From: mgood@MIT.EDU
Date: Mon, 4 Apr 94 19:12:03 -0400
Message-Id: <9404042312.AA14667@the-thin-man.MIT.EDU>
To: sca@MIT.EDU
Cc: accounts@MIT.EDU
Subject: **VERY IMPORTANT** sca ACTIVITY ACCOUNT CONVERSION

Hello!

This letter is your notification that your Athena Activity Account,
sca, is being converted into a locker and group. The only
noticible difference that will effect your day-to-day activities
is that no one will be able to log onto Athena as sca.  You will
still have the storage space you now enjoy on Athena, and the group
will be able to administer the locker and any lists associated with
sca.

Our experience with these deactivations has show that activities
usually need the login portion of the account for non-MIT people to
help them with their activities.  Our primary concern at Accounts is
that we not have any anonymous logins.  If the people currently using
the Activity account need Athena accounts, we can forward you the
Guest Athena Accounts Form, and with the proper sponsorship and need
for the account, we can grant guest accounts to those non-MIT people.

If you need the activity account for mail management, we can provide
a discuss meeting to help you to archive and manage your activity's mail.

Your activity account will be converted on 4/11/94.  For your convienence,
we would like to know the following information:

1) Who should be the user owner of the locker:
2) Who should be in the group that owns the locker:
3) If you require a Discuss Meeting to archive the activity's mail:
4) If you would like us to send you the Guest Account Request Form:

Please note that if we don't hear back from you, we'll assume the
account is not in use, and we'll merely deactivate it.

Please let send any questions you have, and responses to the questions
above, to

        accounts@mit.edu

Thank you for your cooperation,

Matt Goodman
Athena User Accounts

PS/FYI:

Here's some historical background on Activity Accounts, and why we're
doing the deactivations now:

In late 1987 or early 1988, representatives from Project Athena met
with members of the ASA, and agreed to give ASA-recognized activities
a small amount of file storage space on athena, and the capability to
limit access to those files (via Unix "groups" or "lists") . After
setting up the first several "lockers" as they were called, we found
that a technical problem was giving all Unix groups created on the
same day access to each other's files. That was unacceptable, so we
instead started giving out complete accounts to student activities
until we could get those problems fixed.

As soon as the technical problems were corrected, we once again gave
out lockers and lists for activities rather than full accounts. Early
in 1991 we started the first bulk conversion of activity accounts to
sets of lockers and group and mailing lists. At that time an
electronic mail message was sent to the activity accounts outlining
the problems with shared accounts and what we were offering them
instead. Several groups gladly accepted the switch, so we converted
those. Other groups never replied and were not actually logging into
their accounts anymore, so those were deactivated. Activities that
protested for some reason were left as they were, as were activities
who didn't reply but were actively using their accounts.

Since that time, we've been converting activity accounts individually.
However, because of increasing concerns about and problems with the
lack of accountability, we have once again begun the conversion
process in bulk. Many changes have taken place in the Athena computing
environment since the last bulk deactivation, and as part of the
conversion we are able to offer features that we couldn't offer
before, such as using AFS acls to control access to directories.

The motivation for converting these accounts is coming from the
highest levels of our organization, and that is why we're taking care
of the last few now.