Computer Support Guidelines, Security and Unsupported Devices

Overview

With the increasing availability of portable computers, USB Pen Drives, PDAs, and other mobile computing devices, some end-users are expecting support for these personally-owned devices. In most cases, providing support for personally-owned devices can take technical support resources away from normal network operation and support for departmental-owned computer systems. The scope of this page is to provide an clear explanation of what is supported, and what is not, as well as provide clarification of policies for security incidents involving these devices.

Guidelines for Support

The following guidelines must be met to request and receive assistance in the Mathematics department:

1. The item you are requesting support for must be owned by the department.
2. When receiving a new computer, faculty members may request to keep their old machine provided that the computer is not needed elsewhere in the department. In this case, only the newer machine will be eligible to receive computer support.
3. The operating system must be an officially supported operating system of this department. Officially supported operating systems include Mac OS X 10.3 and 10.4, and Red Hat-based Linux. Minimal support will be provided for existing Microsoft Windows machines in the department. All new departmental-owned machines are required to be on the officially supported operating system list. Exceptions to this rule must be approved by the network manager and/or the departmental chair/associate chair.
4. Support is provided for a pre-selected group of software packages. This includes standard web browsers (Mozilla, Firefox and Safari), email readers (Apple Mail and Mozilla/Thunderbird), Mathematical software packages (MATLAB, Mathematica, Maple, SAS, TecPlot) and various other packages such as Microsoft Office, Neo/OpenOffice. Support for alternative or legacy software packages is provided only as time permits.

Personally Owned Computers

The department provides for network access for faculty, visiting faculty, and staff with personally owned computers. The faculty, visiting faculty, or staff member must specifically request access to the network and provide the network hardware address for the device they wish to connect. Each network interface has a unique hardware address. If both wired and wireless access are requested, the faculty, visiting faculty, or staff member must provide both hardware addresses if they wish to connect through both network mediums. While we can assist you in locating this information, in many cases it is more convenient to have this information available ahead of time. A guide on how to obtain this information about your computer for common operating systems is available here.

Other Personally Owned Devices

As time permits, we will attempt to make our computers compatible with the majority of portable hard disks, USB pen drives, etc. You are welcome to use these devices but if you encounter any problems, or these devices require special drivers, we will NOT support them and we will NOT install these drivers on our computer systems. Faculty with department-owned laptops already have administator access on their laptop and can install these drivers if they wish.

Security and Unsupported Computers

Because the network medium is shared, it often occurs that one machine can cause problems for another machine on the network. Mostly this occurs through infection of computer viruses and worms. If a personally-owned or unsupported device is infected with a worm or a virus, or otherwise interfering with the normal operation of the network, notice will be given to the user of the device and the device will forcefully be disconnected from the Mathematics network. The computer in question will not be permitted on the Mathematics network again.