New students, faculty, and staff are not given shells by default. It should be noted that almost no commercial Internet Service Provider offers shell accounts to the general public because of the security issues. The more open accounts on the system, particularly little used alumni accounts, the easier it is for hackers to exploit an account undetected. This motivates us to work toward minimizing the total number of shell accounts. Also, as we move to more secure clients for functions like telnet and ftp, it will become generally more difficult to support a far-flung community of users.
Alumni are heavy users of the modem pool - heavier than students.
As part of this strategy, Reed has negotiated favorable rates for students, alumni, and other members of the College community with the same ISP that will provide services to faculty. For more information on Reed's ISP, see the section on Modem Access above. For many alumni, getting an ISP account would negate the need for having any account at Reed in the first place, since almost all ISP services include email, dialup access, and web page hosting.