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More isn't better
Apparently CSAIL (LCS + AI) has its own Kerberos realm and AFS cell now. While centralized infrastructure and such is great, you only really need so much of it. If I were a grad student in my group, I'd need an Athena account, an MIT Web certificate (with the separate MIT CA certificate), a CSAIL account, a CSAIL Web certificate (with the separate CSAIL CA certificate), and a CAG account. That works out to three passwords, all of which access "centralized" infrastructure (two Kerberos realms and an NIS domain), four if I also have a CAG Windows account.
"Why can't we all just work together?" While I think it's great that CSAIL/TiG is blessing centralized infrastructure, it feels really strange to me that they're deploying the exact same infrastructure that MIT as a whole has but separate. It made a little more sense when there was CAG and Athena, and you needed lots of storage because Compilers Are Big. (That having been said, my CAG account has about 2 GB of storage in use, and projects require more space, and people don't understand AFS well enough to ask Athena User Accounts intelligent questions.) But now Athena accounts are pretty big too, and it's not hard to get one if you're working in an MIT research group. The Web certificates thing feels especially dumb to me (if we weren't explicitly trying to accomodate crappy software, we'd write khttp and get it over with), and CSAIL's implementation is particularly bad. I wonder if there are useful IP-ACLd things that are going to lose because the new CSAIL network won't be on net 18, too.
"Why can't we all just work together?" While I think it's great that CSAIL/TiG is blessing centralized infrastructure, it feels really strange to me that they're deploying the exact same infrastructure that MIT as a whole has but separate. It made a little more sense when there was CAG and Athena, and you needed lots of storage because Compilers Are Big. (That having been said, my CAG account has about 2 GB of storage in use, and projects require more space, and people don't understand AFS well enough to ask Athena User Accounts intelligent questions.) But now Athena accounts are pretty big too, and it's not hard to get one if you're working in an MIT research group. The Web certificates thing feels especially dumb to me (if we weren't explicitly trying to accomodate crappy software, we'd write khttp and get it over with), and CSAIL's implementation is particularly bad. I wonder if there are useful IP-ACLd things that are going to lose because the new CSAIL network won't be on net 18, too.