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Re: [LUG] Plymouth Uni Portal, Student Access & Wreaking Linux...



On Sun, 2004-03-14 at 22:34, Andrew Rogers wrote:

I tried Lynx on the portal and I get authorisation failures, even when 
using -auth=user:pass. But it seems to work O.K. from Mozilla 1.0.

Okay, I'll try lynx and opera from home.

OT whinging:
I think part of the network is managed by an external body.

Nope, none of the Uni network is run externally. However, the network
itself is obviously part of a larger network, swurn - SW university's
regional network, and ultimately JANET - the UK joint academic network.

I was really mad when I discovered that they had changed the IP
address of my machine and others, they didn't even give any prior
warning of the change. I work from home a lot of the time and use SSH
to connect to my number crunchers there, I couldn't log in to them.

That's got to have been a vlan change I guess. Your departmental IT
contact should have been notified of this and it is for him/her to
inform all other departmental staff/students. If that didn't happen then
I'd suggest either asking the contact why, or if they weren't told about
it then contact the network manager and complain about it.

If that wasn't bad enough, they failed to update the DNS entries, and 
hostnames were pointing to the old IP addresses.

I maintain the DNS and can only change IP addresses that I am told
about. There were several vlan changes some time ago and several
departmental IT contacts informed me of the entries that required
changing. As such the TTL is dropped to enable the changeover more
quickly.


There was speculation that they would charge research groups £1000 per 
network socket, now where did I put that old modem...

'They' is the whole University - everyone will be charged for everything
from room space (by estates), to the number of network sockets you have
(by networking). It's part of the University's financial restructuring.
Networking themselves will likewise be charged for room space and so on.
Previously you 'paid' for these services but it was all done through
top-slicing of the deparmental budgets. So in reality there is not much
new about being charged for a socket - the amount you are charged may be
interesting though!

Recently I can't access the POP server from home to read my email so I 
am forced to use some Microsoft Web Access thing that increases the 
network traffic ten fold.

Why can't you use pop? although I susepct that imaps would be preferred.

These new PCs are audited via the network and can be rebooted
remotely. One of my colleagues has one of these new PCs and 
had it rebooted during a critical number crunching application,

Complain! I'm sure this 'rebooting' thing must cater for exceptions by
some means. (I don;t know since it is not something I deal with.)

 he can't install Linux as this would break the rules and the
auditing.

Yes if you wipe out the RM windows installation. However, if you use
vmware on top of XP then you can use linux. You may also want to talk to
SoC; I was involved in trying to sort out some of the vmware problems
with linux but I think they may have agreed to SoC using dual-boot
machines. (The RM installation does not take all the disk space you
could install linux on the spare disk space. It is the 'rebooting' thing
that is the problem - it ensures patches etc are installed I gather and
hence ensures the integity of the University's PC's....it says here :-)
I can only go by what I hear; not being a windows user I tend to avoid
all that stuff.)



John.

-- 
---------------------------------------------------------------
John Horne, University of Plymouth, UK  Tel: +44 (0)1752 233914
E-mail: John.Horne@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx       Fax: +44 (0)1752 233839



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Lynx friendly