Network Policies and Procedures

Auburn University College of Engineering
Network Services

The Auburn University College of Engineering network is an internetwork of local area networks (LAN) located in the Auburn University College of Engineering buildings. The College of Engineering network is connected to the Auburn University network (AU-net) which is connected to worldwide Internet. Each College of Engineering building has at least one LAN. See Map

Hosts connected to the College of Engineering network include 300+ Sun workstations and servers, 500+ Intel based personal computers, 50+ Apple MacIntosh computers, and a variety of other computers. Services provided by the network hosts include distributed file service, tape archive, remote printing and remote job execution. The College of Engineering network also provides connection to the services provided by the Division of University Computing (DUC) including connection to the academic and administrative 9672 IBM mainframe, LUIS library catalog, ASN C90 Cray supercomputer, telephone modem dial-in service, gopher, WWW and UseNet News. The Sun workstations provide the majority of the services available on the College of Engineering network. A Sun account (sometimes called a network account) is required to access most of the network services.

An important design goal of the College of Engineering network is the idea of a consistent environment for the users. This means that a user can login to any Sun workstation on the network and have the same environment. The user's home directory is there, the file system looks the same, and most all of the programs will be available. Due to licensing costs, not all machines can run all software packages, but this is a problem of economics.

This policy is the result of efforts to educate the users of the network as to what services are available, what the rules are, and how to more effectively utilize network resources.