Subject: SDF Newsletter November 2003 [1] SDF Dialup Service Reinstatment! **VOTE** [2] SMTP Registry .. a solution to the UCE/spam problem. [3] Vintage Computer Festival 6.0 Report [4] New SDF hoodie colors and Girl T-Shirts [5] A few words about SDF maintenance and downtime [6] Universities are dropping general UNIX shell access! [7] Other means of continual sponsorship. [1] SDF Dialup Service Reinstatment! Based on the survey results taken last month, I've decided that we're going forward with a national dialup service. There is a hefty setup fee, but we'll get that covered. Hopefully this will be a decent for of funding allowing SDF users to ditch their dialup ISPs and use SDF. Here are some interesting results based on the 104 members who participated in the survey: Are you interested in a Dialup Membership? 36 Yes, 34 No Which country do you live in? 87 USA, 7 Canada On membership dues: 54 $15.00, 17 $16.00 Would dialup be your only internet access? 54 No, 19 Yes Based on your survey answers, I'm keeping the questions the same. From now until Nov 30th, there will be a VOTE on the dues for the dialup membership. I urge you to exercise your right to vote even if you are not interested in the dialup membership. Type 'vote' to vote! [2] SMTP Registry .. a solution to the UCE/spam problem. When I was working for Texas Metronet for a bit with iczer and srl, I got my first bit of real exposure to spam/UCE .. Infact, its only been this year that its *really* become a problem for me personally. An address I've had for about 13 or so years is now almost completely unusable. I've heard from others, such as the great MIT hacker of the Artificial Intelligence Lab, David Moon, that many are giving up on their decades old addresses just because they are getting too much junk mail. The idea I came up with in 1996 was to create an SMTP server registry much like the way domains have to be registered before DNS will propagate. It immediately got hammered down by others as something that would not happen. I kept it in the back of my mind and earlier this year I began thinking about it again. I've created a site 'smtpnic.org' to get a movement going. I hope that by getting enough people talking about it, we can get something together. I have never felt that it is the mail server or the user mail client's responsibility to fight spam. [3] Vintage Computer Festival 6.0 Report We got back from the VCF 6.0 a week before the band's tour, so I didn't get to write to much about how it went. It was actually lots of fun. I believe Paul Zachary showed off his PDP-11/70, which was a rather large display .. 3 or 4 cabinets and a bunch of DEC VT100s running RTS-11 and Digital UNIX. We were in competition with each other in the minicomputer class along with a few other machines. SDF won first place in the class! I've posted the pictures under our 'tour' section in the 1994 and 1997 as that is when this hardware was in use. Paul really liked the SDF tshirt I was wearing, so I gave him a spare one I had with me. Bill Gosper (of MIT AI Hacker Fame) was also with me and was exhibiting his implementation of Conway's Game of LIFE on his Symbolics XL1200 with a color system. He had lots of hardware problems, but I was able to help him with a board set out of my XL1201 and my console. I've posted some quick pictures at http://sdf.lonestar.org/gosper I do have some other pictures I really need to get together and post and I promise to do that soon. [4] New SDF hoodie colors and Girl T-Shirts Last week we got our largest order of hoodies and tshirts in! This time we have hoodies in blue and in red as well as the black. We also got a small order of women's sizes in khaki, red and black. If you are want to get yours, run 'order'. If you are curious about how these shirts look, go to 'tour' under http://sdf.lonestar.org and look at 'sdfers' and 'shirts'. If you have one already, send me a picture of yourself in your SDF shirt and I'll put it up on the 'sdfers' section. [5] A few words about SDF maintenance and downtime Recently we've had a problem with uptime that seems to have gotten really noticeable the past two weeks. This is just to let you know that we are working on this and hope to get it resolved very soon. The problem, plainly, is that a client machine (such as sdf, otaku, norge ..) will get caught in a 'deadlock' virtual node lock which doesn't seem to be a recoverable state. It also seems to be a very rare 'bug', but because SDF is probably one of the only NetBSD sites that is heavily used, it crops up quite a bit. Once we've got the bug squashed, the fix will be checked into the source repository for others to benefit from. I've been in correspondence with two other sites that have experienced the same bug (both of which run proprietary applications). We're all working together to compare notes and hope to have a resolution by the end of the month. Thank you for your patience and understanding. [6] Universities are dropping general UNIX shell access! I've been hearing this since the beginning of the Fall semester and it seems to be true. Universities all over the country are prohibiting UNIX shell access to the general student body. While most CS/E students still have their UNIX access, many are losing theirs. (BTW, I majored in music at SMU and I was given a UNIX shell account). We've designed a flyer which you can download, print and post at your school or other place to let others know about sdf. Its available under the 'tour' section on http://sdf.lonestar.org. You might say that 'if someone is interested in UNIX they can just install it', but what people are losing and missing out on is a since of community that a multiuser system brings. [7] Other means of continual sponsorship. If you are looking at ways to help SDF but you don't really feel like you need memberships such as DNS, VPM, VHOST, DBA, MLIST or TWEAK, give 'pledge' a try. 'pledge' allows you to make a monthly or annual contribution to SDF of $1 or more. Like with membership levels, you will receive a friendly reminder that will tell you when your pledge is due. You are welcome to use pledge without actually pledging if you are just curious at how it works .. pledging to SDF is entirely voluntary! I also encourage you to read the FAQ regarding other memberships, or even try typing 'tweak', 'vpm' or 'vhost' at the command line and seeing if you would like to sponsor SDF at those levels.