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Grex > Coop9 > #108: The Medium-Range Planning Item |  |
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valerie
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The Medium-Range Planning Item
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Jun 27 06:34 UTC 1997 |
This item has been erased.
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| 54 responses total. |
valerie
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response 1 of 54:
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Jun 27 06:46 UTC 1997 |
This response has been erased.
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mdw
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response 2 of 54:
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Jun 27 08:53 UTC 1997 |
If you want more excitment, find a way to stick people into interesting
conferences when they join. That why I fought hard on m-net, & to some
extent here, to have "general" or "agora" be the default. What I think
would be even more interesting, and something I've always wanted to try,
is to have newuser read through what people say interests them, and
generate a .cflist file of conferences.
Generating more publicity, and getting grex better known, could mean a
*lot* more people, and a lot more demand for the system. How do people
feel about having 200 people on at a time on grex? Are we ready to
think about issues such as running out of UID space, kerberos, Solaris
2.6, DFS, etc?
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aruba
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response 3 of 54:
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Jun 27 19:06 UTC 1997 |
What I'd like to see most is more conferencers. I think that will result in
more members, which is what I would like to see second-most. In order to
pay for a lot of things Grex would like, we need more members. Period.
(Oh, I suppose we could search for alternate forms of income, but I hope
we don't do that, because if we become dependent on such sources, then we
become beholden to them.) The way to get more members is to have more
content, in my opinon, though perhaps we can make more of an effort to get
regular Grexers to become members.
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dpc
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response 4 of 54:
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Jun 27 19:29 UTC 1997 |
Let's get the new Sun up and running. Since this obviously isn't
going to happen "short-term," I assume it fits under "medium-term."
Once we do that (or even sooner), I would *really* like to restrict
all the folks who use us as a remote mailer somehow. There is no
easy way to do this, I know.
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dang
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response 5 of 54:
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Jun 27 22:41 UTC 1997 |
With Valerie, I would very much like to see mail limited on Grex, so that it
doesn't hog all the resources, especially the link.
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orinoco
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response 6 of 54:
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Jun 29 13:37 UTC 1997 |
Re:valerie's issue #4:
I know next to nothing about computers, and have very little money, but I
*would* like to help out somehow. In the past, I've felt kind of guilty about
using grex so much and not becoming a member, but I really can't afford it.
What can I do to help out that doesn't require a high degree of computer
literacy?
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steve
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response 7 of 54:
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Jun 29 17:20 UTC 1997 |
How about talking about Grex to people, when you think you might
have found a kindred soul who might like us? That would be very
useful if everyone could find just one or two people and get them
into the Grex community.
So, for social issues I agree with Mark. On the technical side, Dave
is right.
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krj
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response 8 of 54:
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Jun 29 22:27 UTC 1997 |
Well, if you can't afford to buy a membership, you'll just have to
be interesting enough in the conferences so that *other* people will
want to join. Think of it as a form of "sweat equity."
(1/2 :) )
I think getting conferencing speed up is important -- cutting out the
net link lag and the CPU lag so that conferencers don't get bored
and go away.
I think that Grex's concept of "open-everything-for-everybody" is going
to need some reformulating, and there are going to be some political
struggles with that. (Hi, Mary!) I think there are two problems:
1) As has been discussed at great lengths, many of us believe that
free-email-to-the-world is becoming a black hole which will
grow to consume all of the resources Grex will let it consume.
E-mail chews up lots of the link; it chews up lots of staff time,
from what I hear.
2) Regarding the minutes of the last Board meeting, where Steve Andre'
reports that Grex is under heavy pressure from vandals: I am starting
to suspect that offering open shell access to the world just makes
us too tempting a target to the malevolent. Again, here I suspect
the issue is staff time. Every hour Steve and others spend coping
with system attacks is an hour not spent on getting the new Sun up.
So I would lay out an argument like this: From this item, and other
discussions, I feel a strong consensus that conferencing, and
probably party and e-mail within Grex, are Grex's most important
functions -- these are the community-building activities.
But we have not been willing to act on this consensus: to direct
our scarcest resources, the link and staff time, in support of
this community-building. Such a redirection of resources would
imply some significant shake-up in how Grex operates, and what it
offers to the wide world.
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steve
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response 9 of 54:
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Jun 30 03:07 UTC 1997 |
The risks associated with an open system such as Grex are
real, but a couple of things need to be remembered. The first
is that some largeish number of root-explotiable bugs in commonly
available software these days comes from complicated user programs
like elm, or lower-level things like sendmail which are still
accessable by people.
The second part is that more and more attacks are from the
"outside", ie off-grex but still attacking the system.
Thus a lot of #1's problems aren't solved by closing
down the openness, and none of #2's are.
The worst part of Grex's openness is that we've become
something of a "magnet" amongst the vandal community. I'm
not sure that we'd be better off in this regard if we shut
shells down, or not. Unforunately, probably not.
You are right however Ken, that this activity does take
away from working on the Sun. And yes, at some point we
are going to have to come up with a new way to do some things.
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mary
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response 10 of 54:
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Jun 30 15:09 UTC 1997 |
(Hi, Ken!)
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dang
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response 11 of 54:
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Jun 30 17:01 UTC 1997 |
I, for one, would very very much like to see Grex keep open shells. You can't
get shell access easily any more. Most ISP's don't offer it. Universities
do, but only to students and staff. So, grex is one of a few places to get
shell access, and one of even fewer that are free. I very much like that
about Grex. The shell access that Grex offers has been very important in
deciding my career choice, and I'd like to offer that to others.
