The SL/IP Storybook

Ok children, gather around because Uncle Avrex is going to tell you a real
story about two young children, and the truth about SL/IP, a wonder and
pain all rolled into one.

It all goes back to when two children of a culture that we're not sure
exists decided to purchase UNIX.  Avrex chose to buy BSDI BSD/386 v1.1
UNIX for his Intel box, and his good friend Lucipher decided to buy MachTen 
UNIX for his good old Mac.  

The two children (17 at the time) decided in the spirit of the hacker 
ethic that they would learn all there was to learn, and see all there was to 
see in this wonderful land called UNIX.  They fooled around with everything 
from Sendmail and Cron to "ttys" and X, discovering a world more powerful 
than they imagined.

Until the one fateful day...

 "Avrex, lets get a SL/IP set up, it will be cool!  We can run NFS, 
  Mosaic, FTP, Telnet, send each other mail, chat with each other, we've got 
  the phone lines..."
 "Um, ok..." I replied, not realizing what would lay ahead.

Now many of you out there may just think that SL/IP is something you use to 
attach to a service provider to jump on the Internet, wrong!  It's
also something you and your friends can can use if your running UNIX to hook
each others' computers up over the phone lines when you can't afford
Ethernet cards and 87 miles worth of cable.  But don't get me wrong, SL/IP 
isn't all fun and games as we'll see.

 "Anything?" asked Lucipher over the phone.
 "Nope." I replied.
 "Try hitting enter." 
 "Enter, Enter, Enter, Enter... nothing." I replied.
 "God... ok, hang up and try again."

For the sake of brevity, please repeat the above conversation in your head
347 times, pretending it was happening from 1 am to 6 am on a Sunday morning,
11 pm to 3 am Sunday night, and finally 4 pm to 8 pm on a Monday night.

In the end everything was fixed, from minor errors in setups, modem settings,
and discovering that a specific Macintosh font obscured a reader from 
noticing the difference between sl0 and s10.  Pain my children, pain, but it
gets worse, far worse.

After manually logging in and running:

slattach /dev/tty00 9600
ifconfig sl0 89.0.0.2 89.0.0.1 link2 up

and ping 89.1 just to make sure, the real fun had just begun...

 "What do you mean we can't go faster that 9600?!?!" I yelled.
 "The gettytab doesn't support modems faster than 9600, welcome to Macintosh
  and MachTen." Lucipher answered.

 and

 Network File Systems (NFS) over 9600 baud connections with systems running 
 System 7.1 and MachTen don't go well together.  Can you say 
 "NFS Crash" when you try to view a .GIF through XV over a NFS mounted
 drive?

 But the real lessons came when sleeping was concerned:

 Saturday morning, 8:23am, someone decided to call AOL last night to
 check USENET, and took SL/IP down, guess who wanted it back up.
	
  
 "Hello?" I was no where near awake in reality.
 "Matt, get SL/IP UP!" Lucipher yelled into my ear.
 "No SL/IP, I'm going back to bed, I'll get it up later."
 "No, get SL/IP up!" Lucipher insisted.
 I would always cave in, get up, log in, call out, and re-establish SL/IP, 
 and let me tell you, this entire scene has happened more times than I wish 
 to talk about.

 Or how about...

 "Hmmm, Avrex isn't logged in at his console right now, I wonder if he's 
 there?  We'll, I really want to know, and he's might be sleeping so I have
 2 choices.
 
 1) I can log in, su to his account, and run the following C program:
	    
 main() {
         printf("\a\a\a\a\a\a\a\a\a\a\a\a\a\a\a\a\a\a\a\a\a\a\a\a\a\a\a\a\a\
 a\a\a\a\a\a\a\a\a\a\a\a\a\a\a\a\a\a\a\a\a\a\a\a\a\a\a\a\a\a\\a\a\a\a\a\a");
 }

 (Which for the C Impaired means send 3 million "BEEPS" to Avrex's PC speaker
  while he's sleeping.)

 or
 
 2) Route some 10 meg docs through the SL/IP through his Line Printer Daemon
    (lpd), scaring all hell out of him while he's sleeping.

 Needless to say...

 I think the worst may have been one day when Lucipher called, I refused
 to chat with him because I wanted the extra sleep, so he decided to play
 a little game:

 "Let's see how many times we can boot up the MIT X Window System on his
  console, consequently making his poor IDE hard drive and monitor access
  on and off like their having an seizure..."

 Not a fun game for a System Administrator trying to sleep.
 
 So my children, we have learned that SL/IP can cause sleep deprivation, but
 to say that it's the only thing it causes would be a lie.  For when you 
 master SL/IP, everything starts falling into place, configuring name
 servers, setting up FTP sites, playing with ttys & gettytabs, making your
 own shells, setting up Mosaic HTMLs, etc... everything just beings to make 
 a little more sense for some reason.  Maybe it's called experience, maybe
 it's called "Stimulus/Response", I'm not sure though, I'm still learning
 the wonderful OS of UNIX.

 So my children, if you want to experience where the real "Super Information
 Highway" starts, look no closer than obtaining a copy of UNIX for your
 computer, and expand from there, it will open your eyes to a whole new
 world of thinking.

 So, what happens to Avrex and Lucipher in the end?  Oh, well Avrex is going
 to major in Computer Science and Business and Lucipher is going to major
 in Computer Science, both at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, the fall
 of 1994.  Lucipher is also planning to purchase a Sun SPARC 5, and Avrex
 is looking into a Sun SPARC 1 with a lot of memory, for they both are 
 planning to get their systems on the Internet.  Oh, and just one more thing:
 Avrex will end up losing another hour of sleep, because Lucipher just got 
 PPP for his Mac...

        "Disclaimer: Life is hell, live with it."

			       	    Sincerely,
			             Avrex
		  	             Matthew R. Peterson
	     	  	             ExEditor of DiSTORTiONS Magazine
			             System Administrator of eta.infinity
			             Student of a culture that doesn't exist.
				     mpeterso@nyx.cs.du.edu