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Reliability steps were made when we updated the “sparcstation 1s in a university lab” hosting architecture to what marketing called a “hot-swappable blade serve

Reliability steps were made when we updated the “sparcstation 1s in a university lab” hosting architecture to what marketing called a “hot-swappable blade server with integral UPS” i.e. a bunch of second-hand thinkpads on a rack shelf above the Livingston Portmaster

ssl-3 3y ago
Ah. The Livingston Portmaster, and its finger server (or the same on many other dial-up terminal servers): An easy way to not only show the RADIUS username of a person dialed into a port, but also an easy (and scriptable) way to discern their IP address and ping them to death. Or, working oppositely: Knowing the IP of the user (from IRC, say), it was often possible to discern the accounts's username. And since usernames were often factually-descriptive back then -- sometimes for billing purposes (firstnamelastinitial, say): It was easy to give them details about themself or their family that they would not have guessed were possible. The greater Internet was a fun time back then for me as a teenager, and I never did anything particularly damaging with it even though I absolutely fucked around with things from time to time. It is certainly fun to remember, but there are aspects of how things worked back then that I'm not itching to bring back to life here in 2024. (And that includes the solitary pizza-box server on someone's desk, as well as the wooden racks of modems and thinkpads.)
- inopinatus 3y ago
  in summer we’d nick desk fans off the telco folks to cool down our USR Sportsters, distracting them first with snarky remarks about ATM overhead absolutely do not miss those days
  - ssl-3 3y ago
    You were closer to the fire than I was, and I do not envy this position that you had. I'm over here remembering that /etc/passwd was world-readable (and shadowless) on a given system's [singular] shell box, but you were more like the man behind the curtain.

ssl-3 3y ago

Ah. The Livingston Portmaster, and its finger server (or the same on many other dial-up terminal servers): An easy way to not only show the RADIUS username of a person dialed into a port, but also an easy (and scriptable) way to discern their IP address and ping them to death. Or, working oppositely: Knowing the IP of the user (from IRC, say), it was often possible to discern the accounts's username. And since usernames were often factually-descriptive back then -- sometimes for billing purposes (firstnamelastinitial, say): It was easy to give them details about themself or their family that they would not have guessed were possible. The greater Internet was a fun time back then for me as a teenager, and I never did anything particularly damaging with it even though I absolutely fucked around with things from time to time. It is certainly fun to remember, but there are aspects of how things worked back then that I'm not itching to bring back to life here in 2024. (And that includes the solitary pizza-box server on someone's desk, as well as the wooden racks of modems and thinkpads.)

inopinatus 3y ago
in summer we’d nick desk fans off the telco folks to cool down our USR Sportsters, distracting them first with snarky remarks about ATM overhead absolutely do not miss those days
- ssl-3 3y ago
  You were closer to the fire than I was, and I do not envy this position that you had. I'm over here remembering that /etc/passwd was world-readable (and shadowless) on a given system's [singular] shell box, but you were more like the man behind the curtain.