Sentinel — NCAR/UCAR Cheyenne Admin Support Group · last updated July 2026
Sentinel is an internal operations platform for UCAR/NCAR staff. Most of it requires a UCAR account. A few pages — this one, the sign-in page, and the public weather display — are reachable without signing in, which is why this notice exists.
Sentinel sets exactly one cookie:
| Name | Purpose | Lifetime |
|---|---|---|
casg_session |
Keeps you signed in. Strictly necessary — without it every page would ask you
to sign in again. HttpOnly (unreadable by page scripts),
SameSite=Lax, and Secure wherever Sentinel is served
over HTTPS.
|
7 days, or until you sign out |
There is no analytics cookie, no advertising cookie, and no third-party cookie. Every stylesheet, script and font Sentinel loads is served from Sentinel's own domain — no content delivery network, no font service, no tracker.
Two optional features load content from YouTube: the Music tab, and YouTube links pasted into internal chat. Opening either contacts YouTube, which sets its own cookies under Google's privacy policy — not UCAR's. Nothing else in Sentinel contacts a third party, and neither feature runs unless you use it.
| Data | Why | Kept for |
|---|---|---|
| Username and email address | Your account, and notifications you have asked for | Until the account is removed |
| Time and source address of each sign-in | Recognising account compromise, and reviewing dormant accounts | Most recent kept on the account |
| Security events — sign-ins, failed sign-ins, permission changes, administrative actions, access denials | Required by UCAR standard US11 (security logging and monitoring), and needed to investigate an incident | 365 days |
| Terminal-session records — which host you connected to, as which account, from which address, and for how long | Attributing changes made on managed systems | Most recent 5,000 sessions |
| Browser user-agent string, alongside security events | Distinguishing your own sessions from someone else's | With the event, 365 days |
Sentinel does not profile you, track you across sites, sell or share data with anyone, or use any of the above for automated decisions about you. The security log is readable only by Sentinel administrators.
If you connect Sentinel to Jira, OpenDCIM, ExtraView or a remote host, the token or password you provide is encrypted before it is stored and is never sent back to your browser — not even to the page where you entered it. Two-factor secrets are encrypted the same way. You can remove any of them at any time from Account Settings.
/weather is open to anyone and needs no account. It sets no cookie and
records nothing about visitors. Map and satellite imagery are proxied through
Sentinel rather than fetched by your browser, so the upstream providers do not see
you.
About your data in Sentinel, contact the Cheyenne Admin Support Group at casg@ucar.edu. To report a suspected security problem, contact the UCAR Office of Information Security at security@ucar.edu or call 497-4300.
UCAR's organisation-wide privacy policy is at ucar.edu/privacy-policy and takes precedence over anything on this page.