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This is a topic I get very soap-boxish about. I have too many problems with providers who don't understand the college student market. I can 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 time for both parties. Sure it makes tracking down the abusers much easier, but is it worth the time and effort to manage? This is a very legitimate idea for public portals in common areas, but not in dorm rooms.

I've been offline for a few days and I'm catching up, so I might be taking this one out of context. If so, I'm sure I'll be flamed appropriately. The University that I work for has one of these "go to a web page and authenticate to get a valid IP" though, admittedly, we only make them authenticate once. What does it take to manage? Just the up front work to put the system in place (which wasn't much). For the small inconvenience of logging in once and the extremely small overhead in maintaining the system, we've found a log of uses. Two examples come to mind. We have the ability to automate the forwarding of DMCA violation notices because we know what human was responsible for the "offense" that occured a few weeks/months back. We also have the ability to contact a human when their system is infected instead of merely shutting their port, waiting for them to call, and hoping that our help desk correlates the "my computer isn't working" with the "this port is shut for a security incident". We might know what dorm room the computer is in, but our rooms sometimes have four people with four to six computers and almost none of our students use their land-line, opting for a cell phone that's not listed in the campus directory... Anyway, knowing what room the computer is in really doesn't provide us much help unless we want someone to walk over there. With a username, we can at least send them an email or put them on a "watch" list for when they call.... Eric :)