Research Computing policy on guest system administrators
From Research Computing
Occasionally outside administrators are granted access to research computing servers. Since documentation is be maintained for all servers in the research computing area, as a condition of their residing in the area, guest administrators are asked to follow our procedures for documenting their work on research computing servers. Documentation on work performed on research computing servers is maintained in the tracking system, http://track.gc.cuny.edu. Guest administrators will be provided with accounts on the tracking system, and are expected to adhere to the following documentation policy.
- ALL modifications to servers MUST be documented in the tracking system.
- If online documentation is referred to, the relevant portions must either be excerpted and copied verbatim to the tracking system, or else full URLs must be supplied.
- If any test is performed, the commands used to perform the test MUST be documented in the tracking system together with the results, so that the test and the results can be evaluated and replicated if necessary.
- More detail is better than a synopsis. If you show what happened when you ran ./configure --prefix=/usr/local, that's more informative than writing, "ran configure."
Remark on #2. It is not acceptable to vaguely refer to "the documentation," as this defeats the purpose of the tracking system and creates the need to guess what the referrer meant. It is not acceptable to indirectly refer to a URL; for example as in, "the URL you emailed me 50 messages ago." The URL itself must be provided in the tracking system.
Remark on #3. It is not enough to document that "a test failed." We need to know what test was performed, how the test was performed, and what the results were.
