From dmoore@its.caltech.edu Sat Nov 18 21:56:44 2000 Date: Sat, 18 Nov 2000 13:38:49 -0800 (PST) From: David Moore Reply-To: David C. Moore To: Justin Osborn , fogies@mbhs.edu Subject: Re: Some questions I finally have a moment to respond to this thread, so I'll just spout some random thoughts. When I was in 8th grade and a prospective magnet student I went to Blair to take the tour. I distinctly remember going to the computer lab and having Dan Sandler give us a tour of the facilities there. He was a senior at the time. It was quite enthralling to see the unix machines there. I remember Mosiac 0.9 running on goober, and having Dan show us the Blair webpage and Captain Jim stuff. At the time, it was really cool. In my freshman year, I recall coding some cgi scripts or something on my binx account, Kevin Doherty starting randomly ytalking me to explain how I had made several errors. From that point forward I was sure that he was spying on me, but in retrospect I think he was just poking around my (public) files as I was working on them. My frosh year was probably the last year of "traditional" sysopdom at Blair. There was a certain hackish culture of the sysops that managed to last until 1996. This shift was probably due to the fact that networking and unix hacking went from something kind of obscure to something very mainstream. It was kind of disappointing in a way, because the old-school sysops seemed to have more fun doing it than the new breed. I think Brendan, Luke, and the Kevins were probably the last of the "traditional" sysop culture. Anyways, when I became a sysop, I was most interested in binx. The nice little things that had been done by our predecessors such as hello, binxcfg, the .profile and .login scripts, etc. were what appealed to me. Hello was originally just shell script. When I became a sysop, it was in C, but most of the functionality was still done using system() or popen(). I took out all of those calls and wrote everything in pure C. It made me much happier. Looking at the last line of hello today: `-----hello--------------------------------v2.2-dc-v2.1-dm&kd-v1.1-ds&nc-----' So v1.1 I assume is the shell version written by Dan Sandler and Nate Cook. v2.0 would be kevin doherty's C translation. v2.1 would be my changes. 2.2 would be daniel church's changes. I sort of wanted to do fun stuff like hello, but everything had pretty much been done. I briefly played with a program I wrote called confer that basically turned binx into an IRC-like chat room. However, it wasn't that cool so it didn't catch on. On binx today, I see that my ytalk rank is #4, which is pretty sad considering that I've been gone for 2 years. Interestly, back in my sophomore/junior time period, ytalking was very in vogue. It was not uncommon to see 20 people all ytalking on binx on a given weekday night. Somehow, I think binx usage has declined a bit over the years. Again in my sophomore/junior years, binx was hacked a lot. We got a lot of root break-ins and stolen passwords, sniffers, etc. I must admit that having an insecure system was fun. It was cool to track down what the hackers had done and find their little treasures hidden in directories named things like "/usr/local/...". One time they even replaced /bin/login with their own. Unfortunately for them, it broke all logins except theirs, so we quickly realized the problem. Those were fun times. We also had that cracker from Slovenia who stole a bunch of passwords. For a while there we ran crack on the shadow file. I remember taking the list of cracked passwords to an ARML practice and musing over it with brendan and luke. I still have a lot of the left over cruft from the various hacks in my binx ~/sysop directory. Considering the various security problems, I wrote a kernel patch at one point to have kernel process accounting print command arguments in addition to the commands themselves. That was cool. The next big thing to come along was Clinton's visit in Feb. 1998. That was certainly very exciting. Sometime shortly after, we began the transition to the new Blair, and also the new binx. The new 333 MHz machine was certainly a nice upgrade from the old open-case 90 MHz machine. However, it didn't have quite the same charm. The old machine was crashing a lot towards the end of its life, mostly due to faulty power supplies and other bad hardware. At one point, the guts of it were just spread over the floor with multiple power supplies and a desk fan sitting next to it to keep it cool. Once we had the new machine up and running, we also didn't have many hacks anymore. Or maybe we just weren't paying as much attention. Then came more stressful times of DHCP, netware, and other more mundane sysop tasks. Somewhere along the line, sysoping transformed from fun hacking on macs and unix boxes to more difficult network interoperability issues. Some of these issues we weren't even allowed to touch, because the central office wanted us to stay away. The Novell servers for instance became the central hub of computing at Blair. Binx was only used for email, web, and chatting. By this time, I had mostly become interested in more web-based programming. Since the cool stuff had already been done on binx, interactive stuff on the web was the new unexplored domain of sysopdom. I also got involved with the CAP guys. Ben Krefting managed to lure me into the CAP stuff. At one point, their cap.mbhs.edu machine was more powerful than binx. That didn't last long. Anyway, after a year or two with CAPonline, consisting of a couple thousand lines of bash shell script, I decided to broaden my horizon to the whole school with AUC. I started in June of 1998 writing the same stuff in C. My first task was the email client. I finished that rather quickly, but the work went on. Never did I expect that I'd still be working on it today. Interestingly, it's available in several different languages now, and is used beyond Blair. Here are a couple random links to some other school's AUC front pages: Australia: http://www.sceggs.nsw.edu.au/cgi-bin/auc.cgi/home http://intranet.sacs.nsw.edu.au/cgi-bin/auc.cgi/home Canada: http://auc.cmsd.bc.ca/cgi-bin/auc.cgi/home US: http://www.boleyschools.org/cgi-bin/auc.cgi/home France: http://perso.wanadoo.fr/buch/xterm/auc/ Regards, David ------------------------------------------------------ David Moore California Institute of Technology http://www.ugcs.caltech.edu/~dmoore ------------------------------------------------------