[ntp:hackers] Some NTP services to be terminated or relocated at UDel

David L. Mills mills at udel.edu
Tue Aug 19 19:53:12 PDT 2003


Folks,

As most of you know by now, there are very deep philosophical
differences between Harlan, Brad and myself on administrative issues
involving mail and testing support. Harlan just beat me up on problems
with testing support on the backroom machines, which is the final straw.
I have been willing (read that forced) to compromise on a great many
issues previously, but I stand firm on the principles outlined in my
last letter. Accordingly, I am terminating or relocating certain
services here at UDel.

1. The backroom machines are withdrawn from all except bona fide
research activities. The effort on my part to keep the ISDN line up and
the machines in good repair is just not worth the effort. Whimsy has
sprung a memory parity error, mort has lost a fan and grundoon shows
terminal illness of motherboard. All of these need fixing and, in the
case of mort, physically getting it to campus for repair is really hard.
I don't have any budget or staff for hardware diagnosis, repair or
transport. I intend to keep my own activities on whimsy mainly because
that's the best way I can deal with dimished eyesight. I continue to
offer what machines I can keep running available for protocol and
compatibility testing. I expect eventually to get things repaired and
back on air, but maybe not real soon now.

2. The distribution, bug tracking and release archive activities must
move elsewhere from backroom. By far the best choice is
maccarony.ntp.org, but possibly a better choice is outside UDel. It may
be easiest to move everything, lock stock and barrel, from whimsy to
maccarony and what I will do is clone on whimsy and pogo as required.
With exception the mail issue below, maccarony is a good place to park
NTP things. It is well connected, security isolated from other machines
and self contained. Best of all I keep away from it and the department
staff are willing to watch it and contribute hardware as needed.

3. I am extremely irritated at the mail condition on maccarony. I have
insisted, read that required, that incoming mail behave as incoming mail
on UDel machines. Harlan and Brad have sandbagged that to the max and I
won't stand for that. I have set a deadline of Wednesday for conforming
to the UDel model, but from mail received today, it hasn't happened. It
would be much better if Brad or Harlan could do this, since that would
be minimal impact on NTP mail. However, if that hasn't happend by
Wednesday afternoon, I will ask the department staff to reconfigure the
mail as per UDel practice.

4. If the community as a whole cannot live with administrative fiats as
declared in my letter, mail will have to relocate from UDel. Brad,
Harlan and possibly others might think up a way to do that with minimal
impact. If there is no practical way to do that, perhaps the web should
move as well. For all practical purposes, the web is completely
independent of UDel now. Maybe that can be done with appropriate DNS
records, maybe not, but unless mail can work like UDel, it will go. The
maccarony.ntp.org and www.ntp.org will stay here under my exclusive
control, but all it will have on it is forwarding links.

I don't know who will make these plans or who will implement them. I am
happy to hear possible alternatives or amendments and grant extensions
as required, but the web, mail and release/maintenance/bugfix activities
must be resolved. If at all possible, I would like these issues to be
resolved before classes resume after Labor Day.

Dave



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