Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.2 9/18/84; site brl-tgr.ARPA Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!allegra!bellcore!decvax!genrad!panda!talcott!harvard!seismo!brl-tgr!tgr!Gds@MIT-XX.ARPA From: Gds@MIT-XX.ARPA (Greg Skinner) Newsgroups: net.mail.headers Subject: Re: Firewalls in sendmail Message-ID: <8569@brl-tgr.ARPA> Date: Sun, 24-Feb-85 12:18:21 EST Article-I.D.: brl-tgr.8569 Posted: Sun Feb 24 12:18:21 1985 Date-Received: Wed, 27-Feb-85 07:25:43 EST Sender: news@brl-tgr.ARPA Lines: 57 From: Mark Shoemaker > Why not relax and enjoy it? I wish we could -- but allowing approximately 4500 undergraduate students access to the ARPAnet (even if only through mail) seems, uh, unwise. I'm curious: are there any schools out there that give unrestricted ARPA mail access to all their students (and will admit it)? Mark I think your problem lies not in restricting mail access through purdue to ARPA hosts, but in restricting mail access between machines. At MIT's undergraduate comp center (mit-eecs) students often need to communicate with their TA's via mail, who often keep accounts on other research machines on the chaosnet. Therefore, mail access to the chaosnet is allowed. It so happens that mail access to the ARPAnet is done via the chaosnet, so students have mail access to the ARPAnet as well. It seems that mail is considered generally harmless to the ARPAnet by those in a position to control access to it, so it was not disallowed. It certainly could have been disallowed, since general use of the chaosnet is not permitted for undergraduates (it requires a special bit which enables one to write to the cha: device which is the chaos network device on a DEC-20). Undergraduates are not allowed to make file transfers, telnet to other hosts, etc. unless they have that bit. Since mail works the same way, it could have been restricted the same way. The policy of the undergraduate comp center was (at least up until a couple of years ago) to deny chaosnet access to any undegraduates using the 20 unless they actually worked there as staff, consultant, or some other software support. With the growing number of undergraduate research opportunities at MIT, the number of chaosnet access bits increased (the only other way to get chaosnet access was to justify the need for it by having a non-guest account on another chaosnet machine). Nowadays many undergrads get chaosnet bits -- I'm not saying this is right or wrong, just the way things are. Speaking personally, having chaosnet access (implying ARPA access) benefitted me greatly as an undergrad because I was able to get useful technical information (unix-wizards, header-people, etc.) which I wouldn't have got otherwise until my undergrad years had just about ended. I wouldn't have known half of what I knew coming out of school without those bits. Many other MIT undergrads feel the same way -- I'll forward the question to some of them so you can hear from them. --gregbo gds@mit-xx.arpa gregbo%houxm.uucp@harvard.arpa {allegra,cbosgd,ihnp4}!houxm!gregbo -------