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mdw
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response 12 of 54:
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Jun 30 19:05 UTC 1997 |
People have been saying since 1983 that it was "not possible to run an
open access Unix system". I think first m-net, and now grex, show that
this is just not true. It does take some percentage of staff time, &
more importantly, "the right perspective", to do it. This was known
from the start on grex.
Going to a more closed system would not reduce, in the slightest, the
amount of work that would be necessary here, nor, to any substantial
degree, would it increase security. In the short run, it would actually
considerably *increase* staff work, because considerable extra effort
would have to be devoted to finding replacements or workarounds for
programs that inherently offer shell access. For instance, programs
such as mail, party, vi, and picospan all offer this facility, and
derive part of their power and usefulness from including this facility.
In the long run, since clever users with socialization problems would
persist, the potential for misuse would still exit. Since also grex
doesn't have the budget that NASA has for exhaustive proactive custom
"bug-free" design methodology and code development, it is inevitable
that there will sometimes be bugs to be found. One need only look at
the typical freenet to find an example of a system that is considerably
less open, yet probably has just as many if not more problems from
vandals.
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steve
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response 13 of 54:
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Jun 30 19:20 UTC 1997 |
Heh. Thats an excellent point marcus, about various freenets
problems.
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remmers
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response 14 of 54:
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Jun 30 20:35 UTC 1997 |
I agree about the desirability of keeping open shell access.
Another reason to throw into the pot is that it's in line with
Grex's charitable mission. I can think of various people who
have benefitted education- and career-wise from the open shell
access on M-Net and Grex. From a practical point of view, it's
an avenue for recruiting new staff members. Folks like Ed
Anselmo, Marc Unangst, Mark Bobak, and Steve Gibbard come to
mind.
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janc
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response 15 of 54:
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Jul 1 04:32 UTC 1997 |
By all means, keep open shell access.
I would like to institute some scheme that would limit the preportion of our
total bandwidth that is consumed by mail.
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valerie
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response 16 of 54:
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Jul 1 04:32 UTC 1997 |
This response has been erased.
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krj
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response 17 of 54:
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Jul 1 16:44 UTC 1997 |
I'm certainly not invested in the idea of restricting shell access if it
won't buy anything. Let me rephrase my goal: We need to examine
what ongoing tasks are devouring staff time; if these tasks are not
central to Grex's community building purpose, we need to find ways
to streamline or eliminate this drudgework. We need to be able to
redirect more staff energy from "maintenance" to "development."
The "fake POP server" is an excellent implementation of this idea;
we need to find more and bigger ones.
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steve
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response 18 of 54:
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Jul 1 23:30 UTC 1997 |
Heh. Can't argue with that.
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mdw
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response 19 of 54:
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Jul 2 05:40 UTC 1997 |
I am currently thinking of several changes to newuser that may help in
this area, both to "discourage" not so good uses of grex, and to
"encourage" conferencing.
The first change I'm contemplating is to teach newuser to generate a
cflist based on people's interest. This way, instead of seeing one
"introductory" cf, which may not be intrinsically interesting to all,
and which isn't really a "home", people will instead see real live
conferences right off, that are hopefully discussing things that will be
of interest to that person.
The second change I'm contemplating is to make newuser more nosy about
what people are going to use grex for. One thing I want to catch is
people hoping to run "eggdrop" on grex. This is definitely a big waste
of time, both for us and them, and I'm hoping by nipping it in the bud,
so to speak, that we can just avoid the whole mess. Another thing I'm
interested in is catching people who are interested in mail. What I
want to do there is basically a bit of "social engineering". I want to
describe grex's mail in the least favorable terms possible (no modern
gui, slow, doesn't work to every system, etc.) and then to have pointers
to as many other mail systems as we can possibly find (hotmail, juno,
etc.) I also hope to deal with mailing lists, web pages, gif files, and
so forth in a similar way. It'll probably take a bit of work to get the
wording in all of this phrased right, but I'm hoping that the result
will be a higher quality of user who makes it through newuser, the users
who basically *want* to become part of our community, and aren't just
looking for free pine.
I don't know when I'll get time to work on either of these. I'm hoping,
though, that it will be soon.
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scg
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response 20 of 54:
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Jul 2 06:52 UTC 1997 |
I worry about adding more stuff to newuser without also taking some stuff
away. Newuser already makes people go through a huge amount of stuff, and
it seems like while people are often willing to add something to it, people
are rarely willing to see anything taken out (kind of like the Federal
budget).
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jared
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response 21 of 54:
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Jul 2 16:04 UTC 1997 |
Yeah.. I wrote a very shortened version of newuser for nether.net
awhile back to make it much easier to get on the system, which took
out lots of weird little quirks that I did not think were very worthwhile,
and also had it do stuff like check the passsword against a wordlist,
and verious other things.. it's by no means perfect, but making it easier
to initally register, and later change the information is good.
I've got the eggdrop/bot problem also, but on a different scale since people
can compile it and make it owrk on my system, but I go and delete
their accounts.. there's stuff in the newuser text, /etc/motd, people
are just plain stupid. Putting more text in there isn't going to be
worthwhile.. they're already doing it and there's sufficent docs in the
ftpd motd to get the folks that are actually interested in caring.
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valerie
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response 22 of 54:
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Jul 2 21:30 UTC 1997 |
This response has been erased.
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nt
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response 23 of 54:
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Jul 2 23:25 UTC 1997 |
whenever I see .cflist I get hurt. guess why? :)
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dang
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response 24 of 54:
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Jul 3 00:10 UTC 1997 |
(Some of use acutally *like* to use strange things like vi for our .cflist
and .login, etc. :)
(Then again, some of us are total geeks...)
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