From dmason@wso.williams.edu Sat Nov 11 21:25:18 2000 Date: Sat, 11 Nov 2000 17:32:05 -0500 (EST) From: Evil Dr. Porkchop To: James Dang Cc: Justin Osborn , fogies@mbhs.edu Subject: Re: Calling all (former) Sysops! dude, I'm impressed how much we all seem to remember about this stuff; one thing I am noticing, though, is that we're hitting the core stuff (Binx, Goober) pretty hard, but leaving out a lot of the fringe stuff. we weren't all Unix weenies, or actually, we weren't all _just_ Unix weenies. anybody remember the library Novell network? i do. I was more of a utility infielder, and so I was root on Goober (when Goober wasn't that important anymore, and was actually being treated like a special projects machine), root on the Annex, a Mac admin now and then, an MVHS traveling Linux admin/troubleshooter, and the Novell admin for Blair and a couple of MVHS schools. We did a lot of work punching holes in Netware/IPX so we could get existing Netware networks to talk IP. The library network was 15 or so computers running WFW 3.11, hopefully they are all on the scrap heap now. :) But it was very cool to, in 1996, have a networked set of computers halfway across the school from our leased line. the Networking class dragged wires through the ceiling of E hall to make that happen; I still have a scar from a nail in the ceiling, and I may be suing the county when I die of asbestos induced emphysema 50 years from now :). the first Networking class was me (Dan Mason), Chad Wolfsheimer, Amir Caspi, Frank Wright, Jenny Linnoila, and Chris Mysen. we basically researched network hardware and software, and did a lot of the gruntwork to network the old Blair. but we did get graded for admin work, so it wasn't all bad :). lots of good times, and it made my college networking class pretty fuckin easy. :) oh, also, I was one of the bunch working on spork when it first came in; this was part of the county initiative to network all the schools with standard hardware and a shared frame relay (something like 256K, which was a big jump for us). Spork/Runcible (Hammond's insistence on that name always amused me, if not everybody; the runcible spoon is another name for the spork) was an AlphaStation/4, I think, with 64M RAM and some relatively big hard drive. it ran OSF/1, which was and is the worst memory hog of an OS I've ever seen; one user could make it swap by running pine, from what I remember. but it was fun, although it never did anything important, from what I remember. this was also when we were first introduced to the blair.mcps.k12.md.us domain, which we all wanted to die die die die die. anyway, back to work; release is on Monday, but it is fun to reminisce. peace, -d --- daniel.m.mason / dmason@wso.williams.edu / dan@netmorf.com m. 617.510.0829 w. 617.603.2912 web. wso.williams.edu/~dmason aim/yahoo!im. danMas0n