[committee] VPN access for non-UWA librarians

[David Adam]

On Fri, 6 Jul 2007, Matthias Liffers wrote:
> I'm helping organise a not-for-profit unconference for a group of
> librarians in August.  One of the venues we're scouting is UWA.
>
> How much would it cost to give an arbitrary number of people VPN
> access for a day through UCC?  We're trying to keep the total cost to
> a minimum, as we don't want to charge attendees a cent.

As long as we don't muck the firewalling up, it will probably cost us
nothing to provide in terms of bandwidth. We'd need to know a rough number
of simultaneous users to provide IPs, and it would not be the world's
fastest link with a bunch of people using it. If UCC could put a
click-through disclaimer/advertisment on first HTTP connection I can't see
any reason to charge a non-profit.

Also, the security on the PPTP VPN is fairly closely linked to the
strength of the password used, and it would be really nice to be able to
track down people in the unlikely event that someone abuses it. It would
be trivial to write a script that generated a random account password and
printed it out, but that might mean too much hassle for your attendees.

My in no way authoritative 2c, mostly technical, and as AHC said, ITS
might be able to help you out too.

David Adam
(at a conference in Adelaide where there are four computers for 1000
people)
zanchey@