I apologize for asking a question that does not directly pertain to
listserv and listownership. At my university we use several Robotics
28,800 baud modems for student and faculty access to our VAX/VMS
system.  The lines are unavailable most of the time for one of the
following reasons: (a) someone has hung up without logging off,
(b) someone has logged off without hanging up (the system remains
online even after logging off), (c) the system has suddenly disconnected
without apparent reason, resulting in condition (a) above, or (d) some
other unknown problem.  In cases (a) and (c) it is possible to
call and suddenly find oneself in somebody else's mailbox without
logging in at all.  When that happens to me I log the person off
and call back using my own user-id.  I have avoided using the
modems and generally telnet into the system from a commercial
account but my students need to have access, particularly since
I am involved in teaching a course via a listserv list in the
Temple University system and they need to be able to exchange
information with colleagues in other parts of the country.  When
I talk to our systems administrators they tell me that it's
the users' fault who don't properly log off.  That may be technically
true, but we can't depend on people not making mistakes; furthermore,
at least 20% of the time the University system disconnects on
its own! I have modem access to at least five systems (including
my commercial account), and ours is the *only* one where this
happens regularly.  Several of my students have switched to the
commercial account in order to have regular access to Internet
and the WWW).  If anyone out there has any suggestions, please
write to me personally.  This will become even more critical as
more faculty members become computer literate and start assigning
cyberspace research projects.
 
Thank you!
 
Ingrid Shafer
http://astro.temple.edu/arcc
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