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%% $Id: Alumni.tex,v 1.5 92/07/17 03:45:31 warlord Exp $
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\begin{document}

\begin{center}
\em {\huge Proposal to the MIT Alumni Office for Alumni Dialin/Login 
Service} \\
\hfill{} \\
{\Huge BLEED ON ME!!!} \\
\hfill{} \\
Derek A. Atkins\\Chairman, Student Information Processing Board

\end{center}

\section{The Problem}

Currently, when a student graduates from MIT, unless he or she becomes
an MIT graduate student or acquires another form of affiliation with
MIT, all contact with the Institute is lost, except through the Alumni
Office.  One of the services lost upon exiting from the Institute is
access to services like those provided by Athena, namely access to
computer services.  Is there a way for MIT to provide a service to its
alumni similar to that which Athena provides to the current students?

Athena is MIT's computational environment, and every student is
allowed to get their own Athena account, which lets them communicate
with students and others both at MIT and outside of MIT.  Access to
Athena gives students a place to work:  a place to work on papers, to
talk to friends, to collaborate on work with a professor, to communicate
to the educational and professional world at large.

There are a number of alumni each year who, for one reason or another,
would like to keep their access to Athena.  The current Athena policy
does not allow for this at all, since only students can have an Athena
accounts, so the Alumni are forced to try to find a new method to
obtain those services.  Providing such a service would allow Alumni,
for example, to keep communicating with each other after they leave,
or to keep in contact with those organizations with whom they were
involved when they were at MIT.

This document is a proposal to the Alumni Association to help fund
the service described herein: an Alumni Server to allow electronic
access to alumni.

\section{The Solution}

What we propose is to create a new service available to MIT that would
allow alumni access to online electronic services similar to what
Athena provides to the MIT community.  We hope that this is not
limited in scope to only those Alumni in the Boston area, although
given the resources required to expand to other areas it seems
feasible to begin locally.

An example of the services that we propose to support include:

\begin{itemize}
 \item[\bf E-mail:]{The ability to send and receive electronic mail.}

 \item[\bf NetNews:]{The ability to read and post messages to the Usenet.}

 \item[\bf Network Access:]{The ability to access any host on the Internet, using:

 \begin{itemize}
  \item{telnet or rlogin:} To access accounts at other sites or on other machines.

  \item{ftp, the File Transfer Protocol:} To transfer files.
 \end{itemize}}

 \item[\bf File Transfer:]{The ability to download personal mail/files and
freely distributible software to computers at one's home or office.}

 \item[\bf Disk Space:]{User storage space for personal programs or files.
Each user would be allotted a limited amount of space when they
subscribe to the service.}

 \item[\bf Zephyr:]{The ability to communicate in real time to other users
of the system.  This might be tied into the Athena Zephyr system,
depending on feasibility.}

 \item[\bf Other:]{The ability to access all Athena services which are
already available at remote sites, Discuss and AFS, for example.}

\end{itemize}

\section{The Requirements}

The major requirements for this project are machines and disk space.  We
would need at a minimum two machines: one to act as a server for all the
standard Athena network services, and the other to act as a
computron/login server.  In addition, a 4mm (DAT) tape drive would be
useful in ensuring reliable backups.  The amount of disk space, memory,
and the number of machines necessary are dependent upon the load that we
anticipate from usage.

As an example, Athena is currently using approximately 8 dialup
machines.  Three of them are IBM PC/RT machines and the other five are
VAXstation 3100s.  According to Athena:
\begin{quote}
%\singlespace
As to the hardware; there are 5 VS3100's and 3 RT's.  The Vaxen have
20M of memory, and total of ~280M of disk (rz55's), using ~80M for
swap.  The RT's have 12M of memory, using Athens drives, and have ~57M
for swap.
\end{quote}
These are just the login server configurations, and do not take into 
account the space used up for file storage and maintenance databases.

\begin{table}
\begin{verbatim}

                Load            Simult. Users
Date      Min    Max    Avg.    Min Max Avg.         % up
---------------------------------------------------------
05/10      0.00  20.58 1.0129    14 126 78.33        87.5
05/11      0.02   9.88 1.2014    38 206 116.8     92.7083
05/12      0.00  11.07 1.3926    34 204 120.6         100
05/13      0.00  13.90 1.4308    34 211 111.6       93.75
05/14      0.01  11.77 1.3771    25 194 110.9         100
05/15      0.00   5.81 0.8907    31 191   100         100
05/16      0.00   5.07 0.6401    25 104 63.12         100


                     Load            Simult. Users
Machine        Min    Max    Avg.    Min Max Avg.         % up
--------------------------------------------------------------
e40-008-10      0.00   8.12 1.0456     2  31 13.66         100
e40-008-11      0.00   5.44 0.9045     1  34 12.85         100
e40-008-13      0.01  20.58 1.4936     1  34 12.15         100
e40-008-5       0.00  11.07 1.1068     4  37 15.52         100
e40-008-6       0.01   9.53 1.1098     1  29 9.005     77.3809
e40-008-7       0.00   8.82 1.0857     2  31 13.07         100
e40-008-8       0.00  11.77 1.2963     0  37 11.63     92.8571
e40-008-9       0.00  13.90 1.0384     0  36 12.29         100

\end{verbatim}
\caption{Athena Dialup Usage Statistics for the week ending Sunday, May 
17, 1992}
\label{Dialup-usage}
\end{table}
As for usage, looking at Table \ref{Dialup-usage} shows a week's worth
of usage on the Athena dialup machines.  Dividing through by the eight
machines, it can be seen that the average usage is about 10-15 users
per machine, continuously, although the loading of the machines will
vary depending on the time of year.

