Newsgroups: comp.admin.policy Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu!usenet.ins.cwru.edu!usenet!davis From: davis@usenet.INS.CWRU.Edu (Palmer Davis) Subject: Re: Multi-User Domains Message-ID: <1991Jun6.044102.18776@usenet.ins.cwru.edu> Keywords: green fuzzy bananas Sender: news@usenet.ins.cwru.edu Nntp-Posting-Host: usenet.ins.cwru.edu Reply-To: davis@po.CWRU.Edu Organization: Case Western Reserve Univ. Cleveland, Ohio, (USA) References: <1991Jun5.182009.26836@newcastle.ac.uk> Date: Thu, 6 Jun 91 04:41:02 GMT Lines: 53 In article <1991Jun5.182009.26836@newcastle.ac.uk> A.G.Poole@newcastle.ac.uk (Ford (Alex Poole)) writes: > >I've also heard that American Uni's actually support MUDs.. or is this >folklore? > Depends on what you mean by "support." We have one MUD up and going (well, it died a while ago of a database crash followed by a write over the only backup, but I hear rumors that it's back) due to its administrator's ability to scrounge a spare machine (half a spare machine, actually) to run it on. Although the university isn't formally providing it with a home, there is a club on campus ("CRUMMM") that has formal University recognition, and consequently *does* get University funding for activities. They have requests pending for money for something like an old workstation to run the MUD on (though something less like a hard drive is more likely); there was a get-together that it sponsored last term. > >How are they justified if this is so? > "Justified?" Who said anything about "justified?" If there's a machine sitting around with an administrator willing to waste cycles on a MUD, there isn't really too much that the University has to say about it unless it does something obnoxious. We have fiber-optic ethernet running into all our dorm rooms here and are slowly migrating toward making the NeXT our standard platform, which raises the possibility of literally thousands of student-owned 15 MIPS workstations available for running MUDs, with enough raw bandwidth that the net isn't going to be the bottleneck unless a *lot* of people try to be MUD administrators. Most people around here would rather play on MUDs than hack them, so that isn't very likely. I can see how a policy of forbidding MUDs would be reasonable, though, in an environment with considerably scarcer computing resources. (I'll resist the temptation to tell you about the multimedia MUD I have under development for the NeXT right now.... :-) :-) ) >(PS... those people who program such things... not me of course... are trying >to find a way of stopping it, so if anyone has had the threat of removal, and >has overcome it somehow, please tell us how!!!) Find an aging VAX that isn't running X, and put the MUD on port 6000. They *can't* block that without breaking everyone's X server.... Or take over some other well-known port reserved for something that nobody ever uses, like SUPDUP or RJE. -- PTD -- -- Palmer Davis I'm probably wrong, so don't blame INS. CWRU Information Network Services Life is short. "Where I came from, we were taught that lawyers had a high social status. But my father never would have friends who were lawyers." -- Lim