Alpha bids adieu

Much to the dispair of students, the computing center replaced the old Alpha 2100 mail server with a new mail server this summer. The new system offers more memory for each student account, but at the cost of very popular system functions.

Mulberry will be the new client/server software available to students, faculty and staff for accessing their mail accounts. The new, more powerful, mail server will bring the student, faculty and staff mail accounts together on the same server. This consolidation will allow for better campus-wide communication.

"The biggest advantage is what is going to come with all of the faculty and students on the same server," said Director of Computing John Bucher.

The most serious difference between the old Alpha 2100 and the new server is the absence of the popular programs Kiosk, Finger, Phone and Talk. "I really miss fingering people," said college junior David Fishkin.

The computing center's director of client services Kevin Weidenbaum said, "Over the summer we got a few students who were upset they couldn't do stuff they could do on the old Alpha 2100."

While the new server may provide better communication between faculty, staff and students, it appears that it will hinder communication between students compared to the old Alpha 2100. The Talk and Phone functions allowed students logged into the server to communicate directly with one another. No such program exists with the new mail server. College sophomore Noah Kirshbaum said, "I was very disappointed. The change is geared more for the computing center than the student population."

The computing center has not disabled Alpha 2100. Students can activate their mail account on Alpha 2100 if they want Phone, Talk, and Finger capability. Even with this option available to students, it is not conceivable that enough students will acquire accounts on Alpha 2100 that Talk and Phone will be widely used.

Kiosk, the public message posting system available on Alpha 2100, will effectively be replaced by a classified section on the revamped Oberlin Online, Oberlin's home web page. "Under the circumstances, logging into a central system is not the way of the future. Logging onto a classified page on the web is," said Weidenbaum.

While the classified section contains a greater range a categorized inquiries, it lacks the immediacy of the Kiosk system which delivered a series of messages every time a user logged into their mail account. Only 50 percent of students subscribed to the accessible Kiosk system, which also had its share of problems. Subscribers had to scroll through numerous messages in search of their desired inquiry.

On the old Alpha 2100 server, students accessed their electronic mail (e-mail) through the PINE program, while faculty used Quick Mail. Increasing difficulties with QuickMail have contributed towards the acquisition of the more powerful server which would unify all campus e-mail accounts. "QuickMail is great for 100 or so people, but it did not perform so well for 800-900 people," said Weidenbaum.

The new server will also provide more space for each individual account compared to the old Alpha 2100. Whereas an old Alpha account supplied two megabytes of memory, the new accounts supply a total of five megabytes with the in-box and home directory combined.

This improvement in space for student accounts has yet to be realized, though. College senior Nicole Wright said, "I think it is pretty much the same."

The computing center transferred all student accounts from Alpha 2100 to the new server over the summer, but still needs to integrate the faculty and staff accounts. Since students are the only populous working off the new server, it remains to be seen how well campus wide communication will improve.

Changing the faculty accounts should prove difficult, as each account has to be changed over individually. "We are going to do it department by department. We have to go through a careful process of turning off the QuickMail account and turning on the new account at the appropriate time or e-mail will be lost," said Bucher.

The faculty computer network will be worked on individually by computing center technicians. "We want people to coordinate with us. If they are not aware what is going on they could mess stuff up," said Weidenbaum.