🚀 go-pugleaf

Craig Berry wrote:
> 
> Rick Ellis (ellis@ftel.net) wrote:
> : In article <32DA734A.167EB0E7@net.com>, J. Prakash <prakash@net.com> wrote:
> : >Rick Ellis wrote:
> : >> Well, we got into this by talking about why many ISPs don't offer shell
> : >> access.  I can tell you that while we do provide shell logins here almost
> : >> nobody uses them.  Don't know why but that's how it has been going
> : >> lately.
> : >
> : >All the more reason to offer shell accounts at lower rates! :)
> :
> : Huh?  Shell accounts take more resources and have a larger security
> : risk.  One person doing an ftp on a dial-up PPP doesn't have much impact.
> : One person doing an ftp on a shell login can use a large portion of your
> : Internet bandwidth.
> 
> Seriously don't follow this argument.  FTP to a shell account involves N
> bits/second coming in over the Net connection, presumably a T1 or higher,
> or at the very least a 56k line.  FTP to a PPP remote involves the same
> volume of incoming data, probably at the same rate due to local (ISP)
> buffering...then the same volume of data being sent *out* again over a
> slow phone line.  Seems that for the same FTP up/download, doing it to a
> shell account involves *less* overhead than to a PPP account.
> This is not correct!  On a PPP account, data "pass through" the ISP
terminal server with the only buffering being a 16550 fifo.  No disk
storage, no processor time, no memory.  Funny, we used to have this argument
over 3 years ago when certain ISP's lied in justifying higher PPP charges
rather than saying in truth that the reason is that you can do more.

There are many resources to consider...bandwidth, server resources (memory,
disk space, cpu time, etc.) and phone usage.  Of the three, it is usually
the third that is most critical and although z-modem may be a bit faster
to download from a server, because you are connected during download to the
server, the total connect time is longer.


> Now, of course, once the data's on the shell account, it will likely be
> moved to the client's home machine sooner or later, either via a protocol
> (zmodem, ftp) or simply by being displayed to the telnet screen.  But a
> certain amount of filtering may occur at the ISP ("Let's see...read first
> couple of pages...nah, not interesting...rm foo.txt"), for a net savings
> even taking this into account.
> 

There are three main reasons ISP's are not promoting shell accounts:
1.  You have to know more to administer a system than simply put
    up a terminal server and an e-mail server...you have to have to
    port and maintain, mail readers, news-readers, text www clients, irc
    clients and even the sz,rz,sx,rx modem transfer protocol.
2.  Headaches of people running lots of programs, using up cpu time. running bots
    and multiple programs that continue running when the person has logged off (nohup),
    leaving their pine or elm mail readers running...abusers run spam-bots, 
    mailing lists and denial-of-service attacks.  And you have to watch how much
    disk space people are using...
3.  PPP accounts are easier and more cost-effective to sell.


> ---------------------------------------------------------------------
>    |   Craig Berry - cberry@cinenet.net
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