Personal Computers

Personal Computers getting Permanent IPs

Here's the immediate issue. IPs are controlled by individual departments or colleges. *THESE UNITS* are responsible for the network and require that all IPs be assigned BY THESE groups. So having a "central" entity, aka ITD/ComTech, do this would NOT be good. On many levels. I can go into detail later if you like, but save us all time, and make sure that you're working with individual colleges, not central IT, when requesting IPs.

One example -- I will remove ANY IP in ECE IP ranges that are not in our records. This is something you'd want to avoid.

This is NOT a centralized problem, or one in which a centralized solution is likely to work. Should the committee like some contacts within each department/college, I can provide this.

Having said that, some departments and colleges already *do* register personal machines. ECE is one of those.

The current version of our online request form is here: https://www.wolftech.ncsu.edu/requests/register/

You can get an idea of the information we require on our form there.

Sample of the rules we follow:

1. The registered name of the machine is USERID.ece.ncsu.edu. Students do not have the option to change this. FT Faculty can, if strongly desired. This naming convention allows identification of the owner quite easily, as well as distinguishing it as a personal machine on sight. We do, of course, maintain a comprehensive database of all of our IPs/computers, but this helps as well. Also removes some maintenance/labor costs in setting up the IP access.

2. One registered machine per student. We will occasionally make exceptions for special cases (in which case, the name of the machine is USERID2). This is a very rare event.

3a. Symantec AntiVirus is required, but this is a general NCSU IT rule already in place. NCSU users are directed to http://www.ncsu.edu/antivirus/. Additional network usage policies are set by NCSU, the colleges, and departments. For example, you are not allowed to run servers from these machines. Should the computer show up (*blip*) on our network monitors, we will come ask what the user is up to.

3b. OS Updates: All personal machines operating on the ECE network must be configured to automatically install Windows patches from our WSUS server. For more information and instructions on how to configured your computer to use WSUS, see WSUS.

4. You must have an NCSU UnityID to have a permanently registered IP. All faculty, staff, students, postdocs, and, usually, visiting scholars (see NoPay notes below), have a UnityID.

5. All personally owned machines are removed from the network once the userid of the owner has been disabled by the University. We have scripts that report these machines to us on a weekly basis. If we know someone has left, we'll remove it ahead of this time.