Athena Account Deactivations

[dmaze]

Athena account deactivations happened last week. I generally don't shed many tears over this; on some level, it seems right to me that people should eventually leave the MIT community. In turn, this means that I've gotten slightly bitter over people who have managed to keep an online presence somehow. It's certainly easy enough: a private Un*x machine is sufficient to get you access to MIT's internal messaging system, a friend can get you a mailing list that forwards email for you, a student group or MIT employee can even maintain your account. (And also a somewhat hypocritical attitude on my part: if I wasn't staff, my account would be preserved by student group affiliation, and I doubt I'd abandon it.)

This begs the question: why does MIT bother? Is there some actual resource that's being recycled by deactivation and isn't growing faster than new accounts? Political-level implications of trying to be able to claim that only students and staff have accounts?

Comments

[forgotten-aria.livejournal.com]

Username space is a resource that isn't growing and highly contested. But I'm sure that this practice is from when the resources weren't growing all that fast. It seems to me that most of the students will never use their accounts again. Most of them don't use their accounts for much while at MIT. Now that many people come in using AIM it's even worse. It seems neat and tidy to clean up some accounts, but perhaps one should be able to ask to keep it.

[dmaze]

I didn't want to put this in the main text...the two things I can think of that might be precious (aside from layer-9 considerations) are disk space and namespace. I know there are things that need to be done to reclaim namespace, and my understanding is that they haven't been done in the past several years and there's no sign that they'll be done soon. This just leaves disk space; you could put a quota freeze on "old" accounts or something. Disk is also something you can exchange money for, though I can understand a reluctance to do so for the benefit of people who aren't students any more.

[avacon.livejournal.com]

Maybe what just needs to exist is an alum.mit.edu kerberos realm
that can be used for zephyring and AFS ACLs.
It seems totally reasonable for community members to be able
to continue to use zephyr and some other services,
like being able to be placed on AFS ACLs.
Principles there should just come along with
alum.mit.edu email accounts.

[earthdragon.livejournal.com]

Well, I've finally been deactivated...
From what I understand, the issue is not diskspace(its so cheap that its not significant). And they don't care that much about namespace. Its a software licensing issue. MIT gets software licenses for a number = to students and staff and whatnot, and often gets educational licenses for software, and thus technically, it can't be used for non-educational users(matlab is not exactly cheap, but it is ubiquitious on campus).
Then again, this is from several old discussions I've had and may well be wrong.

[plymouth.livejournal.com]

but we didn't licence zephyr - we wrote it ourselves.

[earthdragon.livejournal.com]

yes, but I/S does not give people different access to programs in general. It may be possible to make accounts that can only access free software, but they don't exist now. As you may have noticed, you can still have zephyr withouth an athena account, and I/S lets known sane people have shared keys with athena.

[cfox.livejournal.com]

Exchanging money for anything is quite difficult to set up and maintain, from an administrative standpoint. (I'm in the middle of the leased disk space billing, and that's only a dozen customers, all with internal account numbers, and still sucks royally.) Taking money from a credit card is hard.

Support is also a big cost, something that's hard to deny people, and hard to recover costs on. I also get the idea that the stopit and net-security teams are relatively costly, case-for-case, and you don't manage to avoid generating those cases, when you have people in funny account statuses.

starking

[sculder.livejournal.com]

I think it would be cool if keeping an athena account was an option open to alumni who donate a certain amount per year, exactly like how you can get technology review for "free" as long as you donate so much per year. It doesn't even need to be terribly cheap, since the primary thing is you are donating money somewhere you would like it to go.