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Back To IC...
Eldrytch, as a sysop in Elec Eng, had rather more clout now, and had a machine pretty much
to himself. He didn't really need the nod of anyone's head to put things on this machine,
certainly not in the short term, and so, just as Ele had seemed to be in a hole so deep
one could wave to our Australian players in real life he came to the rescue. Ele moved
again, and this time to: Radian.ee.ic.ac.uk
4444
Radian wasn't a massively powerful machine, but was
suitable for our needs. It was, if I recall, a Sparc 5 but since it wasn't used all that
much by anyone else, coped admirably, and was a step up from the old days on Chips!
Now for some reason and to be honest I forget why,
Eldrytch decided to ask Liam's permission for it to be in Elec Eng. I can't remember
whether it was because Radian would be only able to be a long term solution with his
permission *or* that he was doing some work on Radian that made it laggy and unstable.
Either way, Liam, perhaps rather surprisingly, agreed and not only that: just as he had
before, he found us a better machine! We happily moved to our next all legal site, once
more at Elec Eng, Imperial College, this time under the name of:
Flop.ee.ic.ac.uk 4444
Some would say that this is a bit of an ominous name for
a site. While most of the machines in ee had sensible names such as 'volt',
'ampere', 'capricorn' and the like, they let someone out of the loony bin when it came to
naming pairs of machines. Chips, it was revealed, was the sister machine to
fish.ee.ic.ac.uk, and flop, rather predictably was the sibling to flip.ee.ic.ac.uk.
Flop was nice. It was a Sparc 20 with lots of memory and
it really didn't do all that much apart from act as a server for some other machines. It
had a fast connection too and what with the fact that Eldrytch now worked for the
department, we seemed finally to have found a decent, permanent site. All this moving
around was taking its toll and each time we hopped to a new location some players ended up
getting lost, despite our best efforts. It looked like this was a godsend. The only
problems we did have was from one Dr Xiao, who was perhaps the only other user on
flop. We never really caused him much heartache, but he would switch to root and kill us
every now and again, despite being asked (by Eldrytch and Liam both) not to do so. Someone
once said that Xiao was in fact not a person but a X-Windows application called
'X-Ignorant-&-Annoying-Operator', but this was unconfirmed, and although it was very
annoying, it didn't happen all that often.
The astute reader will know, however, that we are not on
Flop any more. 'What happened?' you cry aghast. Well, something very, very, very stupid
happened. Some bright spark in Elec Eng decided to have a WWW page with some highly
illegal links in it. Some company or organization, being unable to take out that dodgy site,
decided the next best thing was anyone they could find with links to it. **BANG**.
Imperial cops some shit, and someone in elec eng decides to forbid 'externally accessible
servers'.
It has a certain ring to it doesnt it, 'externally
accessible servers'. Sounds like it was thought up by some manager who probably couldn't
tell the difference between an 'externally accessible server' and an aardvark called
Simon. Anyway, because of the stupid wording, we got caught up in this, even though it had
no relevence to us whatsoever.
As you can imagine, we really wern't too chuffed by this
but, fortunately, another of our new Wizards, Groggie, was able to wangle a machine in
Civil Engineering, where he worked, so once again, we packed up our bags and moved.
This time to:
Palladio.cv.ic.ac.uk 4444
In the beginning |
The pre-Ele days | A pachyderm is born! |
Ele goes legal | Disaster strikes |
Middlesex Uni | Back to IC | IC politics | Elephant today
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