Invitation to join Research User Admin

Telephone 32658
mjg17@eng.cam.ac.uk

To all research groups

Dear Colleagues

Administration of user accounts on research computers

Your help is requested in establishing an electronic mailing list to assist with the administration of user accounts on research computers. Greater coordination in this area will have benefits for research groups and for the Computer Systems Group (detailed in the document discussed below).

The Research Computing Admin mailing list (research-user-admin) is being set up to coordinate the deletion of user accounts. It is intended to give the administrators of the Department's central computer systems a means of contacting research group administrators about the planned deletion of users from the central system. This should reduce the number of problems caused by accounts on research systems persisting after a user has been, in some cases wrongly, deleted from the main Departmental computer system.

Each research group possessing its own research computers is asked to nominate one or more members for inclusion in the mailing list. An ideal member would be both the technical adminstrator of the system, and the person who makes the policy decision about who should have an account. In many cases, these are different people and it may be appropriate for both to be on the research-user-admin list.

Information regarding the mailing list, its membership and other related issues are discussed in a new document which can be found on the Department's Web Server at:

http://www-h.eng.cam.ac.uk/help/mjg17/research/admin/

If you would like a copy of the document by email or on paper, please ask me. The document should help you identify suitable members for the list.

To join the research-user-admin mailing list, please email research-user-admin-request specifying the names of the machines you are responsible for, and whether you are the technical contact or the ``policy-maker'' or both.

With thanks

Michael Gray