[Gllug] OT: Announcement

[Jon Masters]

On 01 Sep 2001 00:15:50 +0000, Ian Norton wrote:

> 6667 is if you run one of the essex.ac.uk irc servers

At Nottingham, use or encouragement of IRC is officially evil and
banned. I have repeatedly asked for a student internal IRC service
however have been told "no" and that it would never happen.

> well it will be fun :-)

* stop reading now unless you want to read my rant *

No, it won't. At least, not in my experience.

The student data network at Nottingham drove me to 50quid per week
telephone bills towards the end of last year (via nasty NTL calling card
system which requires "atdt71771,,**,,<cardno>,,,<ispno>") and also in
my opinion helped to augment my deep depression/misery at one point.

Last year I paid around 80 quid for a connection to the campus student
network, was given one of the cheapest network cards money can buy and
for this exchange of funds I was given access to internal hosts and the
webcache only. No outgoing/incoming traffic of any kind (due to previous
"copyright violations" - which means that the University must punish all
future students rather than be reasonable) or any other services which
were not strictly for "educational use" - no IRC, ICQ, SSH, anything.
The service was frequently unavailable and generally of lower quality
than cheap dialup ISP access, which I would much rather have had except
0800 calls were charged from Hall telephones during the entire period
not to mention that my mobile offered cheaper call rates than the phone.

During the course of last year I made frequent suggestions that the
JaNET rules and regulations were being intrepretted too strictly and
that the service should be switched to a leased line in order to offer
students what they wanted, additionally I complained about the list of
"allowed operating systems", that you must use their unstable network
cards, that personal accountability was absent due to the network
topology and a number of other things besides. I shall refrain from
describing exactly how bad my relations with them became but suffice it
to say that it was not at all pleasant. For the new year they have
obtained a leased line, and allow any Operating System and NIC :(

I will never live in a Hall of Residence at Nottingham again after what
happened although they have taken measures to make it better, I'm told.

Generally, I am slowly getting fed up with certain aspects of my
University and may again consider leaving this coming academic year :(

There, I feel a little less bitter now.

--jcm



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