Purpose

rlogin.cs.vt.edu is intended for instructional use by Computer Science majors and non-CS majors taking a CS class only. Any unauthorized use may be interupted without notice.

Accounts

A Computer Science login is required. Computer Science majors should get an account during orientation or during their first course. Non-CS majors taking a CS course should be directed by their instructor on how to create a CS account. Non-CS major accounts are removed at the end of each semester. If needed for the next semester, the account can be re-created. An account may be locked out if suspicious activity is detected. Locked out accounts will require the user to come in person to reset their password.

Abuse

Users should be considerate of other users on the system. Abuse of the system may result in the account getting locked out. Examples of abuse include: consuming a disproportionately large amount of disk space, “hogging” the CPU on one or more nodes, leaving a large number of processing running while you are not logged in interactively, or any action that could adversely affect other users on the system.

Limits

The following limits are in place to protect the system from accidental or intentional resource exhaustion.

soft limit of 0 core size dump
hard limit of 65536 open files
soft limit of 4096 processes
hard limit of 15000 processes for undergraduates

Quotas

Disk quotas are enforced on rlogin home directories.  They are set at:

Grads - 50GB
Majors - 25GB
Non-majors - 25GB

To find out how much space you are using, run the following command on any rlogin node:

du -shx ~

Depending on how many files you have this command might take a minute or two to run.

Availability

We strive to make the system available at all times, however we cannot guarantee that the system will always be available due to unforeseen circumstances. It is always a good idea to get your work done early to avoid problems with availability. To ensure a consistent and stable environment the individual nodes in the cluster may require rebooting. Rebooting of a node should have minimal impact on the cluster as a whole. The remote cluster uses special firewall rules to thwart brute force attacks. If it detects more than twenty connections within a two minute timeframe, then the IP will be blocked. This policy may change as hacker techniques evolve.