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

[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.