Date: Tue, 20 Jun 1995 12:15:24 -0400 (EDT)
From: Alex Nishri <nishri@utcc.utoronto.ca>
Reply-To: alex.nishri@utoronto.ca
To: Norman Housley <norman.housley@utoronto.ca>, eugene@utcc.utoronto.ca, Eric Ng <eric.ng@canada.sun.com>, Alex Bewley <alex.bewley@canada.sun.com>, Glenn Britton <britton@utcc.utoronto.ca>, Don Gibson <don.gibson@utoronto.ca>, Ron Vander Kraats <r.vanderkraats@utoronto.ca>, Terry Sanderson <terry.sanderson@utoronto.ca>, oattes@utcc.utoronto.ca, John Bradley <john.bradley@utoronto.ca>
cc: Cheryl Ziegler <cheryl.ziegler@utoronto.ca>
Subject: Queens
I have already had a bunch of hallway gatherings to discuss e-mail strategies. In this note I summarize what Queens is doing.
Queens put in a new e-mail service for all students last Sept. They had 16,500 eligible human bodies (including a small number of part time students.) They estimated that 3,500 would want (free) e-mail in the first year. By April 9,700 had signed on (i.e. more than 50%). This includes a small number of Faculty who sneaked in, but no staff.
Their service consists of telnet login to a UNIX box running Pine, rtin (uses nntp server running on a separate box to provide netnews), and lynx. Basic menus help novices, but there is no attempt to really hide UNIX line-mode--in fact it is intentionally easy for anyone to use UNIX linemode commands directly (i.e. "ls", "rm", etc.). (However, no compilers are offered.) Personal Web pages will be offered by Sept. Queens does run an imap and pop server on the same machine, but doesn't advertise this fact--only a small number of keeners know about it. Users get 1 MB disk quota for UNIX files and a separate disk quota for their inbox.
Queens pre-assigns a mailbox name to every student in advance. Its of the form 5an2@...; the first digit is the year you got your mailbox (5=1995), followed by the initials, followed by an optional digit to make it unique. This was selected because it is easier algorithmically than something like firstname.lastname@...
Students must activate their mailbox at a self-service terminal. They authenticate themselves using a "pin" they are already assigned for manipulating other academic information. Once they go through this process, they are added to the e-mail machine's /etc/passwd overnight. (It is common at other Universities to do this overnight.)
The whole thing runs on one box--a Sparc Center 1000. They started with two CPUs in the fall, but hit a maximum of 120 concurrent sessions. Two more CPUs were added to the box, which can now handle 170 concurrent sessions. They have 8 GB local disk (no NFS).
The killer is the character interrupts. For example, with 170 telnet sessions they see 500 ethernet frames per second. Some of these frames are nntp and http frames, but the vast majority are telnet traffic. (Solaris wins over SunOS with this kind of packet level because Solaris implements telnet in the kernel.)
Alex