where to host web server

[Nadav Har'El]

On Sun, Oct 21, 2012, Orna Agmon Ben-Yehuda wrote about "Re: where to host web server":
> I think it is not a question of resources, but of policies and firewall
> ports. The Technion does not allow any SMTP servers that are not controlled
> by the system team, for example.

Look, specific policies about port 25 (SMTP) serve to solve a very
specific problem (spam bots) and the collateral damage is small
(students and faculty can't experiment with writing new mail servers).

This is quite a different thing than a broad policy that no
student-accessible computer in the technion may allow incoming
connections. That prevents development of all sort of Internet services,
protocols, and so on. I don't think I need to give here a list of
Internet protocols and servers which were developed in universities, and
would not have had the universities were so unnecessarily-strict back
then. The smallest example would be my very own "almost complete guide
to the Israeli Internet", which some of you may remember as my index of
Israeli web sites in the early 1990s, which I created as a student and
I learned *a lot* from this experience. Today, I guess, the Technion
would frown upon such enterprise. Twenty years ago, people thought it
was great that students learn about the Internet and create new
things...

Anyway, the original poster demonstrated why this policy is nothing but
stupid: Here he wants to teach students something, and can't because of
Technion policies, so he needs to turn to external companies to do this.
How does this make any educational sense?

-- 
Nadav Har'El                        |      Sunday, Oct 21 2012, 5 Heshvan 5773
nyh at math.technion.ac.il             |-----------------------------------------
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