lnr | Entries tagged with geek

In 1993 Cambridge University introduced a new mail server for its users, called hermes. In December 2021 it officially closed, with end users moved to a new system on Exchange Online. And on Monday July 22nd 2024 it was switched off.

I didn't get a hermes account until 2002, and I've not been involved in running it, but I've worked closely with those who do. I helped hundreds of people migrate from using the Engineering department's mail server to using hermes instead, and then helped support the team migrating hundreds of people from hermes to ExOL nearly 20 years later.

Now it's gone I've been reflecting a little on its history, and found this excellent paper from 2004 about scaling up the system to cope with the many thousands of users it then had. It was one of the two authors who switched off the server last week.

https://fanf2.user.srcf.net/hermes/doc/talks/2004-02-ukuug/paper.html

Looking through the references of that paper I spotted a familar one, relating to a "thermal event" on one of servers making up hermes, and tried to follow it. The server hosting it in Cambridge also no longer exists, and while the page is still available via the Wayback Machine, the excellent photos of the poor DIMMs seem to have been lost. I wonder if Tony still has a copy?

http://web.archive.org/web/20181110142000/http://people.ds.cam.ac.uk/fanf2/hermes/doc/misc/orange-fire/

A reminder that the web too is impermanent!

I shall raise a glass to hermes tonight, with thanks to Tony and David, and to the other David who had a vision of where it could go next:

https://dwm37.user.srcf.net/2019/email-strategy-submission/dwm37.pdf

So long hermes, and thanks for all the phish!

Mike has bought himself a new shiny desktop, and now I'm looking at what to do with what we've still got in the house, or whether to buy in an entire new machine.

I'm currently running a 4th gen i7, with a Radeon GT1030 and 12GB of memory, and a 512MB SSD. But the motherboard and processor and some of the memory technically still belong to work.

I was thinking of migrating my computer's brain into Mike's old machine, but it turns out that's a 3rd gen i7, so less good, though it has a Radeon GTX1070 instead, so much better graphics. I could probably get some performance improvement by sticking that in my chassis (*if* it has enough power) and seeing if I can up the memory too.

Or I could spend 900 quid on a 10th gen i7 system from Dell with the Radeon GTX 1650 super, it only comes with 8GB of memory but that's on one DIMM so almost certainly possible to add more from our stock.

Have decided against spending a small fortune on the shiny gaming PCs they also have available, as I'm just not enough into ALL THE POWER, and mostly it would just be nice to have something that actually belongs to me and can at some point do Windows 11, which neither of the existing i7s are new enough for.

The 900 quid Dell Inspiron is looking quite tempting. Anyone want to suggest other ideas?

Here's my latest note from Facebook:

My new computer
by Eleanor Catherine Blair on Thursday, 14 October 2010 at 14:04

Specs for those as might be interested: Motherboard/CPU: Intel DH55TC inc Core i5-660 3.33GHz 4MB Cache/Graphics

Case: Mini Tower ATX Case High Efficiency 80
Power supply: Zalman ATX 600W Power Supply Ultra Quiet
Hard disk: Seagate Barracuda 1TB 3.5" 7200RPM 32MB SATA
CD/DVD writer: Samsung Internal 22xDVD-RW SATA Black
Memory: 4 x 2GB 1333MHz DDR3 Non-ECC CL9 DIMM
Graphics: Sapphire ATI Radeon HD 5850 1GB GDDR5 HDMI Dual DVI DP DX11
OS: Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit OEM DVD

And I stole the wifi card out of my old machine :)

Used Windows Easy Transfer and an external USB drive to copy over about 70GB of data and setup from the old machine. Still have to install quite a few programs by hand, but did Firefox and Putty this morning along with McAfee AV and I was pleased to see all my Firefox bookmarks and so on have been preserved - and the wifi card still works. Thankfully I've developed a habit of saving the installers of programs I've downloaded and installed, so they were all in one directory ready for me to run again :)

I'm seriously looking forward to seeing how Starcraft II runs on this.

We've booked our wedding venue, and will be getting married on 18th September 2010 at Queens'. We're very excited. Have to go do the Notice of Marriage at the Register Office in the next few weeks, and next weekend me and mum are going to look at wedding dresses. I shall try not to go on about it too much :)

No new health news :) Back to Addies on Monday to get rescanned to see if the kidney stone has really gone. Still waiting for the results of the blood tests they took at the end of September to see if my hormone and calcium levels have gone back to normal. Otherwise pretty well though, scar is already visibly fading, and I'm still slowly losing weight. 5.5kg to go until I'm no longer obese, at which point I might think about trying to maintain my weight instead. We'll see.

A couple of lovely parties fairly recently for Laura and Karen's birthdays. Other than that life's been pretty quiet: lots of reading, lots of watching DVDs, not much else. It's all good though.

Oh, and I'm vaguely considering upgrading to Windows 7, since I can get it cheap as an academic, but it seems my graphics card isn't compatible with their shiny new "Aero" style desktop, I'd need new drivers for my ethernet card (not so bad), my AV won't work on it, I'd need more memory to run the 64-bit version, and it's not clear whether any of my games and so-on would run on it. Oh and it definitely won't do the virtualised WinXP compatibility stuff. So it's not looking like a great move really. I might just buy the extra memory instead :)

Actually I think I know what the problem is. I don't really want to move to Gmail at all, it's just the thing I'm using at the moment as a workaround for the main problem. And that's that I want mail to me at chiark to just work. That's my published contact address. It has been for a year or two, since I finally decided to retire the lspace one. I don't want to have to change it again.

