There can be legal implications from this. What if the user harasses, hacks
or abuses someone? ISP's maintain tremendous logs covering all activities
and are sometimes asked to testify in court by subpoena. ISP's continually
monitor usage for suspect traffic and have complicated usage agreements for
this reason. Frequently, an "abused" person or organization sues the person
with the deepest pockets (your company in this case). Frivolous or not, law
suits cost money to defend and there is always the possibility of a poorly
educated jury awarding damages. Additionally, if you have an onsite
webserver, your dial-in user traffic would be competing with your business
webserver traffic. Mailservers aren't much concern due to low bandwidth
requirements.
It could be done and would probably be popular. A well executed usage
agreement would help. 24hr monitoring would be a good idea (you do have an
IT department that monitors the network, don't you?). Consider though that
you would be offering an employment benefit that only those few employees
who live close-by can utilize. Would there be any labor-legal requirement
that benefits be equally beneficial to all employees? If so, you might find
yourself offering 1-800 access to the dial-in pool at great expense.
I won't even begin the discussion about security. Lets just say you're gonna
need some sharp people in your IT department.
-----Original Message-----
From: Joseph S. Gardner [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: Tuesday, January 18, 2000 3:16 PM
To: Linux Newbie; Linux Expert; CLUG - Talk
Subject: [expert] O.T. personal internet access via employer connection
Greetings all,
I recently proposed to our human resources dept. that our company
consider allowing it's employee's to use it's internet backbone
connection form home during off hours as an employee benefit, some thing
along the lines of becoming a small scale ISP for it's employees. They
have asked me to provide names of any other companies who are doing the
same, so my question to you would be "Does your employer and any that
you know have a similar benefit available?"
Any help here would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks
--
Joseph S. Gardner
Senior Designer / Technical Support
Kirby Co., Cleveland, OH
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
