Our goal is to provide efficient access to computing facilities for students. For most students, the standard installation (perhaps with some extra software installed by our technical staff) will be sufficient. However, we acknowledge that some postgraduate students may require regular administrator access to maintain software and systems for their research.
If you are granted administrator rights on your machine then you are taking on a very significant responsibility, and this document explains what you need to be aware of. Some students who have experience administering home networks have incorrectly assumed that the same skills are sufficient to be an effective administrator in the university environment, and the consequences of this have included loss of not only their own data, but a significant impact on other students, and a lot of technical staff time to recover our systems from the ensuing problems (including severe virus infections!).