Subject: Public Use of Pine

From: [email-masked] (James Jones)
Date: 5 May 1995 00:05:49 -0500

We have PC's available for student use which are connected to a terminal 
server through serial lines using trumpet winsock with wfw311.

Right now, our students have to telnet into our linux host and run pine from 
a shell.  Frequently, pine will lock or a student will go off without 
logging out. 

What I would like to be able to do is have the students not even have to
login to the unix machine to get their mail.  I would like to have them
sit down at the public terminals, run pine, supply a login name and
password, and get their mail without having to mess with the linux side of
it.  I don't want any user information stored on the local machines since
it will be a different person using it the next time. 

I got pc-pine to run once and ask all that information, but then it asked 
me if I wanted to write the information to the ini file.  This is 
unacceptatble.  I can't have students using their information as the 
defaults (even though some of them live at the terminals).

I have IMAP setup so that I can read from pc-pine in my office (where I 
am the only person who uses that machine) - but I want to provide 
generic mail capabilities where the username is grabbed from the linux 
system based on the login name and password supplied.

I need to know if there is some way I can do this.

Thanks.
-- 
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
James D. Jones:  Mathematics Instructor & Internet System Administrator
Richland Comm. College, Decatur. IL       Opinions expressed are my own
-----------------------------------------------------------------------

---

From: [email-masked] (Trey Harris)
Date: 7 May 1995 01:55:47 GMT

In article <[email-masked]>,
James Jones <[email-masked]> wrote:
=We have PC's available for student use which are connected to a terminal 
=server through serial lines using trumpet winsock with wfw311.

=Right now, our students have to telnet into our linux host and run pine from 
=a shell.  Frequently, pine will lock or a student will go off without 
=logging out. 

=What I would like to be able to do is have the students not even have to
=login to the unix machine to get their mail.  I would like to have them
=sit down at the public terminals, run pine, supply a login name and
=password, and get their mail without having to mess with the linux side of
=it.  I don't want any user information stored on the local machines since
=it will be a different person using it the next time. 

What you want is IMAP4 with IMSP capability.  IMSP allows a centralized 
server to hold configuration options (such as addressbooks, Pine 
defaults, etc.) which a mail client can download to configure itself to a 
given user.

Unfortunately, it isn't really available today except in very beta form.  
Look for it later this year, or check out 
http://andrew2.andrew.cmu.edu/cyrus/cyrus for information about an 
ongoing IMAP4/IMSP project.
-- 
Trey Harris                              http://sunsite.unc.edu/harris
  System Administrator, Project Isis, Office of Information Technology
                       The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill