Let's put this in a slightly broader perspective:
1. Livingston does not have an infinite budget.
2. Quality Software Engineers are NOT in infinite supply.
3. The percentage of portmasters deployed for shell access type
services is probably less than 10.
4. This problem doesn't really apply to network access as it
does to shell access.
5. One customer with four PortMasters is not overwhelming demand.
Sure, there are a few other people asking for this, but the
vast majority of Livingston's customers don't consider this
important.
6. The multiple login problem is not a problem which can be solved
on the PortMaster itself.
7. RADIUS is a NON-REVENUE product for Livingston. That's right,
it's FREEWARE!
8. NO terminal server solves this problem (NO other terminal
server comes as close to solving this problem as Livingston).
9. If you're running UNIX, the place to solve this is by
creating a replacement for the distributed quota(1M)
program called by login. This can easily be done on SVr4
as follows:
1. Write a simple program (even a shell script will
work) which:
Checks for user already logged in
If (user already logged in)
{
Inflict pain here
}
exec(/usr/sbin/quota.real)
2. mv /usr/sbin/quota /usr/sbin/quota.real
3. mv <program from step 1> /usr/sbin/quota
Remember, quota is an SUID program. The program you write
should not need SUID priveleges.
This means that:
1. You haven't modified anyones code.
2. You still have full support available
3. You can go back to the way things were by:
mv /usr/sbin/quota.real /usr/sbin/quota
10. There are many other features which Livingston Engineering
is focused on which are much more important to a much
larger percentage of their customers.
Overwhelming demand is, IMHO, defined as "A very large percentage of
Livingston's customers want this so badly that it stands to significantly
impact Livingston's sales if we do not deliver it. In fact, so
substantially that it is in Livingston's best interest to discontinue
efforts on other projects in order to staff a solution to this particular
issue."
Your problem does not fall into this definition of overwhelming demand.
OSPF does. PRI does.
I have features I'd like to see in the portmaster as well (secondary
IP addresses on interfaces, for example) that aren't there too. However,
I suspect the demand is less than overwhelming, so I don't scream too
loud about it.
Owen