[ale] Mindspring and Earthlink merge

[alexei at mindspring.net]

Glenn Stone <taliesin at babcom.com> writes:

> 'tis nice to see you're listening.  Far more than I can say for Media None. 

I definitely lurk more than participate.. at least for the most part.

> And double points for pointing out a solution for us, even though it doesn't
> involve one of your services.  

Well, shell has been one of the services that does not really go with our
core business: dialup access. But that is another story.

Everyone has different needs of shell accounts. On the Netcom side, it is not
every day you can get a SunOS 4.1.3 box to do work on (development, testing,
building software, etc). There are also the side effects of it being a larger
machine (usually) and the nice collection of tools that are there.

I (personal opinion, not work) would love to offer a shell service which has a set
of machines of each class: irix, sunos, solaris, aix, hpux, linux, freebsd. Using
NFS shared home dirs, you could use any system you like to do work. But if you are
in the software business, it would be nice to not have all these build hosts in-house,
but have access to them. 

There are also big dangers with shell accounts. If you are telnetting to a system, folks
might be able to get your password (esp if someone has gotten a compromised system and
is running a packet sniffer). Sure, you can have ssh, but most folks like telnetting in.
As desktops get more powerful and folks run *nix more at home, the need for shell
systems will definitely decrease. Or so I think :)


Alex