dzoey@umd5.UUCP (03/31/87)
Thanks to all the people who have taken time to send me information about
their electronic mail setup. They have been quite informative. I think
though, a little backround needs to be given.
Here at Maryland, we're thinking of providing email access to anyone who
wants it (not just regular computer users). For example, Joe Philosophy
would be able to send mail to Sherry Architecture, yet neither of them
are taking courses in which computers are accessed.
Has anyone else had experience with this?
What are the technical pitfalls to look out for?
What are the administrative pitfalls to step over?
Once again, thanks to the people who've already sent me replies,
I very much appreciate it.
Joe Herman
P.S. Even if this isn't your situation, any information dealing with a
large mail user population would be helpful.
dzoey@umd5.umd.edu
dzoey@umdd.bitnet
seismo!umd5.umd.edu!dzoey
--
"Everything is wonderful until you know something about it."dpz@paul.UUCP (04/02/87)
> From: dzoey@umd5.umd.edu (Joe Herman) > What are the technical pitfalls to look out for? You probably want to think hard about the kind of environment you are going to present. Give a choice, because while some users may be hackers (ie, those who can stumble through yards of 68030 assembly without batting an eye), others may just want to use it as a toaster oven (ie, those who want to press a button and make it go, essentially). How much access to the operating system will you want? Watch out for the crackers, but leave room for the toaster people to move on a bit if they want to. Menus can be a large help, if you have the time and resources to set up a really good looking, logical, explanatory menu system. Do you have any mentally/physically handicapped students? Will you ever have? Keep an eye on their needs - those with learning disabilities need clear, simple, consise menus that they can understand with little to no help (this is not a small task from my experience). Make sure that the terminal stations for this project are comfortable for someone in a wheelchair, who may spend a lot of time there. You can have many kinds of system setups, as you well know. Standalone Sun clusters, huge mainframes, networks and networks and networks of IBM PCs, or any combination of these will work. You may want to think whether you want them to mail to "user@host" or just "user". You may laugh when I say keep it simple, but some people just may not be interested in the computer revolution, and you don't want to ram it down their throats. Am I saying user@host may be too complicated? Very possibly, depends on how many hosts there are. The simplest thing I can think of is the login shell being mail on a big black box to which they can send junk mail to their dormmates, and for those who don't care, this may be all the "view-of-the-world" that they want. Of course, if you want to do this for *all* students, a single box may not be enough. Then you may have to do some trickery, like getting 30 multiuser Sun 3/280s or something and pointing all of their /usr/spools to a single reliable mail server. Terminals are probably best on the user input end, simply because they are the cheapest I/O things around (next to a, yechhh, printer). IBM clones might also be cheap, but maintenance of software and hardware would probably end up being more than terminals, and then you need someone fairly knowledgable about IBMs to maintain and fix them. And of course, you can either telecommunicate through the serial port or cater to the hackers with an Ethernet board and telenet software ($$$) - somewhat more flexible than terminals. > What are the administrative pitfalls to step over? *Sigh*. Watch out if you try to get all of the departments to pitch in to install/support this thing. If your CS department can handle the cost of this, then more power to you. If you can get some kind of funding above them, like University level funding instead of department level funding, then you won't have to deal with the individual deparments. But I wouldn't expect 100% cooperation from, say, the athletics department. Accounting? Disk space quotas? ARPA access? You will have to decide whether these mean anything to your setup. Will you really care about charging students or faculty for online time? Be careful about charging students per hour. If you need to charge them, make it a one-price-pays-all type of deal for a semester or year or something. (This is why I *don't* use Compuserve unless my boss happens to be paying. :-) Disk quotas would not be outrageous, but don't penalize the users by wiping out their mail or .newsrc files if they can't save them due to being over quota (or out of disk space!) as we have unfortunately had problems with here lately. There is nothing worse then losing your saved mail and not knowing why. ARPA access for those who can intelligently (in many ways) grasp the idea of a network would not be out of place, I don't think. And for the sake of sanity, make them memorize the net-etiquette before releasing them on the Usenet! :-) Whew. I'll stop now. Please excuse me if I munged the administrative and technical divisions of this message. dpz -- David P. Zimmerman, Founder of the Society To Make "Hacker" Respectable Arpa: dpz@rutgers.edu Uucp: ...{ames,cbosgd,husc6,moss,seismo,ucla-cs,ut-sally}!rutgers!dpz