[24] in resnet
Name service
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Joe Harrington)
Wed May 19 12:53:47 1993
Date: Wed, 19 May 1993 12:53:36 -0400
From: jh@flolab.mit.edu (Joe Harrington)
To: resnet@MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: pshuang@Athena.MIT.EDU's message of Wed, 19 May 93 09:12:14 -0400 <9305191312.AA15250@ninja.MIT.EDU>
Cc: jh@MIT.EDU
Reply-To: jh@MIT.EDU
I would expect tuition to cover everyone getting a real name, and
moving it when they move. That might mean I/S getting some support
from the deans for the burden of maintaining the namespace. I'd guess
some added part-time student help would be needed at peak times, and
the cost of hiring that person should be a lot less than $1/name
change. Telling all the people outside of MIT that you deal with that
they have to finger you at some special machine to see your plan file
to find out your machine's name this term to finger you there is too
complicated.
Servers sometimes migrate to other local machines when their initial
provider moves, sometimes they go with the provider, and sometimes
they disappear. It depends on the provider and who else is interested
in being the provider. It would seem prudent always to get a special
name for such services, however, so that no matter where they move,
it's invisible to the users. See for example the
Folk-Dance-Info-Request@athena.mit.edu mailing list, which has moved
from Hawaii to some usenet place, and to my knowledge was never
actually here at MIT. As a practical matter, I don't expect that the
fraction of students hooking up who will provide net-wide services
from their rooms will be large.
One issue that is similar to several resnet-relates administrative
issues is names for students (and faculty and staff) who live off
campus and have machines on the net. There are a few of us who have
connections via SLIP or PPP. In my case, the provider of my permanent
connection is a roommate who is a researcher at Harvard. I'd really
like to have an MIT name, to avoid explaining to professional
colleagues elsewhere that I'm not at Harvard, I'm at MIT. Some people
have even called Harvard looking for me. Harvard has had no problem
providing me with inverse address resolution, but MIT Network Services
has so far denied my request for a name in the MIT namespace and
ignored my followup queries. I'm paying the same tuition as anyone
else, and pay for the cost of my connection besides (which for
everyone else will be coming out of their tuition).
To offset the thought of the database administration hassle here, I'll
bring up the fact that by doing resnet, MIT has just made it that much
less desireable for someone with a computer to move out of their MIT
living group into an apartment. This can't help but contribute to
dorm crowding unless something is done to make it possible for those
people to hook up, even if they have to bear their own at-home costs.
In my case, it cost about $500 for a pair of good high-speed modems
(one on either end), plus about $20/month for the phone line. The lab
at Harvard pays for the Harvard end of the phone line.
--jh--
