From kmernick@mbhs.edu Sun Nov 12 07:48:23 2000 Date: Sun, 12 Nov 2000 00:47:49 -0500 From: Kevin Mernick To: fogies@mbhs.edu Cc: Justin Osborn Subject: Re: Calling all (former) Sysops! On Fri, Nov 10, 2000 at 04:56:12PM -0500, Kevin Doherty wrote: > Kevin Mernick joined, as I recall, as a result of the MVHS SRP. He and > I came up with the Kevin Dance, also known as the Annoy Frank Dance, > because we would annoy Frank Wright with it, which was really pretty > damn fun. Ah yes, the Kevin Dance... That was fun. Anyway, I did start out as a sysop as one of the members of the second NetSRP. Margaret Hwang, Dan Rodriguez and Jennifer Cabrera were the other people on that, but they did mostly web and MVHS stuff. And of course, we all ran a whole lot of cable through the ceiling. As I recall, I was involved in three binx reinstalls. The first was at the end of my junior year, and was the last time we installed Slackware on binx. There were some weird problems with that install (I have no clue what they were anymore, only that they were weird), so we installed RedHat over the summer. Then we had to reinstall after someone broke in and screwed all kinds of stuff up. That was entirely our fault, the four binx ops at the time (me, Kevin, Brendan, and Luke) all thought that someone else had fixed a hole in mount, but none of us actually did it. I also worked at Blair over the summer between my junior and senior years. I think I was technically working for MVHS, but most of my work was on Blair stuff. That was the summer that we moved everything onto the MCPS network and got rid of the 56K line we had. In retrospect, that was probably not a great decision, but at the time it didn't seem so bad. (Plus it was made entirely by "the adults".) BBN (or SuraNet, or whatever the hell their name was then) wanted to triple or quadruple what they were charging us for the connection, and I think Ms. Steinkraus and Hammond were getting political pressure from MCPS to move onto the County network. But anyway, regardless of the reason, there was a fair amount of work involved in coordinating the move. Hammond, Matt Shibla and I did almost all of that. First we moved blazer/mvhs1 onto the county network and set it up as the mbhs.edu nameserver. I spent a lot of time on the phone with Nate Cook and Frank Wright (who were working for MCPS that summer) going over how to set up the nameserver files. Eventually, Nate read me most of the stuff from the files on ns1.mcps. We also moved the annex to run off blazer instead of goober. The annex was causing problems for most of the time I was a sysop. It kept running out of memory and crashing. Eventually, Brendan and I wrote a script to check how many memory buffers were free and reboot it if it got too low. We finally figured out that the annex was looking for a time server on the old subnet and was wasting all of its memory trying to figure out what time it was. We moved the rest of the machines over later in the summer and for about two months everything worked fine. Then MCPS started screwing things up (especially the nameserver). The other big thing I remember was trying to rescue goober from its slow, painful death. During the fall of 96 (my senior year) goober would crash fairly often and sometimes take a few tries to come back up. One day (Oct 11, 1996), goober crashed and wouldn't come back up. I think a few other people helped out, but I did most of the work trying to get it back. After a lot of time staring at the three digit LCD display on the front of goober, and the book explaining what the hell it meant, goober came back long enough for me to move the web pages to binx (this was when binx replaced goober as www.mbhs.edu) and to backup all of the files on goober over the network to binx's tape drive. Later that year, the freshmen (Damon, Jesse and Greg) replaced the dead goober hard drive and reinstalled AIX. Unfortunately, they didn't restore anything from the tape, so goober remained totally useless. I still have the list of all the files that were on that backup in my directory on binx (~kmernick/sysop/goober.backup.stuff.gz). That tape probably disappeared, and even if it didn't, I'm sure all the bits have rotted off of it by now. I think we did manage to copy all of Ms. Verona's files onto blazer (otherwise, there would have been hell to pay). Also, there was the time that Gov. Glendenning came to visit Blair. That was mostly an MVHS thing, and I think it's still up on the MVHS web page. The only other thing that I can think of that was important that no one else has mentioned is Armand's. At least with the sysops from 96, 97 and 98, sysop meetings at Armand's were the best perks we could get. I think Hammond used all the money he made selling clueless people floppy disks to pay for our pizza. It was great. :) Kevin [Sorry Doherty, I fucked up and forgot to group reply before...] ________________________________________________________________________ Kevin Mernick kmernick@mbhs.edu "You certainly usually find something, if you look, but it is not always quite the something you were after." --J.R.R. Tolkien ________________________________________________________________________