Here follow some of the policies regarding the CCSO Nameserver and the data contained therein:
NAMESERVER UPDATES
Updates for people are done four times per year. An update can
include one or all of the following steps:
name, phone, office_phone, home_phone, address, office_address, home_address, permanent_address, department, title, curriculum, high_school All other fields are left strictly alone.
The step listed in #2 above may be avoided. If you do not wish this update to occur on your entry, put something in your "no_update" field. If you have something in your "no_update" field, your entry will not be touched by step #2, except for the "name" and "curriculum" fields, which are ALWAYS updated. For more information, see help on "no_update".
The approximate schedule for student/faculty/staff updates is as follows:
January Step 1 and Step 2, students only
June Step 1 and Step 2, students only
September Step 1 and Step 2, students only
October Steps 1, 2, and 3 for students, faculty, and staff
The University Timetable information is updated three times a year. The fall timetable is available in early March, the spring timetable comes online in early October, and the summer timetable is available in the middle of February.
The ph restaurant guide has not been updated since summer 1991. Two volunteers have come forward to update it.
Telephone area code information in ph comes from an old, pre-existing dataset and is only sporadically and haphazardly updated.
Weather information is updated in real-time as it arrives on the data feed.
MAILING LISTS
The Nameserver is not to be used as to generate mailing lists. For this
reason, queries resulting in more than 25 persons are rejected. This
is not negotiable.
Sites from which users attempt to circumvent this restriction may be placed on the "reject list". The Nameserver will not accept queries from such sites.
PROXY RIGHTS FOR NETWORK ADMINISTRATORS To facilitate the process of keeping ph entries up to date, CCSO now offers proxy rights to network administrators, so they can systematically enter e-mail address information for their users into the Nameserver database and make other modifications upon request.
Network administrators who wish to obtain proxy rights for a group of users should send an e-mail request to "nameserv@uiuc.edu". The request should contain the administrator's own name and ph alias and a list of ph aliases for the entries to which s/he wants to gain proxy. Once proxy rights to a ph entry are granted, the administrator can edit any changeable field in the entry.
Note: It is incumbent upon the administrator to get permission from his or her end-users before requesting proxy rights from CCSO. Users who don't want their network admins to be able to change their information should put "no!" in their own "proxy" fields. To do so, login to ph (see help on "login") and type:
make proxy=no!
Network administrators who would prefer not to bear the burden of managing multiple ph entries, but nevertheless want to have their users' "email" fields filled in or updated, can send a list of ph aliases and associated e-mail addresses to "nameserv@uiuc.edu". The e-mail addresses in such a list should be in the format "user@fully.qualified.domain.name" (for example, "paul@uxc.cso.uiuc.edu"), rather than an alias-based address such as "p-pomes@uiuc.edu".
For more information on proxy rights, see help on "proxy".
ABUSE
Anyone who makes repeated queries to the Nameserver under program control
in order to circumvent normal restrictions on queries will be treated
as an abuser of the database. Such persons will be subject to suspension
of CCSO service privileges and such other penalties as deemed appropriate
by the University.
SEE ALSO: areacodes, restaurants, timetable, weather, people, update, proxy, edit, alias, aliases, interactive mode, no_update, login