Automating CGI logons - clarification & further question

[Charles Blair]

> <A HREF="telnet://proxy.x.edu:5013/"> ... </A>

I should add that "proxy" here is a DNS alias (in a CNAME record). You
really should make sure that the name "persists" regardless of which
machine is actually performing the service, otherwise links will have
to be revised, and you will have defeated a very useful part of this
system. 

> At our site we use a different machine for the telnet proxy server
> and the web server, though that isn't necessary

I mean it is technically not necessary. Operationally we distinguish
between two sets of services, "stateful" and stateless. We like to put
our stateful and stateless services on different machines, because one
can't bounce a machine with stateful services with impunity--user
sessions will be disrupted. But in the old days, web servers would die
or be killed, but sometimes couldn't be restarted, because port 80
remained busy for some mysterious reason. The only cure was to bounce
(reboot) the machine. This is only minimally disruptive for a web
server (if you've fetched a page and are still reading it, you won't
notice the bounce; you'll notice it only if you try to reload it or
fetch another one), but for a proxy server you will have killed a
number of user sessions rather rudely.