Re: Question on student user accounts

[John Lupton <lupton () ISC UPENN EDU>]

Students are part of our overall PennKey authentication system, by 
which PennCommunity members register a unique PennName (you may be 
detecting a nomenclature pattern here <g>) of 2-8 characters that is 
associated with a password and used to identify themselves to various 
common university resources, and in most cases serves as their email 
user name as well. When registering their PennKey, they are presented 
with a list of possible PennNames that are generated by an algorithm 
that produces some combination of their first, middle and last names, 
e.g. jsmith, jqsmith, smithjq, johnqs, smith05, etc.

Our current practice is that the user retains this PennName, 
essentially, forever. The reason for this is that it is very common, 
for example, for students to graduate, leave Penn for a time, and then 
return for later postgraduate work, or as a staff or faculty employee. 
In these instances, since their own "real world" identity has not 
changed, then their Penn "online" identity will not change as well. 
This also allows alums to authenticate and request transcripts and 
other records pertaining to their time here.

Looking down the road, we foresee that the combination of the 
8-character namespace and the permanence of names may produce a 
situation where "all the good names are used up", so we are presently 
evaluating options like expanding the namespace, "retiring" names after 
x years, etc., but have not yet reached any decisions.

==============================================
John T. Lupton           Sr. Information Security Specialist
Information Systems & Computing/Information Security
University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia PA USA
lupton () isc upenn edu       (215) 573-3811


On Jun 21, 2005, at 10:37 AM, Fretz, Kerry wrote:

> Our institution has been using a specific format for student network 
> accounts for many years.  Our format has always been the last name 
> followed by a sequential number.  For example, we would use SMITH11, 
> SMITH12, SMITH13 with the email set as the same format.  After the 
> user would graduate, we would remove the accounts and eventually, the 
> username would be reused by another incoming freshman.  This has 
> created some issues over the years.
>  
> I was just curious what you are using for the network username format 
> at your institution and what you’ve found that works well for you.  Do 
> you reuse network accounts or do you have a unique username for each 
> student coming in?
>  
> Any input is appreciated.
>  
> Kerry Fretz
> Manager, Network & Systems
> Philadelphia University
>