[ntp:hackers] Re: ping?

David L. Mills mills at udel.edu
Mon Sep 29 13:56:02 PDT 2003


Paul,

I have no idea what "my team" has in mind, unless it is taking you up on
your offer to provide cycles. I'm trying to get out of the distribution
and maintenance business but stay in the R&D business and it's proving
very hard.

I have a bunch of different architectures here for test, including
SunOS, Solaris, Alpha 4 and 5, HP-UX, Ultrix, FreeBSD and Linux. The
guys want more, including AIX and who knows what else. Keeping the
existing claptrap going in the face of bolts, lack of expert help and
distraction from other things I am paid to do is a chore, especially now
that John has departed for grad school at Penn State. Since the bolt and
then Isabel I've done not much else but fix machines, restore fried data
and design and populate archive schemes.

The Corps and I have explored several schemes to split up the
maintenance and R&D and web chores, but nothing seems to work well.
Right now the development and stable versions live on whimsy at the
backroom site (my home) with occasional transport via ISDN to campus and
web. Harlan does the bulk of bugfixes, deploys build schemes and manages
the repository, for which I and the Corps are profoundly greatful. Once
in a while kind souls like Danny and the IPv6 guys come calling and test
things, but mostly it's me doing little incremental things and testing
and Harlan doing bugfix. I stay completely out of the webdudes territory
other than to require unpopular mail procedures consistent with our
department and campus procedures.

What I am encouraging the Corps to explore is finding warm places to
squat architectures other than we keep here. And, I would like to stand
down Ultrix, HP-UX and Alpha 4. I get Solaris support from staff here
and Alpha 5 by HP, FreeBSD by the Corps. John keeps a Linux box here,
but we don't admit it exists. The Corps wants to build and test in
various other architectures and operating systems, one or more of which
you might happen to have handy.

If a phone call helps, call my office 302 831 8247 Tues/Wed/Thur
1200-1500 local. On Mon/Fri and if no answer, call home 302 737 9212. 

Dave

Paul Vixie wrote:
> 
> dave,
> 
> your team has told me that you're expecting them to talk to me directly,
> but they don't know what to talk about.  can you and me have some phone
> chat and learn what's to be done so i can goose your boys into doing it?
> 
> paul



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