From achurch@mbhs.edu Mon Feb 12 21:17:45 2001 Date: Tue, 6 Feb 2001 21:14:28 -0500 (EST) From: Andy Church To: Justin Osborn Cc: fogies@mbhs.edu Subject: Re: Calling all (former) Sysops! Okay, this is just a bit late (can you tell how often I read my binx mail?), but here you go: I was the MicroVAX II sysop during its last year of operation, 1994-1995 (my senior year at Blair). The VAX ran the VMS operating system, which I once heard described as "solid as a rock, and about as much fun to use"; it had a truly bizarre, at least to my senses, command line syntax and overall system setup, but it almost never went down--I can recall two crashes in the three years I had an account on it. Anyway, my duties ran the gamut, from adding and deleting accounts, to doing periodic backups, to general system maintenance and virtual dust removal. I learned a lot more about VMS that year than I ever wanted to know, though in retrospect it was a quite fascinating OS, and it's a shame it's not around much anymore. One happening that sticks in my mind from that year is that we received a warning about the so-called Good Times virus, supposedly a virus which can infect your computer by simply reading the mail. This was back in the days before mailers supported HTML and scripting, so there was little basis in reality for such a claim, and in fact it was a fairly long-running hoax, of which I was simply the latest victim. Nevertheless, I took it at face value and posted a system news message warning all users about the "virus mail". This resulted in a number of people telling me what an idiot I was for falling for that, so the next day I posted another system news message explaining the hoax and apologizing. Live and learn. There was another little story that never actually saw the light of day: At one point, we lost Internet connectivity for a short time, about half an hour as I recall. That problem in itself cleared up shortly, but I decided to post a news message about it to let people know what was going on. A friend then came over, and suggested I instead write a message purportedly from an account called "overmind", along the lines of: "I am the Overmind. The communication disruption you recently experienced was my awakening; from now on, I will monitor and control all communication with the outer world. Bow down and obey." Or something like that. I never did post it, but it made for a bit of interesting conversation at the time. That year was also when we decided to switch from the VAX to a new Linux system, which we named binx (others have told that story already). As a result, I came in over summer vacation to dismantle the VAX, a tearful (or perhaps not) event that basically involved doing a final backup, deleting all user data and shutting the thing down for good. I used a lot of paper on the terminal that day. Yes, the VAX had a good old hardcopy terminal, and in single-user mode that was _all_ it had. In non-VAX news, I caused all sorts of trouble and frustration by setting up an anonymous FTP server over my Annex PPP link; I eventually took that to university with my and started a web provider, which I eventually sold before moving to Japan (it's since gone out of business). I also occasionally provided a target for everyone else in xtank and linuxdoom, and probably did lots of other stuff I don't remember anymore. And for the curious, dchurch is my younger brother. I've attached a couple of old text files I found lying around that I captured from binx and goober at various points. Apologies to anyone who didn't want to remember them. --Andrew Church achurch@achurch.org http://achurch.org/ On Thu, 9 Nov 2000, Justin Osborn wrote: > Hello, > Justin Osborn here. I'm currently a sysop at MBHS. Since becoming a > sysop, I've realized that we have little or no record of sysopdom. Being > pretty interested in history, especially the history of technology, this > bugs me. I here some stories occaisonally, but I thought it would be cool > to get some stories firsthand. > > So here's the deal. If you've got some time, write a paragraph or two > about what sorts of things you did when you were a sysop, any major events > that occurred, etc. That way we can make a history of the sysops at > MBHS. If we get a good response, we'll compile this into a webpage, and > have new sysops add to it each year. > > Thanks for your time, > Justin > > Justin Osborn "what if there's someone up there? > Montgomery Blair HS shrugs it off with a > Class of '01 'don't know, don't care' > josborn@mbhs.edu hopes to God he doesn't exist > mbhs.edu/~josborn but ignorance here is less than bliss" > mbhs.edu/activities/mblug -The Newsboys > > [ Part 2, "" Text/PLAIN (Name: "binx.credits") 118 lines. ] [ Unable to print this part. ] [ Part 3, "" Text/PLAIN (Name: "goober.credits") 43 lines. ] [ Unable to print this part. ] [ Part 4, "goober login messages" Text/PLAIN (Name: ] [ "goober.messages") 132 lines. ] [ Unable to print this part. ]