ident
Encouraged, provided that it either produces
- Engineering or CRSids (preferably as TS see below, but failing that CRSids are preferred) or
- The longer "random" strings where the people running the machine are keeping a record of the mapping of the strings to actual user.
IDENT producing other ids than these is strongly discouraged, and we would rather any machine that can't confirm to either of the above to not run IDENT.
For the TS machines it should produce Engid if called from within 129.169, and CRSid if from without (more detail available if required).
N.B. Ident does not work reliably on the Linux machines (i.e. it sometimes gives bogus answers). The HPUX implementation, though horrible, does seem reliable. (Caroline Blackmun)
I'll take this chance to remind PC people that I have a freeware identd for Windows systems. One useful feature (as seen on the twns) is that an administrator can set it to run such that an ordinary user can't alter the settings or quit it. It isn't, however, smart enough to return variable results depending on the client. By default, it will return the Windows username. (Paul Taylor)
Computing infrastructure service names
Use the infrastructure service names rather than "machine" names whenever possible.
Non-cam.ac.uk domains
See https://help.eng.cam.ac.uk/non-cam-ac-uk-domains