Athena is supporting a user base of approximately 5000-10000 users.
We propose to start a lot smaller than that, estimating less than 1000
users at the start.  Theoretically this means we could get by with
only two moderately loaded machines.

We doubt that we would need the hardware support that Athena does.
Using two or three machines for filespace and another five or six for
login ability would more than equal the Athena login ability, from the
perspective of computer resources per user.

A good medium solution would be to start with two fileserver machines
and three dialup machines.  This would allow us a starting base well
within our goals, and allow us to expand the system for a while without
additional need, until the usage base grows, requiring more hardware.

As for other requirements, we would also need to deal with incoming
phone lines and a CPT (Cisco Protocol Transformer (sp?)) so that we do
not abuse Athena's resources for dial-in capability.

The Alumni Office would sponsor this project, and would pay for the
hardware and physical maintenance costs.  The SIPB would provide for the
administrative needs of the system for two years, at which point a
decision should be made; considering the load and usage whether or not
the SIPB could actually continue running the service and still provide
adequate quality of service.

\section{The Benefits}

The service would be Athena-like and would provide a majority of the
services of Athena, and, we hope, would be able to provide
some of Athena's third-party software as well.

One place look for a precedent is at existing companies which supply
dialup network access similar to what we are proposing to supply.
They do not supply many of the MIT-specific services we intend to
supply, however.  For example, World, which is run by Software Tool
and Die here in the Boston area, charges approximately \$20.00 per
month, and offers access to the Internet at large.  Well, on the other
hand, which is located in San Francisco, does not offer all the
services of World.  Cost?  The Alumni Office could easily decide to
charge users for their accounts and also for extra storage space.

Another service that could be provided is an online directory of
alumni, which would make it easier for both the alumni and the Alumni
Office to keep track of alumni.  To prevent improper use of this
information, the number of accesses per user per time could be limited
or access to the database could be prohibited to external sites.  This
could be used as an online white pages of MIT Alumni.  We know that
the Alumni Office has spoken with IS/Athena regarding this service,
however we think that conglomerating many alumni services into our
proposed system would be offer the best possible service to its users.

\section{Possible Problems}

Some problems that we might have include:

\begin{itemize}
\item[\bf Loading] If we were oversubscribed then we would need to expand our
base of machines.  We do not anticipate this happening at the
beginning of the experiment.

\item[\bf Software Licenses] Who will pay for third-party software? 
Many MIT site licenses are for educational use only.  How can we be
sure that alumni will use the software for educational purposes?
Otherwise we might have to buy licenses ourselves, which could get
expensive.  Should we just ignore this issue?  Who will pay for it?
The growing availability of good free software may nullify this problem
shortly.  Since this venture will be funded through the Alumni
Association, the licenses should be bought through the Alumni Office.
If the licenses are for educational or academic use only, then we
will have to limit the availability of the software, or try to work
out an arrangement with the software vendor in order to provide those
services.

\item[\bf Overloading Services] If we started out by using Athena's
servers, we might wind up loading them even more than they are now
which means we would have to purchase, set up, and maintain our own
servers to handle our own load.  One such service that falls under
this category is the Athena Zephyr notification service.  It is
currently loaded almost to capacity from the normal Athena usage, and
adding more load through the Alumni Server might overload this
service.  This hopefully would not be a problem in the beginning, but
it might become a problem if usage increased, which means we would
have to set up our own server, which would take some resources.

\item[\bf NetNews Licenses] Some of the newsgroups Athena receives are 
at a cost, and there are license agreements, as with ClariNet, which
prohibit reproduction.  This would have to be worked out for such
newsgroups to be made available to our users.  We have to decide a
policy regarding these groups, whether we want to purchase them in
this service, or bind the users to the agreements when they use the
service.

\end{itemize}

There will undoubtedly be numerous other problems with this system
that we have not foreseen, but the fact that this has not been
undertaken in the past makes it an exciting a worthwhile task to
undertake.  We hope that people would become interested in it as word
of its existence spreads among the alumni.  In casual contact with
graduating seniors and other new alumni, we have asked their opinions
regarding this proposal, and the straw poll seems to be positive.
Many recent alumni, it appears, don't want their accounts to
disappear, or at least want some sort of access if it does.  This
service will provide the alumni with that opportunity.

\end{document}
