lmn(AUP)

We've never been much for limitations, and we truly dislike fascism in system administration. Nonetheless, it is unwise not to at least vaguely protect onesself from the brutal force of an angry justice system, so we try to find a balance. With that in mind, here are our thoughts on acceptable use.

• Don't do anything illegal on or from the machines we run.

• We take NO RESPONSIBILITY for any illegal things you choose to do. If we notice you doing illegal things in the course of our day-to-day administration, we'll ask you to stop.

• If law enforcement demands our co-operation in something, law enforcement is likely to get it.

• Please do not do anything abusive to the system. We do our best, but there may be problems or security holes in our implementation. If you discover such a thing, please tell us, but please do not `demonstrate' unless we ask you to. In other words, be nice.

• Anyone caught snooping into the files of any other user without that user's express permission will have their account immediately terminated.

• We make no warranties of any kind regarding anything we provide you with, such as shell service, web service, or email.

• You must not do anything commercial in nature on or from our servers without asking us first.

• Connections to external IRC servers are strictly forbidden. This includes all IRC clients, IRC bots and connection bouncers. We've endured too many DoS and other related attacks whose cause originated on IRC.

• Explicit permission to run your own network-accessable services must be received from the admins before doing so. Violations of this rule will result in your account being terminated.

• Our net access is provided to us at a reduced charge by the nice folks at Impulse. Please don't do anything that might make them change their minds. This includes saturating our connection for a long period of time, incurring DoS attacks, or doing generally not-nice things that show up as coming from us.

• DO NOT use anything we provide you with to deny service to someone else on the net. You will lose your account if you do. We believe strongly in the net as a co-operative thing. We won't allow our resources to be used to degrade the quality of the network for ANYONE. Period. If you're feeling a need to DoS someone, count to ten and light some incense. Relax and let it pass, because the internet has no future without self-discipline at ALL levels.

• We don't put a lot of hard limits on the resources available to you, such as disk space, CPU time, etc. This trust that we put into you as a user enables you to make better use of our system. We do this at great risk, but firmly believe that in trusting you in this matter you will have a greater respect for the system. If you are found to gobbling resources beyond what is reasonable we will ask you to stop so just don't.

That sounds quite harsh, but we mean well. In return for being nice to our servers, our other users, and us too, we commit to the following:

• We will respect your privacy, and not use our administrative access to violate your privacy. We won't go into your home directory as root unless you want us to for a specific reason. If you don't want anyone to know what's in your home dir, chmod it 700 or somesuch. Be aware, however, that if you do NOT apply such a permission change, ANYONE can browse your home directory, even as a regular user. Ask us if you are unsure about permissions.

• We will try maintain the system to a level that is enjoyable to use. That is our goal; it is desirable to us for you to like the service.
  -The Admins