🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1991Jun5.182009.26836@newcastle.ac.uk> A.G.Poole@newcastle.ac.uk (Ford (Alex Poole)) writes:
>
>I've also heard that American Uni's actually support MUDs.. or is this
>folklore? 
>

Depends on what you mean by "support."  We have one MUD up and going (well,
it died a while ago of a database crash followed by a write over the only
backup, but I hear rumors that it's back) due to its administrator's ability
to scrounge a spare machine (half a spare machine, actually) to run it on.
Although the university isn't formally providing it with a home, there is
a club on campus ("CRUMMM") that has formal University recognition, and
consequently *does* get University funding for activities.  They have 
requests pending for money for something like an old workstation to run
the MUD on (though something less like a hard drive is more likely); there
was a get-together that it sponsored last term.

>
>How are they justified if this is so?
>

"Justified?"  Who said anything about "justified?"  If there's a machine
sitting around with an administrator willing to waste cycles on a MUD,
there isn't really too much that the University has to say about it unless
it does something obnoxious.  We have fiber-optic ethernet running into
all our dorm rooms here and are slowly migrating toward making the NeXT
our standard platform, which raises the possibility of literally thousands
of student-owned 15 MIPS workstations available for running MUDs, with
enough raw bandwidth that the net isn't going to be the bottleneck unless
a *lot* of people try to be MUD administrators.  Most people around here
would rather play on MUDs than hack them, so that isn't very likely.  I
can see how a policy of forbidding MUDs would be reasonable, though, in
an environment with considerably scarcer computing resources.

(I'll resist the temptation to tell you about the multimedia MUD I have
under development for the NeXT right now.... :-) :-) )

>(PS... those people who program such things... not me of course... are trying
>to find a way of stopping it, so if anyone has had the threat of removal, and
>has overcome it somehow, please tell us how!!!)

Find an aging VAX that isn't running X, and put the MUD on port 6000.  They
*can't* block that without breaking everyone's X server....  Or take over
some other well-known port reserved for something that nobody ever uses,
like SUPDUP or RJE. 

-- PTD --
-- 
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