[19] in resnet
re: stuff
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jason M. Sachs)
Tue May 18 16:01:38 1993
To: resnet@Athena.MIT.EDU
Date: Tue, 18 May 93 16:01:23 EDT
From: Jason M. Sachs <nosaj@Athena.MIT.EDU>
In response to Erik Nygren:
FTP and Telnet already exist for both Macs and PC's, so yes: file transfer
and cross-network communication are already possible.
If you have to depend on these for any length of time, though, they're
just not good enough---FTP is rather clumsy, and telnet depends on the
user having access to another machine. Currently there's no way
to access your home directory (correct me if I'm wrong) on AFS directly,
because you can't FTP to the AFS servers. (You could telnet to a workstation
and FTP your files *to* your Mac or PC, but this is icky and ugly,
especially if you only need to transmit one file.)
In addition, one of the reasons why I/S is networking the residences
is to relieve the *intense* load on public machines. The public
clusters are grossly overoccupied (it's extremely annoying to have
to search for a half hour to try to find an unused workstation to
just to dosread a file and print it out, something that only takes
about 5 minutes) and the dialup machines are being worked like mules.
Yes, ethernet is a lot faster than a 2400-baud modem, but if you're
Joe W. Student without access to a private machine, you're going
to hit the bottleneck of the overloaded dialup [which won't be a dialup
any more, really] machine. A Mac or a 486 sitting in front of you
is a *lot* faster.
Instead, think of all the basic services that you might use on athena
which you could utilize directly on your Mac and PC with the addition
of appropriate I/S or third-party software:
* direct access to AFS/NFS, i.e. lockers & home directories (not
only does this mean that you could access your files, but you
could run programs stored in a locker rather than on a hard disk,
something that's not really useful if you're just one person---since
most people have 5 megabytes AFS storage but maybe 120 megabytes
hard disk storage on their home computer---but if I/S comes out
with some really cool, 3 megabyte program or something, wouldn't
it be great to be able to run it without having to use up space
on your hard drive?)
* email
* Zephyr
* printing capabilities (you'd still have to somehow pick up the
output, but if, say, dorms & frats purchased a laser printer
and hooked it up to the network, you could print out stuff without
leaving the building)
* Discuss / netnews / TechInfo
* little things like changing your password, fingering someone,
running listmaint, etc., which are a pain if you have to go to
all the trouble of logging on to a machine first.
These things I've listed above make up about 95% of what I use Athena
for; my PC would become a lot more valuable to me if I could utilize
them on my PC hooked up to a network than if I have to continue to
walk to the main campus buildings and search for a half hour for an
unused DECstation to run some program or to trek out to E40 to use my
UNIX workstation at work.
Considering all the advantages, I think the cost is worth it. (There
really aren't any "advanced" services for PC's / Macs---the most
difficult thing to implement I've listed above is probably the direct
file access. As far as daemons go, they're not advanced either: I've
looked at fingerd for Windows---all you do is click on an icon to run
it, and it works; you don't have to set up any configuration files.
Perhaps in the future there will be something like inetd where you can
edit some configuration file and set up your computer to interact with
the network exactly the way you want, but in general, Mac's and PC's
are a lot less complicated than a UNIX box because they're single-user
machines (which don't require you to log into them) designed for
"ordinary people" rather than hackers. Things like xznol or SIS or xv
or DASH or EZ or LaTeX are not really advanced; they're just a bit
obscure, and for these types of things, you'd probably want to just go
to an Athena workstation, or, in the case of LaTeX and xv, you'd
probably want to ftp freeware versions or equivalent programs for your
computer.)
[the above is not the "official" I/S opinion, but by working for them I
know pretty much what I/S wants to do.]
--Jason
