That was one of the things I disliked much about Ohio State, the stupidly
formatted userids.  Those userids were NOT account numbers, they were just
all that the programs they had to install the userids could create.  It was
just a standardized pattern.  If I created userids on my own, I could use
whatever was appropriate.  There is a move from higher up there to change
to a more mnemonic system.
 
Places like CMUCCVMA and PSUVM disgust me.  Don't take offense Mark, I
am directing this all to accounting types, who either want to number
everyone's lives, or who don't realize ther *IS* an account field in
each userid.  In fact, we actually use the ACCOUNT field here at Illinois.
Too bad there is not one in the SFBLOK, we have to use the DIST field
which messes up a few things.
 
Q:  Having looked at CMUCCVMA's CPQ NAMES, I see many userid's that do
    not conform to the XX9X coding.  They are clearly service virtual
    machines in most cases, e.g. SMTPUSER.  Are the lists you are going
    to run at CMUCCVMA not to be classified as services in the same way
    as the others?  Is this going to be a student run service?
 
Might I suggest that if you can get some administrator to back you up,
that you push for a NEW userid coding system based on "-L" at the end
for the lists.  This seems to have become a defacto standard, with only
a few exceptions.  Since these userids SHOULD be set up in a NOLOG sort
of way (not actually NOLOG since IBM "fixed" it to prevent getting spool
file), then it should be OK to have userids so named.  They would not
normally be logged on, so who should care.  Be sure to point out that
non-conforming userids (albeit for special purposes) do exist, so the
argument that the account programs cannot handle the userids really does
not hold any water.
 
One final thing:
 
I would like to start a list to discuss things like which schools have which
policies, trading of policy ideas, etc.  Many new schools come onto Bitnet
without concrete policies, either relating to Bitnet, or to just their
computer service.  It could be a forum to share ideas regarding these things.
It could also me a clearing house for people who are changing institutions
to know what hassles they might be running into at the place they are going
to switch to.