CSE Account Classes and Groups

Every CSE account belongs to at least one group and one Account Class.

Groups are a general Unix construct used in conjunction with group file permission bits to control access to files, directories, and programs. At CSE, every user belongs to their own group (group.username), but they may belong to up to 15 other groups.

Account classes are a CSE construct used to:

Describe the user's relationship with the school;
Control the user's access to CSE services (like printers, servers and lab machines);
Determine the allocation of quotas for disk space and printing;
Define membership of various CSE mailing lists.

Account classes will either be:

User Classes of the form Organisation_Reason, where:
Organisation
is either
- 'CSE', or
- the name of a CSE workgroup (eg: 'AI', 'CSEOffice', 'CompFac'), or
- the name of a course (eg: COMP9331), or
- the name of a program (eg:3645)
Reason

is the particular association that the user has with that Organisation (eg: 'Student', 'Tutor', 'Academic', etc)
Miscellaneous or Permission Classes, which are solely intended to control access to CSE services. Miscellaneous classes are also used to provide temporary disk quota, login access to certain machines, or prevent login altogether (usually because the user's password has been cracked, or they have contravened one of the conditions of the Yellow Form).

Displaying classes and groups

The classes and groups that a user belongs to, will be shown by the acc command. For example, consider the user 'fbloggs'.


 % acc fbloggs
            User Name : fbloggs              Aliases : s1234567 
                  Uid : 3924
	       Groups : spider
              Expires :  1 Mar 1999

         User classes : COMP9331_Student[01aug98], 3645_Student 
	Group classes : group.spider[forever]
         Misc classes : PrintAllocationExhausted[forever]
		      ...

Groups: shows that fbloggs is a member of group.spider. (Note that fblogg's membership of group.fbloggs is assumed and never shown), Thus fbloggs potentially has access to all directories and files group-owned by fbloggs and spider. In general, membership of groups has to be requested from the System Support staff (SS).
User Classes: describes the association of the user with CSE. In this case, fbloggs is a student and enrolled in the course COMP9931 and the program 3645
Group Classes: exist only to provide an expiry date on group membership, which is usually required.
Misc Classes: are usually miscellaneous system permissions that are associated with users. In this case, fbloggs is a member of the class PrintAllocationExhausted, which prevents him from doing any more printing (probably because he is over his print quota).
Expires: This shows the accounts expiry date. By definition, this is the same as the expiry date of the last User Class to expire. Note that all classes have expiry dates assigned to them, which acc shows in square brackets after the class. If an expiry date is not shown for an individual class, then it is the same as this overall account expiry date.

Class Membership and Expiry Dates

Account class membership and expiry dates are controlled or managed in different ways, depending on the type of the account class.

Student Classes

Membership in these classes (of the form: X_Student), is usually determined by official enrolment records obtained daily from NSS throughout the year. SS does not add or delete students from these student classes, except in rare cases where the student is permitted (usually by the course lecturer and/or school office) to be enrolled in the course in some unofficial capacity.

Course Classes (eg: COMP2031_Student)

Students are members of course classes after they have officially enrolled, and for the duration of the session that they are enrolled in the course.

Start Date (earliest): 1 week before the start of the enrolled session
Expiry Date (latest): 6 weeks after the end of the enrolled semester.

Undergraduate Thesis Classes (eg: COMP4910_Student)

Start Date (earliest): 4 weeks before the start of the enrolled session
Expiry Date (latest): The day before the start of the session following their enrolled session

Postgraduate Thesis Classes (eg: COMP9901_Student)

Start Date (earliest): Beginning of the enrolled year
Expiry Date (latest): HECS census date of the first session of the year following the enrolled year (generally the 31st of March).

The general CSE 'Workgroup_Thesis' class (eg: AI_Thesis) is not tied to official enrolment records, and will generally expire on the date that your thesis is due, which should have been stated on the thesis account application form. If this date is incorrect, ask your supervisor to mail System Support with the new due date, and your CSE 'Workgroup_Thesis' class will be extended accordingly.

CSE Program Classes (eg: 3645_Student)

Program classes reflect the overall program of study in which the student is enrolled. CSE program classes generally remain active as long as the student is enrolled in a CSE program. Students need not be enrolled in a CSE course to have an active CSE program class (see note below).

As with all other enrolment based classes, CSE program class memberships are automatically updated from daily downloads of "official" enrolment records obtained from NSS.

Start Date (earliest): 1 week before the start of the student's first enrolled session
Expiry Date (latest): HECS census date of the session following their last enrolled session. (The HECS census date is either the 31st of March for session 1, or the 31st of August for session 2).

Non CSE Program Classes (eg: UGrad_Student)

Start Date (earliest): 1 week before the start of the student's enrolled session
Expiry Date (latest): The day before the start of the session following their enrolled session

Non-Student Classes

Course Classes (eg: COMP1011_Supervisor or COMP1011_Tutor)

These classes relate to either a teaching or administrative responsibility for the course in question, and are used by the CSE system to control access to the relevant course accounts, files, and marking software. In general:

The lecturer in charge of a course liases with one of the academic teaching administrators, to organise and register those students and/or staff that are going to help with teaching their course.
The academic teaching administrator enters these students and staff into the appropriate session based course database files in the teachadmin account;
Various system scripts read these database files and automatically update the Non-student Course Class memberships.
CSE System Support does not add or delete users from these non-student course classes. This is the responsibility of the academic teaching administrators

The lecturers teaching in various sessions are listed on the Teachadmin webpage.

Miscellaneous User Classes

This includes all user classes of the form Organisation_Reason, where the Organisation is not a course or program.

eg: NICTA_Conjoint, CSE_Teaching, AI_Visitor, CSE_Courtesy, CSEOffice_Admin.

Membership in such user classes is not determined by either official enrolments or teachadmin databases, but is often determined by various ad-hoc (and often undocumented) school policies;
Membership is added, deleted, or extended by System Support, to whom such requests should be emailed.
Membership in these classes are typically not extended by any more than 3 years at a time.

Access and Permission Classes

These classes are used to control access to miscellaneous resources (like servers, printers, workstations, etc). Such classes do not follow the form Organisation_Reason, and usually consist of a number of capitalised words concatenated together

eg: Personal2GigDiscQuota, Extra10MBIPQuota, TelnetServerAccess.

Membership is added, deleted, or extended by System Support, to whom such requests should be emailed.
Membership in these classes are typically not extended by any more than 3 years at a time.

cse taggi

Account Classes and Groups