In article <[log in to unmask]>,
[log in to unmask] (aaron t porter) wrote:
>         I was recently told by someone in a decision making position at
> MCIS that increasing user quotas would result in abuse of services
> (piracy, porn, what have you).  In response to the "web page" arguement I
> was informed that the only students who wanted more disk space for quotas
> are people trying to set up some sort of money making scam on university
> equipment, and that if they wanted more disk space they should probably
> get a commercial account, which the official than noted would have a disk
> quota too.
 
I have been told this by a particular person as well, a few times. As it
so happens, this person also gave me the same speech WRT a student
organization's account!
 
Worse, IMO, is when this person gave me the same generic speech in
response to me asking for my account back a bit early last summer. You
see, I took 2nd semester last year off, so my account was removed. Well,
my home town didn't have a signle local ISP at the time, so I asked if I
could get my account back at Miami, since I was returning this year (by
this time, I had already signed up for classes and everything, so there
was no doubt I was coming back). I figured since I have to pay long
distance charges anyway, I might as well use a free account, and get my
web site back up in the process. I explained all this, yet I was told to
go to my local ISP. Gee, that was helpful.
 
Fortunately, a few weeks later, I managed to get on with our town's first
ISP as a beta Mac user. However, the guys running the place were pretty
clueless, so there were a lot of problems, and there was no NetNews
service at all. By this time, we were at the end of July, getting into the
first few days of August. Accounts were supposed to be reinstated the
15th, so I asked again if I could just get my account back a couple of
weeks early, so that I could get my web site up again before classes
started, and so I could read the mu news, not to mention have some
reliable service. Guess what the response was... yup, the same generic one
I'd been given each time before. Get get a local ISP, accounts are only
for students, we don't want people to abuse university resources, blah,
blah, blah. Makes you wonder if this person even reads messages through,
or just auto-replies from a few similar, but different messages. I know
for a fact they often ignore mail, as I've sent several messages in the
last semester and not received a reply (and they tell me to contact them
via e-mail before doing anything else... convenient way to keep you
schedule open, I guess).
 
As for the quotas on commercial accounts.... Sure, they have quotas, but
they're usually much more reasonable. Most entry-level accounts these days
come with 3-5MB of space, and some much more. Our own local OneNet gives
you 25MB free. That's a far cry from Miami's default of 0.5MB, which I
used to overflow daily with my e-mail. So maybe I should go with an
outside ISP. But you know what? I have a perfectly good account right here
at Miami that I'm already paying for, I can mount the account right on my
own computer and access it like a local drive, and I have a direct
ethernet connection. Why would I want to give all this up to go with an
outside account that I have to pay for, in addition to still paying for my
Miami account? Especially considering that I am encouraged to put the
available computing resources to good use, and to take advantage of the
net. Unless this means just using my Ethernet connection to rapidly
download e-mail and merely surf the web, I don't think it's possible given
our disk quotas.
 
>         By the way, how much disk space on the cluster is dedicated to
> student interactive accounts?  MUC currently has 104 users.  These users
> take a total of 216.32 MB.  The largest user is well over 55mb, the
> smallest about 102kb.  This averages to about 2.07 MB per user, and if you
> kill the largest and smallest users, our no-quota system actually averages
> to about 1.5mb, or 3000 blocks.  I guess my point is the vast majority of
> people will never exceed their disk quotas, so why can't space be shared
> as needed?
 
Not only do the vast majority of people never exceed their accounts'
quota, a large number still don't even use their accounts. I know the
numbers have gone up quite a bit since my freshman year, but I think I
recall Kent commenting then that something like 6% of student accounts
were in use. So, saying (quite liberally) that 16,000 students are eash
using 1MB of space, then just under 16GB would be needed to handle all
accounts. But with only a 6% usage rate, that means we only need 960MB...
less than 1GB! Like I said, the numbers have since changed quite a bit,
but still....
 
My point is that even if the university doesn't want to invest in more
disk space, they should at least be willing to reallocate what they have
as needed. An absolute top limit of 3,000 blocks for students--and worse,
student organizations--is ridiculous, IMHO. Why not offer be a bit more
flexible?
 
Besides, it doesn't look good to incoming students--especially the future
SAN majors and such--that Miami is so stingy with its resources, yet
doesn't offer any way to get around the limitations (i.e., static-IP).
 
BTW, let me reiterate what Aaron said about Kent. Kent's a very generous
and knowledgeable person, and has been nothing short of extremely helpful
to me in my years here at Miami. He's *very* quick to provide answers, and
treats students as equals, rather than subordinates, as so many other
staff members do. And I honestly think that if it were up to him, I
wouldn't have anything to rant about right now. However, it's not up to
him. So, none of my comments are directed at him, but rather at the
officials of Miami who _are_ responsible for these ludicrous decisions.
And while I also don't expect much, if anything, in the way of a response
from Kent, it would be nice if those staff members in charge of these
matters actually answered students' concerns for a change, and replied. If
their decisions are so logical and well-founded, why don't they ever
defend them in these public outcries?
 
Just my $0.04 (ran a bit long :-).
 
Regards,
Bob
--
Robert E. Williams
Macintosh Developer
Enterprise Software
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http://miavx1.muohio.edu/~williar2/