My friend Jignesh (jigamo/gujju/jigwana/jangoora) made me install linux on a brand new computer in my hostel room. For 6 months it ran on Red Hat 9 - with a very bad mouse (that made us learn keyboard shortcuts), XFree86 xwindows that crashed innumerable times (prompting us to find a new fix each time) - but we had the ultimate satisfaction of at least having some idea of what is actually going on in the system and the great pleasure of running a moderately popular ftp movie server in the golden days of the IITB LAN just before Bizarre Bazaar came up.
Red Hat had a /etc/init.d/ directory that listed all the daemons and you could start and stop these daemons e.g. /etc/init.d/sshd stop would stop the ssh daemon - so that if your friends(?) are logging in your comp via ssh from somewhere (e.g. dept comp room) and playing songs to give you pain, you could just shut down the sshd so they won't be able to login. or say if you have a ftp server and you have not set the max number of users or the max allowed download speed and say you are running a vsftp daemon, /etc/init.d/vsftpd stop would stop all the freeloaders who were eating your precious resources. But because we never set a max download speed, my room's ftp server 10.9.2.6 was very popular. This we could clearly see by looking at the /var/log/vsftpd.log file that listed which file was downloaded from which IP at what time. This was our own way of spying on our 'customers' hehe.
Then there was this wonderful thing called nmap - you give it a range of IP addresses to scan and it would find what ports are open where. Of course we movie maniacs were only interested in ftp ports and would spend hours ftp server hunting and greedily download any new movie we got. Before the days of Bizarre Bazaar, there were only a few really good servers belonging to people who knew how to tunnel through the institute proxy firewall. These gods would download great movies (e.g. Amores Perros) and provide them to us lesser mortals.
Even before that, there was this really great place called ftp://ahir.ee.iitb.ac.in that had all the songs in the world - entire albums and very rare mp3s and good old tilak.ee that had ebooks too. But ahir was legendary. This was much before everything - but not before the days when you told your friend - "Yaar mere liye email account khol de".
Let me here pay homage to the great servers that once made up the LAN in the days of the old netmon proxy 144.16.108.236:80 (does anyone remember?). These noble servers run no more but we cherish their fond memories and remember their selfless sacrifices. Alas, no longer can we type ncftp 10.7.11.1, cd movies1, lcd /home/movies, mget -R * (This was one of the bad servers with a miserly speed of 100KBPS and took a few hours to download any movie; whereas our server used to give even upto 10 or 11 MBPS). What would I not give to download even a small mp3 file from you today... Kaash!
Cry the beloved LAN!
Red Hat had a /etc/init.d/ directory that listed all the daemons and you could start and stop these daemons e.g. /etc/init.d/sshd stop would stop the ssh daemon - so that if your friends(?) are logging in your comp via ssh from somewhere (e.g. dept comp room) and playing songs to give you pain, you could just shut down the sshd so they won't be able to login. or say if you have a ftp server and you have not set the max number of users or the max allowed download speed and say you are running a vsftp daemon, /etc/init.d/vsftpd stop would stop all the freeloaders who were eating your precious resources. But because we never set a max download speed, my room's ftp server 10.9.2.6 was very popular. This we could clearly see by looking at the /var/log/vsftpd.log file that listed which file was downloaded from which IP at what time. This was our own way of spying on our 'customers' hehe.
Then there was this wonderful thing called nmap - you give it a range of IP addresses to scan and it would find what ports are open where. Of course we movie maniacs were only interested in ftp ports and would spend hours ftp server hunting and greedily download any new movie we got. Before the days of Bizarre Bazaar, there were only a few really good servers belonging to people who knew how to tunnel through the institute proxy firewall. These gods would download great movies (e.g. Amores Perros) and provide them to us lesser mortals.
Even before that, there was this really great place called ftp://ahir.ee.iitb.ac.in that had all the songs in the world - entire albums and very rare mp3s and good old tilak.ee that had ebooks too. But ahir was legendary. This was much before everything - but not before the days when you told your friend - "Yaar mere liye email account khol de".
Let me here pay homage to the great servers that once made up the LAN in the days of the old netmon proxy 144.16.108.236:80 (does anyone remember?). These noble servers run no more but we cherish their fond memories and remember their selfless sacrifices. Alas, no longer can we type ncftp 10.7.11.1, cd movies1, lcd /home/movies, mget -R * (This was one of the bad servers with a miserly speed of 100KBPS and took a few hours to download any movie; whereas our server used to give even upto 10 or 11 MBPS). What would I not give to download even a small mp3 file from you today... Kaash!
Cry the beloved LAN!
2 comments:
yes thanks to the servers we could watch some great movies. in fact my taste for movies was developed in those few years only
sach muchh. where else could we have watch so many beautiful movies.
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