Colin Perkins
Eloy.universities in the 1980s: writing the majority of internet standard RFCs and their implementations
universities now: moving away from Microsoft cloud is really hard okay? 🥺
Ed Bilodeau@eloy Efforts like this in the 80s were individual efforts, not organizationally driven. Individuals on campuses today are still working to build a better world. And individuals on campuses are moving away from the MS stack (not me, mind you). But to make that change on an organizational level is a challenge of a different kind and order.
Olivier Leroyor we could say now that the organizational level overpower the individual one. Universities are gigantic structures sometimes for good reason and most of the time bad ones.
Pixel Purrito@edbilodeau @eloy not necessarily, and there has been efforts trying to be all-encompassing. For an example, I like to cite https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Project
Scott Williams 🐧@eloy @edbilodeau As someone who has made his career in higher ed, this is very true. It's not impossible, just very hard. Change is more effective when it's organic rather than top down.
Erik Nygren 
@edbilodeau @eloy There was a ton accomplished my #MIT Project Athena / IS&T (and Project Andrew at CMU) by staff members in the 80s and 90s, with things like Kerberos coming out as a result. Lots of this was to fill niches in Workstation software. Ironically some of these underly some Microsoft protocols. Student groups like MIT's SIPB were also tightly coupled into this
Lots of that staff left for various reasons, and universities shifted to using off the shelf products. Sadly MIT as a whole is now way behind (eg, very little IPv6) and I suspect the same is true of other schools.
That said, the people leaving schools to go work in industry had a huge impact on how many large Internet companies operate. Aspects of the MIT network certainly influenced how #Akamai was architected in the early days, and some of those patterns seeded how some of the other largest tech companies designed things.
🌸 lily 🏳️⚧️ 
θΔ ⋐ & ∞@eloy im saying!!!!!!! i hate my chud ass uni trying to get me to use chat gpt and shit
@eloy they don't let you use clients with the stupid microsoft e-mail they have, you have to use outlook web app
Donal Fellows@dkf @eloy there is no outlook app for linux, and for android, it requests admin access to my device before i can use it, so i removed the account, but it's stuck thinking it's still added so for 2fa i have to always select "text me" otherwise it tries to send a message to my nonexistant phone
tldr it's a clusterfuck and postfix + roundcube + gnumail are better
tldr it's a clusterfuck and postfix + roundcube + gnumail are better
ananas
✨ Luna! <3 ✨ 
Stéphanie
VER-1602
Chris Siebenmann@eloy @gnomon Also universities in the 80s: one of the biggest places computer stuff was happening, especially Internet/networking stuff. Universities today: a lower-paid backwater for exciting Internet, networking, Unix etc stuff.
In the 70s and 80s, a university job looked like a decently paid place you could continue interesting work after a CS degree, and better than many outside computer programming jobs (hello IBM mainframes). Today, the exciting jobs are outside of academia.
@eloy @gnomon I came up through the CS to university sysadmin pipeline (and currently work at a CS department). Even back then I don't think it was a majority pipeline¹ and it kept shrinking over time as outside jobs got better (both pay and work). Today the university can't really compete; what highly technical new people we can recruit have to really, really like the environment.
¹ people might start as university sysadmins but they leaked out unless they liked the environment.
@eloy @gnomon I'm low key terrified of what's going to happen to my university over the next 10-15 years as an entire generation of highly technical sysadmins from the 80s and early 90s ages out and retires, with not very many replacements in the pipeline. We have so many home-built, inexpensive, bespoke systems that keep things going, but they really need programmer or system programmer level people around.
Garrett Wollman@wollman @eloy @gnomon The problem confronting the university is that it does not have 10x the money (and it can't get it). If you only have 1x the money and there are 10x the costs, you wind up with 1/10th of what you had and that will probably be disastrous. It will probably be especially disastrous if it comes with the related social attitudes towards service provision and network operation.
