🚀 go-pugleaf

In <1992Sep21.065801.446@newshost.anu.edu.au>
David.Baldwin@anu.edu.au (David G Baldwin) writes:

| 2) Restricting access time or providing more terminals - some people
| seemed to be relying on the terminals to continue doing their jobs
| even while they were away!

More terminals would be nice - this largely depends on how many we
can get the vendor(s) to loan us.  If you used the Labtam X terms
at the conference this year, go buy a couple of hundred or so for
your organisation, and tell Labtam that you were convinced they were
great by being able to use them (really use, not just view them)
at AUUG'92 - but that you would have liked to be able to use them
more, and might have bought even more had they loaned AUUG more...

| 3) This may have been done anyway - advising people without direct 
| internet access from their usual machine of a forwarding address 
| for the duration of the conference

Unfortunately, this time, the internet address to use was only
decided the day of the tutorials, so this wasn't really possible..
The mail system only really worked about lunchtime the first day.

Further, the way accounts were created, mail sent to an account
would simply bounce before the user came and made his account.
Even then, there is no way to guarantee what anyone's user name
would be what they would like it to be.

Keeping this working means minimising the administrative load,
so everything needs to be as automated as possible.

| - this would mean the conference server would have to be running at
| least by the day before the tutorials.

This would also require keeping it out of the exhibition area.  If
you'd seen that space, even on the day of the tutorials, let alone
the day before, you'd know just how impossible that would be otherwise.
The tutorials day is the prime "setup" day for the exhibition,
pushing that back (earlier) would involve large cost increases,
as well as requiring vendors to commit their show equipment for longer
than they now do.

The prime advantage of locating the terminals near (in) the exhibition
(quite apart from causing people to have to walk through, and so
making the place seem busier) is that it benefits from the exhibition
security.

Next time we'll try and plan the technical details a little more
in advance.

kre