Although we weren't going to use our new gigabit backbone connection immediately, I wanted to check that we reallycould get something close to gigabit performance through it and thateverything was working smoothly. When you're doing network performancetesting, you really need to do it from a platform that you trust, sothat any slowness can be attributed to the stuff in the middle andnot to your end having issues.

As it happened, the most trustworthy machine for this was my officeworkstation. But since it was

From one perspective, using someone else's identity system sounds verynice. Imagine the convenience of being able to just use LiveJournal useraccounts on your site, or (for an example closer to home) a centraluniversity database of campus-wide accounts.

(Yes, I am conjoining 'identity' and 'authorization' here, because Ibelieve that it's what a lot of people do in practice when thinkingabout this sort of thing.)

The problem with this is that any time you use a