@cks Different pots of money, often enough. I can't speak to Toronto but at MIT the overhead rate on staff is very high compared to the same services provided by an outside contractor. Not ten times as high but enough to be a pretty significant incentive to outsource. That's especially the case if some significant portion of the outsourcing bill can be capitalized (e.g., one-time development and conversion costs).
maswan@maswan @eloy @gnomon My view is that management is somewhat forced by what staff they can recruit and what that staff can operate (which at a large scale is forced by budget, which is forced by politics¹). Increasingly I think universities (and lots of other places) will be forced to rely on existing solutions instead of building their own.
¹ as mainstream tech salaries get ever higher it becomes ever-harder for 'second tier' organizations like universities to pay competitively.
@cks
@eloy @gnomon Yeah, but this is also a geographical issue. While we can't match US tech giant salaries, we're not far behind the local IT sector (but with some better benefits like 7 instead of 5 weeks vacation etc).
The bigger challenge for us lately is how to sell the position, gotta call it devops and not sysadmin, and stuff like that. Operations seem to be very low-valued in the modern world.
Fred
Jan Vanvinkenroye@eloy Moving away?
🇺🇦 haxadecimal 🚫👑@eloy
And can we go back to submitting papers for publication using LaTeX rather than Microsoft Word? Please?
And can we go back to submitting papers for publication using LaTeX rather than Microsoft Word? Please?
Dr David Mills
William D. JonesRE: https://hsnl.social/@eloy/116003176888188762
To be clear, I HATE the current state of things, but there's a hint of truth to this.
I don't have the blog post handy, but someone tried to roll their own alternative to TCP, UDP, etc for fun recently. They discovered that carriers will refuse to reliably route anything that's doesn't set the IP proto to TCP/UDP.
So even if Unis wanted to create a new proto, it _sounds_ like the social aspect of getting non-Uni middlemen to play nice is a lot more difficult.
Wolf480pl@eloy
I'm under the impression that it was,easier back then because there was less stuff in that area that was already built and that people relied on.
I'm under the impression that it was,easier back then because there was less stuff in that area that was already built and that people relied on.
Enderprincess@eloy i get what you mean but the internet and the world in general has changed a lot since then
Calcaneo
Mathias Hasselmann@eloy Universities just also suffer from neoliberal brain rot. Neoliberal austerity is the cancer.
unlofl [Promoted Toot]@taschenorakel @eloy
"Can I get some real-world experience doing a student job with the IT/Networking department?"
"We slashed their budget and fired most of them, but you might be able to get an unpaid internship with some SaaS company"
😠
"Can I get some real-world experience doing a student job with the IT/Networking department?"
"We slashed their budget and fired most of them, but you might be able to get an unpaid internship with some SaaS company"
😠
sidereal@eloy 20 years ago my small college just hired programmers/web devs to make anything they needed directly (with one login for everything!) and this was so much better than the current system. Now I’m back in school at a much larger college and they outsource everything to like nine different tech companies and it’s so confusing.
pa28@sidereal @eloy This is what happens when you let business factors drive your tech department. When I was in college, a bit more than 20 years ago, (a tiny rural community college) we had an a Computer Department with an IBM 1132 and a lab with a handful of DEC PDP 8s. I got a part time job assisting Sociology students with their statistical analysis. Great time, and the school consistently punched above its weight.
LonM@eloy There used to be just a CS / Engineering department. There was no university IT. So it was far easier to make decisions.
Now there has to be a uni-wide IT team, with business goals, compliance, etc, often competing for resources with department specific IT groups. That's not necessarily a problem but makes it much harder to build and deploy new stuff if it always needs approval from higher up.
The worst though is when individual departments IT get folded into to main uni IT, then it's impossible to trial any innovations.
@LonM
@eloy Hmm. That's not the case here, central IT is older than the CS dept (uni IT is where the applied math folks handed in their stacks of punch cards for programming classes, before they split out into CS and had computers of their own). They just used to be more focused on technical expertise and innovation rather than process management and billing.
The CS and/or HPC dept running their own infra still happens, but is under political and financial pressure.
natex@eloy hey eloy, can i include a screenshot of your post in an article for a culture machine special issue on 'university as infrastructure'?
Daniel Jonsson@eloy But it's great seeing more people getting into self-hosting!
Benjamin