AMMRLers,
Having recently devoted some considerable effort to developing software to delete instrument reservations when people don't show up, I was wondering what rules exist at other NMR facilities around the world to handle this common problem. So here is a multi-part question:
Q1: does your facility have any sort of rules for how late somebody can be when they reserve time?
Q2: how late can people be?
Q3: is any of this handled automatically? that is, are reservations lost once somebody is late by a certain amount of time?
Q4: does anybody prevent unauthorized logins when an instrument is reserved by somebody else? (I know this used to be in effect at UC-Berkeley, but I am not sure if it still is)
Q5: what qualifies as an exemption from enforcement of any applicable rules?
Q6: does anybody have any penalties for reservation abuse?
Here are the answers to my own questions:
A1: yes
A2: being five minutes late causes the loss of the balance of a single 10-minute block (anybody is free to use an instrument if the reserver is not there after five minutes); being 10 minutes late forfeits all contiguously reserved blocks.
A3: yes, a cron job runs at :05, :15, :25, :35, :45, and :55 after the hour to delete single blocks and write the file contains which blocks to delete if the reserver is 10 minutes late, at :10, :20, :30, :40, :50, :00 after the hour , another cron job runs to delete the balance of a reservation if the reserver still has not logged in.
A4: no.
A5: staff reservations, staff usage, and if a previous user runs over time all exempt a reserver from losing their reservation; also, if the network is down no action is taken, because when the network is down it is impossible to determine if anyone is logged in on a given host computer.
A6: to be determined; deletions are recorded, as are overruns (when a previous user is still on, maybe even with the screen locked)
Jeff
Received on Wed Dec 15 2010 - 04:02:57 MST