Printer accounting and cutoff from UNIX: is it possible?

[William Walker]

In article <19636 at mephisto.UUCP>, juan at cobra.gatech.edu (Juan Orlandini) writes:
> >>Students will ruin you if you give them an unlimited number of pages to
> >>print on laser printers... All those christmas cards, sports results,
> 
> Here at Georgia Tech, the Office of Computer Services (OCS) gives each
> student a permanent student account. They also give them a certain amount
> of money (called banannas - for some reason unkown to me). All computers
> under OCS management have accounting software that will subtract from the
> allocated money based on what the user does. CPU time is more expensive
> than mere storage which is about as expensive as printing. Different 
> platforms have different cost attributes, but are equivalent in terms of
> "real" work done. (They use a set of benchmarks to determine the ratios).
> This neatly solves user abuse problems. The more they abuse the less they
> have money to abuse with. Extreme cases of abuse are dealt with immediately.
> Overall, there is a subvocal grumble by most of the students about OCS
                               ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^  
> policy being restrictive, but with limited resources, it is a quite
> effective way.

Wow does that bring back some bad memories.  like working on a final project
at 3AM and having some system accounting message pop up telling me that
my CPU limit has been reached, see the site admin for an extension (at 8am).
some students work long hours on projects not to abuse the system, but
to produce quality work, perhaps beyond the expectations of the instructor,
but why should an instructor or administrator say "you only need 3 CPU
hours for this course, anything beyond that is abusive"??  perhaps i am
taking a subject that really interests me, i want to learn, to dig into
the subject.  perhaps i want to do unix for the rest of my life.  why should
some person set limits on how much i can learn??

limiting the resources like printing or disk space makes sense, or perhaps
prime-time computer access, but there are two users on at 3 AM, who am i 
hurting or inconveniencing by compiling a few programs to experiment with
IPC or terminal modes.  that makes my university look all the better by
producing programmers who know more about the system than "write a program
to balance your checkbook and print a bank statement".

to bypass the quotas, i got a job as a tutor/computer operator at
Penn State, with guaranteed access to a terminal and no quotas.
the quotas issue was one of the driving factors in my transferring to
the univ. of maryland.  at least there they know what hands-on means.


bill.

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       William Walker   ---   uunet!prcrs!wrwalke  ---   (703) 556-2565
   "There's nothing wrong with IBM that a REAL Operating System can't cure."
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