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The goal of this project is to design and make available an improved Athena Private Workstation to satisfy customers who need a secure and easy way to maintain their Unix server. If the model is well conceived, we may be able to increase our ability to serve the MIT community in providing maintenance for Unix servers. Success in this project will also benefit IS; if we can increase the campus population of "well behaved", centrally supported, private UNIX workstations, we will be adding to the solution space for system support of decentralized machines, an issue that faces customers and IS today. The deliverables for the discovery portion of this project are:

1. Creating a list of necessary features for the Athena Private Workstation. Identify the drawbacks to the current offerings for private workstations.
2. Create a high level model for the Athena Private Workstation.
3. A timeline for making the Athena Private Workstation available. (This will help answer how much (if anything) can be done to meet the customer needs with the upcoming Athena release in summer of 2000)
4. A cost estimate for the work required.
5. An outreach plan to create incentives & motivation for current and future Athena Public Workstation customers.
6. A business plan that accounts for both costs and incentives. This will include a review of the current Athena fee structure.

The project is in the IS Strategic Plan to Deliver new I/T products, support and services and is part of the strategy to improve and extend the Athena academic computing services and environment. The project is sponsored by Vijay Kumar. Miki Lusztig and Dan Winship are co-team-leaders and will jointly contribute the equivalent of 30% of an FTE to the project. As team leaders, Dan and Miki have identified the following skills and experience necessary to complete the team. The team needs people who have experience in running an Athena Private Workstation , people who would like to run them but do not find them satisfactory, and people who would like the MIT campus to run Athena Private Workstation for their Unix servers, since they are secure and predictable. The team actively seeks representation and input from the Athena Server Operations team, the Network Operations team, teams in W91 who take care of Unix servers, present Athena Private Workstation customers, and potential Athena Private Workstation customers. If you are interested in this project, please contact Miki (miki@mit.edu, x3-0127)