (empty) home directory located on the new fileserver. This means that all settings (e.g., pine, desktop, aliases) and data you set up on the nsm account are at first not available on the new physics account. How one may copy these files into the new directory is spelled out in a later section. For now we do not provide an additional email account - pine is set up to connect to the NSM email account as before.

DATA SECURITY
It was our major concern during the design and preparation phase of the physics subnet to ensure maximum data security. The following security measures are in place:

• LOCALLY DISPLACED FILESERVER - the fileserver is kept in a separate room with restricted access.
• UNINTERRUPTABLE POWER SUPPLY (UPS) - the fileserver is buffered by an uninterruptable power supply. In case of a power failure the fileserver is safely powered down with battery power automatically.
• DATA MIRRORING - the fileserver serving the home directories has two redundant SCSI hard drives to which any transaction is written simultaneously. If one hard drive crashes, the other one maintains full operation ability without any down-time of the server.
• DAILY TAPE BACKUP - the complete fileserver is backed up every day with a tape backup. The backup strategy is a 11 tape cycle. Each weekday is saved on a single tape (4), Saturdays and Sundays (1) are backed up onto one tape. Every Friday tape drops out of the cycle and goes to a monthly "collection of Fridays" (3). The fourth Friday tape is a monthly tape and goes into a "collection of months" (3). Every three months a tape is taken out of the cycle for archiving purposes. These backup tapes will be kept in a locked cabinet to further secure data. It is our understanding that the above security measures are state-of-the-art and at least as reliable as the ones offered before by NODE. Nevertheless, it is common sense that sensible data should never be trusted to only one computer system. Since the NSM accounts are still available, data can easily be spread onto two computer systems.
• PRIVACY - The physics subnet currently is maintained by 5 graduate students who have administrator rights. This group was voted for in the last Physics GSA meeting and new administrators can only be added with the explicit agreement of the physics student body (this of course should not discourage anybody to join the administrator group in the future in principle). The administrator group is responsible to the physics graduate student body. Each individual of this administrator group has agreed to respect the privacy of any other user. AT NO TIME the user passwords were revealed to the administrators (under UNIX, administrators never have access to clear text passwords).