Subject:
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Re: Allocation of member #'s
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.admin.general
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Date:
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Sat, 3 Jul 1999 22:31:28 GMT
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Viewed:
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692 times
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In lugnet.admin.general, Larry Pieniazek <lar@voyager.net> writes:
> [...]
> > (For the record for anyone curious about why Larry is so sure about
> > being the third person: He helped test the inital pre-newsserver
> > newsserver while things were still in the very early feasability
> > stages back in August of '98).
>
> For the record it was actually my argument that Lugnet needed to
> establish brand identity and soon, and that using "free" available
> software would be a faster way to get there than writing the perfect
> from scratch system, and that a news server was a great place to start,
> that got Lugnet, the newssite, started. Or so I'd like to think.
>
> I recall strongly tooling around Boston together in Todd's Saturn
> passionately making that case, while philosophising on the Cathedral vs.
> Bazaar software development models.
>
> It worked.
>
> You're all welcome.
> [...]
Heh heh. OK, here's the fully story...
Larry had a *very* positive impact, to be sure. Very important and helpful
discussion. It's what he does for a living, too, basically (or did, I'm not
sure). Anyway, I remember writing Larry afterwards and thanking him for his
opinions. But in my mind we were really talking more about buying vs.
building in the much larger DBMS sense, rather than just NNTP news (or so I
remember). When we chewed the fat for 6+ hours about all that fun stuff on
August 27 (1998), I was already, at that point, on a "mission from god" to
get the LUGNET newsserver up and running as efficiently as possible,
whatever the most reasonable path to that was. At that point, I certainly
wasn't considering writing my own NNTP server anymore, although on August 9
the idea did occur to me, given how simple NNML is. :-)
The most potent "spark"/idea that ignited the thought process which led to
seriously considering running an NNTP newsserver came on August 9 while
reading an O'Reilly UNIX book -- although it really took a couple days of
testing before it all sunk in. By the time Larry and I met and talked about
stuff at the end of August, the "test" newsserver (named NNML, a Q&D Perl
library for doing NNTP) had been running for 2 1/2 weeks and was actively
still running but well on its way to being thrown out and replaced by a
"real" newsserver (named CNews), which, if Larry remembers in the car as we
were headed East over the bridge back toward his hotel, I was ranting about
how frustrated I was with some of the CNews installation and configuration
issues, and was almost considering installing INN instead.
Anyway -- not to detract from Larry's impact -- which was, without a doubt,
very positive -- but in my mind, if any one person really deserves credit
for lobbying in favor of a simple NNTP approach as opposed to a homebrew
approach, it would have to be Paul Gyugyi, who, on December 1, 1997, after
having read the LUGNET Plan document, stated:
"When I first saw your post, I was worried you were re-inventing
usenet. I've seen a few web-based message boards, and they really
lack the features I've come to expect from news readers like emacs's
gnus, such as topic and body searches, kill files, etc. So I hope
you'll just run a netnews server, similar to the way microsoft runs
a newsserver for microsoft-related groups."
to which I replied:
"I was wondering about that. I seem to remember hearing about
MS-specific ng's on their servers somewhere back when I was doing
NT GUI development. I think one of the guys at work tried connecting
but the company firewall didn't allow it for some reason. Apart from
any hosting issues, are there any client setup and configuration
issues? Like, I mean, can a 6-year-old kid set it up? Can people
switch easily between news servers? Can things like 'tin' and 'trn'
connect to arbitrary news servers from inside a telnet shell, or do
only things like Netscape and MSIE work for that? How about Lynx?
If someone runs their own news server, can they guarantee that posts
aren't forged by people? Sorry for all the questions...but since you
brought it up... :-)"
and that haunted me for several months. And it's what eventually led on
August 9 (only 6 days after we got the server set up) to consider trying out
NNTP and seeing where it lead. Before Paul's message, my mindset about NNTP
had been "yuck, that's old." But of course Paul was right.
Whew. :)
--Todd
p.s. Many many thanks to Larry and Mike and Sarah and others who
volunteered their time in August of last summer to help test the intial
setups, which proved that it all would be possible and workable.
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Message has 1 Reply:
 | | Re: Allocation of member #'s
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| (...) Yeah, well, I still want 69. <g> Barring that, I'd like the number I'd get according to the order people began posting to Lugnet, which I would imagine would be somewhere less than 20, maybe even less than 10. Lugnet IS new, and just like I (...) (25 years ago, 4-Jul-99, to lugnet.admin.general)
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Message is in Reply To:
| | Re: Allocation of member #'s
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| (...) Yes. You said below what I am about to say: I was the first person other than you to post to the now no longer extant version of the news server... I can't prove it because all those posts were dumped and we started over, they all were test (...) (25 years ago, 3-Jul-99, to lugnet.admin.general)
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