From: sca@Athena.MIT.EDU
Message-Id: <9208210234.AA06197@w20-575-46>
To: ammist@Athena.MIT.EDU, owenwess@Athena.MIT.EDU, danb@Athena.MIT.EDU,
        dagoura@Athena.MIT.EDU, akatlas@Athena.MIT.EDU,
        jmaessen@Athena.MIT.EDU, mcdonald@Athena.MIT.EDU,
        scheible@Athena.MIT.EDU, sca@Athena.MIT.EDU
Subject: Long and rambling: The SCA account and AFS
Date: Thu, 20 Aug 92 22:34:22 EDT


Tibicen here, writing from sca@athena.mit.edu - read this letter in
you spare time, it's a bit long and not flamingly crucial (at the
moment):

I logged in to sca@athena today 'cause I needed some space for a SCA
project I'm working on (details below).  I had a look-see about; I
haven't logged on here in something like 6 months.  Several things
came to mind which I thought I should mention to you.  In this case
"you" are the (relatively) most likely to use or most frequently do
use the SCA account.  This list of names exists as a mail alias in the
account (details below).

Looking about the account, it seems to be just barely maintained.  It
*is* maintained (there was only 6-days-worth of email waiting to be
incorporated), but it's not seeing much exercise or use.  One obvious
reason why is that bothering to log into sca@athena has always mean
really going out of ones way.  In most sca-related electronic work we do,
we find it more convenient to do it in our own accounts, where we have
access to our private email, our own znols, our favorite
customizations - in short ``all the comforts of home.''  The times I
want to get something from this account or to use some function of it,
usually laziness wins out over the process of logging out of my own
account and waiting to log into this one.  I wouldn't be surprized if
I were not the only one.

So (finally, I get to the point) I'd like to see some Groups and some
real AFS usage to make sca@athena more accessible on more levels and
more useful to more people.  If you don't know what I'm talking about,
the short explaination is this: from now on, permissions are granted
to *directories*, and people can be aliased into "Groups" which can be
granted permissions.  For more details on that, RTM or grab me
personally.  

I am given to understand there are two ways to make group-aliases, and
one only lasts for ~3 days.  The other ways is to use Moira Groups.
Moira is the database that Listmaint accesses, and that keeps track of
emaillists (mitgaard, e.g).  It does Groups as well as Lists.  Groups
are Official Things (like email lists), but once you get one, the
adminstrator(s) can change almost every aspect of the group, including
the name.  To get groups, (according to the help viewe) contact:
"accounts@athena".

Assuming that they will give us lists (and I bet they will, at least
now, before the term starts and people find out what Groups are useful
for and start swamping them with requests), I would propose we figure
out a permissions system that uses them to make life a little easier.
One specific plan is:

** a group "sca-users" for all the people who receive this mail
message, i.e. those people who have the password and can log into the
account, and who are trusted to see certain otherwise confidential
materials.  This group will have close to all permissions for all the
directories *including* "insert" "delete".  This means that they can
use almost all of sca@athena from their homedirs as if it were
merely part of their home dirs.  

** a group "mitgaard" for all Mitgaardi - however we want to define
that.  Perhaps the subscribers to mitgaard@athena after September is
past?  This group would never be given write permission, but could be
granted to greater access to view more of the contents of the account.

** a spare group "project", just in case.

In all cases the adminstrator to the list would be sca@athena.mit.edu

This is just off the top of my (sleepy) head.  Can anyone come up with
a better plan?
---------------------------------------------------------------------

The account has some useful things in it (hopefully to become more
useful with AFS) which I'm not sure everyone knows about.

*	There is a .anyone file with the subscribers to
mitgaard@athena in it.  If it were made effectively world readable,
everyone could use it as a znol.  To do so, one would -

athena% znol -f /mit/sca/.anyone

which would get you a list of the mitgaard subscribers logged in at
the moment.   I did this a lot when I was trying to drag people to
things like storytellers meetings.

*	sca@athena is subscribed to -i mitgaard.

*	There is a mail alias file.  "~/Mail/aliases"  In it is
"frequent-sca-users" (recipients of this message), and can be added to
as necessary.  This means to send email only to those who have access
to the account, (one has to do this from the account at the moment)
you can send email to "frequent-sca-users" and the computer will
figure it out.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

	As I mentioned, I logged in here in the first place because of
a project of mine.  I'm making a master accademic calendar for the
seven boroughs so that people have a chance of scheduling
get-togethers and Provost's councils somewhat wisely, and so that
interested people will be able to have a clue as to when they can get
hold of borough members.  Unfortunately, I am stuck doing it in
PostScript.  Right now, it is 234K big.  And that's too big to fit in
my account with the rest of my projects and accumulated stuff.  I saw
that the sca account had gobs of space, so I made this thing a
directory (Tibicens_schedule_project) and put it there.  There's a
READ.ME in there too, for further details.


Too Late at Night,
Tibicen