On Fri, 21 Aug 1998, Eric McWhorter wrote:

> > I think a better way to do this, from a business
> > point of view, is to make sure you don't have anything but shell
> > users on that machine: mail, www, etc. should all be running on
> > other machines that users don't log in to.
> 
> This advice is only practical if the users aren't dependant on these
> services.  If the users want access to these services (which is most
> likely the case), then you'll be inconveniencing them.

You won't inconvenience them much, no. For mail, as I said, they
can have it forwarded to the shell machine. For news, all Unix
newsreaders (and everyone else) uses NNTP anyway. For web stuff,
they can use the standard web-based upload system on www.mydom.com
and just link to shell.mydom.com from their one index.html, or
install a redirect if your web server can deal with that. And so on.

The only real inconvenience is that there's a much better chance
of the shell machine not working (due to resource hogging, breakins,
whatever) than any other machine, but that's just a fact of life.
At least when it does go down, you don't inconvenience the non-shell
users, which in my experience are the vast majority.

cjs

Curt Sampson    cjs@portal.ca	   Info at http://www.portal.ca/
Internet Portal Services, Inc.	   Through infinite mist, software reverberates
Vancouver, BC  (604) 257-9400	   In code possess'd of invisible folly.