Re: Concurrent sessions disabled -- just out of morbid curiosity

I agree with both of Larry's points, but will emphasize the user count question. I have a customer that uses BPCS and has user based pricing. This version of BPCS for some reason does not stop too many users from signing on, it just logs the over use. When Infor bought BPCS they did an audit of the users. Five users for a total of 4 hours of terminal time (not cpu/IO, time signed on) over the course of two years cost the company in excess of $35,000 in fees/fines because of the way the license was written.

For $35K, I'll limit the users. I can argue there are MUCH better ways to do it, a routing program that keeps track of it outside of the software comes to mind, but that is one simple straight forward way of doing it.

One cannot ignore the security aspects of it either.

Jim Oberholtzer
CEO/Chief Technical Architect
Agile Technology Architects, LLC


On 4/6/2010 8:31 PM, DrFranken wrote:

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One reason I've heard told is that it make users remember to never leave
a terminal signed on as they can't sign on somewhere else if they do. Of
course leaving them signed on is a security risk.

Another is that some software still 'counts' a user by terminal.

It's no longer a problem of compute resources for sure.

- DrFranken

On 4/6/2010 7:28 PM, James H. H. Lampert wrote:

Back when I was in high school, student accounts on the district's
student timeshare system (IBM 370/135 running McGill University MUSIC)
had concurrent sessions disabled by default, because there were
generally more students than terminals at any given time, and a student
using more than one terminal was effectively keeping at least one other
student off the system.

One of our customers (and only one) has concurrent terminal sessions
disabled by default. As one who can easily keep multiple terminal
sessions busy, I'm morbidly curious as to why, in an era when terminal
sessions are not a particularly limited resource, an installation would
do this.

Any insights?

--
JHHL