5 ms·
> "For a while, Linux did not quite do everything right with networking, so it was banned from the university network. That gave Linus a lot of motivation to fi
by laumars 10y ago
> "For a while, Linux did not quite do everything right with networking, so it was banned from the university network. That gave Linus a lot of motivation to fix it, of course"
Sounds like there's another interesting story there regarding why it got banned. Anyone any wiser?
- kgabis 10y agoMost likely it was doing something naughty in it's network stack.
- teaearlgraycold 10y agoYeah but that could have been any number of things.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- laumars 10y agoI had worked that much out for myself. What with it being explicitly stated in the quote that the network stack wasn't working correctly and had to be fixed. :P The bit I was interested in was what was Linux doing wrong and how was the fault detected? Did it take anything else down with it? Was the fix something straightforward (ie it was a silly oversight that caused the problem) or something complicated? It can be interesting to read stories about tech going wrong. Sometimes because the results can be amusing in retrospect (less so at the time of the problem) and sometimes because it's just nice to read that problems and mistakes can happen to other people too.
- tyingq 10y agoJust a guess, but I vaguely recall something with linux in the early 90's. Because no other end devices (PC's and the like) would advertise things like RIP, many of the routers on campus and corporate networks would accept route announcements from any device. They assumed any device that could do these things were legit by default. So, a misconfigured Linux box could hork up the network pretty quickly. Of course, that's just a guess.