Rules and principles

Commercial hosting

Our servers are connected to the Internet via the Cambridge University Data Network (CUDN), and as such all users of the SRCF are bound by its rules, which explicitly forbids any use of the CUDN for commercial or for-profit activities. Therefore it is not possible for commercial websites to be hosted on our machines. For more details, please refer to the Authorization for Use of the CUDN Rules and the Rules Made by the Information Services Committee.

Our interpretation of these rules is that including a sponsor’s logo on a group account website is acceptable, however selling web space or advertising is not.

Furthermore, the SRCF server is maintained by a group of volunteer sysadmins who donate their time freely to ensure that our services can continue to operate smoothly. We do not feel that it is appropriate to ask that the sysadmins give up their time in this way so that others can make money.

Inappropriate content

Our policy

Inappropriate content is deemed to be any content that is in contravention of the CUDN rules and guidelines, or JANET AUP. Amongst other things these rules prohibit using the CUDN to store or transmit material that is obscene, defamatory, offensive or violates a third party’s copyright. If such material comes to the attention of the sysadmins or committee the responsible user will be required to remove it. In the case of gross and flagrant breaches of the rules the sysadmins may remove the material themselves. The account of a user responsible for prohibited material may be suspended and they may be reported to the Computing Service.

So in summary, don’t do it!

Reporting a breach

Please let the user or group that controls the content know that you consider it inappropriate, and explain why with reference to the SRCF’s Terms of Service, CUDN rules and guidelines, or JANET AUP. For pages with URLs of the form:

http://spqr2.user.srcf.net/ or http://www.srcf.ucam.org/~spqr2/

you should email spqr2@srcf.net

For pages with URLs of the form:

http://groupname.soc.srcf.net/ or http://www.srcf.ucam.org/groupname/

you should email **groupname**-webmaster@srcf.net

If you do not get a response from the owner of the page or feel unable to approach them yourselves, then you should forward your concerns to the committee: committee@srcf.net.

Using resources wisely

Please be considerate of others when running long and CPU-intensive tasks. Make sure that you use ‘nice’ to give them a low priority and double check your code to make sure that there aren’t memory leaks or other bugs which might impair the performance of the system for the other users.

If you need to use a lot of computing time for academic reasons your first port of call should be your department or college as they should provide you with the resources you need for your studies. If your reasons are non-academic, get in touch with us.