I have setup a shared .bashrc for all the workstations that is symlinked to the normal location on all machines:

controls@rossa:~ 0$ ls -al /home/controls/.bashrc 
lrwxrwxrwx 1 controls controls 23 2012-05-25 15:37 /home/controls/.bashrc -> /users/controls/.bashrc
controls@rossa:~ 0$ 

This should help simplify maintenance considerably.  Editing that file on one machine will edit it for all.  Just edit this one file!  Don't try to get fancy and add extra files!

I also added a bunch of aliases that had previously been missing.  This should help with some of the problems that people had been having.

NOTE: PLEASE DO NOT CHANGE THE DEFAULT SHELL!  We are using bash, because that's what the sites are now using and we want to be as compatible as possible.

You can of course still write scripts in csh/tcsh or use tcsh in a shell if you wish.   Just don't change the default shell for the controls user.