On Mon, 15 Mar 2004, John Kristoff wrote:
There are certain environments where it would be nice for people to have spent some time. Working at a university would be one good experience for many people, particularly in this field, to have had.
I fully agree...This is the one environment where you definately can't trust your users. Unlike most home markets and corporate markets. These kids often forget they are paying for service and thus abuse it.
think of one university who requires students to login through a web portal before giving them a routable address. This is such a waste of
In most implementations I'm familiar with, the time and effort is mostly spent in the initial deployment of such a system.
I'm not referring to the time required to implement. I'm talking about the time it takes for the user. On the user end. Lets do some simple math. Lets say I turn on my laptop before I shower, I power it down during the day while I'm in class and I turn it back on when I get home in the evening. This means two logins per day. Lets say that the login process is very rapid and takes 30 seconds. This is a whole minute per day required to login. Now multiply this by a month and you've wasted 30 minutes of my time. I coulda spent that time watching TV or heaven forbid, doing homework. :) My big thing is that often users are the one who are paying the price and spending the time. I think either system (the mac-ip lookup or the user auth) system could be created in a week using C++ or perl. This week of development is nothing in the long run when compared to the amount of time it now costs the users. Come on, how many users save their mail passwords so they don't have to type it in everytime? What about your dialup password? Too bad I can't automate the web logins. I don't know a single "normal" (not one of us NANOG folks...) user who has not opted to save their WinXP password so they don't have to type it in everytime they reboot the computer. Andrew --- <zerocool@netpath.net> http://www.andrewsworld.net/ ICQ: 2895251 Cisco Certified Network Associate "Learn from the mistakes of others. You won't live long enough to make all of them yourself."