I guess that means trying to work out how the hell SAUCE works so I can write a patch for it to hopefully make the hotmail problem become a thing which is ignored by those who (like me) have configured their address to be checked in lax mode, where it only warns about things rather than rejecting mail.

And think about the official address change for the future. Whether it's to go back to a forwarding address which I can move around with supplier, or to make eleanorb@slimy be my official one and possibly have the same problem again in the future.

Lets first make it clear that I'm not a gmail-is-evil person. It seemed quite a few people commenting weren't sure which side of the fence I was on. And it was interesting watching people trying to convince either me or each other of each side of the argument. I'm partly sorry I asked, because it has led to people getting worked up about it again which isn't what I was after.

Basically I'm aware that some of my friends are really genuinely unhappy about communicating by email when that email is going to end up in Google's database. Especially so when it's not obvious: like mailing lists or people who forward their email from another address. I was curious just how far this strong feeling goes because to be honest it's a complete bloody nuisance, and I'm sorry if it makes me selfish to feel that way.

At the moment I basically have three mailboxes, and none of them is good enough.

My work mailbox is reliable and has fairly good anti-spam measures too. It's a stable reliable mail system under the watchful eye of admins I know and trust who are paid to keep it that way, and no-one dislikes it. It's rare to unheard of for mail not to get through, and it's always been possible to fix any such problems. But it's for work, I'd never find personal stuff in amongst it, and it's not supposed to be for more than minor personal use anyway.

My main personal mailbox has an admin I know and trust, and does a pretty good job of filtering out spam. I read mail on it locally with a unix mail client I'm happy with, I can look at the logs and see what has actually happened to mail, and it has an email address which I've been using for some time and which is in everyone's addressbook. The problem is it's very strict about what mail it accepts. To a certain extent you can turn off the most aggressive bits and work around it, but basically now and then something happens and some people just can't mail me. At the moment no mail from hotmail can get through. My boyfriend and my sister can no longer send me mail. And the admin just doesn't have the time or effort to work out how to work around it, and has admitted he doesn't have the inclination either. It's just not good enough any more, which is a real shame.

And my third mailbox is on gmail. I'd rather I could access it by IMAP instead of only webmail, POP or by forwarding mail to another address, but the webmail is actually pretty good. The anti-spam is really good, considering the deprecated lnr@lspace.org address now goes there, and has been on the web and usenet for years and gets lots of junk as a result. I've not yet found anyone who can't mail me there. But some of my friends just don't want to communicate with me there. And specifically the admin of my main mailbox is one of them, and would be extremely unhappy with me forwarding that mail there.

So that's why I want to know just how many people feel strongly about gmail.

I'd really love any suggestions about what the hell I do now too. I don't want to keep changing email addresses. I don't really want to use a forwarding address that I can move around between suppliers either because that adds one extra layer where mails can get stuck and it's one where you have much less chance of being able to get at the logs and work out what's going on - especially as informal forwarding services tend to be run by friends who don't have the time to chase things down for one awkward user. And I don't know how the hell to *find* a mail provider who is not going to turn out to have one of these problems or another one altogether. I'm completely frustrated by the whole thing.

</rant>

Today it's instant messaging, specifically Google's variant. And hey I got it working at work with their client and at home with Gaim. Not tried that before. Anyone is welcome to try talk to eleanorb@gmail.com.

Yesterday: late to work, town at lunchtime, fail to buy alarm clock, top up phone, buy nice lunch from Sainsbury. Helen's birthday party after work, they're packing up as we arrive, so we help clear up and walk stuff back to Caius. Bottle of Pimms as reward. Dinner in Teri Aki with Mike v nice. Early night but neither of us sleep well.

Today: early morning: snooze is depriving Mike of even more sleep so get up and leave him in bed. Work not bad: got some scribbling done on damned PD33 and it'll look a bit more sensible with these alterations, long way from finished though. Grafton Centre at lunchtime, bought alarm clock, batteries and 2 DECT phones from Argos. Nice skirt and rings from Evans. Lunch from Boots. Chip and pin in Evans refused my card and I had to go get cash. 5 mins later it work in Boots. Go figure.

Evening: got new phones working with old base station: result. Charging batteries. Need spare 4way adaptor for bedroom now. Spent some time faffing with S2 but it's *hard* - wish S2 classic was more like S1 classic. Will try it for a few days and see how I cope. No way am I competant to write my own yet. Long call to mum on phone to talk all about Glasto. Will send her write-up once written. Must write :-)

Edit:

23:28 < Kosai> LNR: Hello.  Are we supposed to know what S1 and S2 are?
23:37 < LNR> K: two different ways of doing styles on LJ.  S2 is newer, more powerful, 
             and allows tags to be more useful.
23:37 < LNR> I was quite happy with the default S1 style though, and unfortunately there 
             isn't an exact replica of it.
23:40 < LNR> anyway, the joy of tags means you can now easily see all the stuff I've been 
             going on about relating to glasto: 
             http://www.livejournal.com/users/lnr/tag/glastonbury
23:42 < LNR> it has a huge programming language of its own, which I looked into briefly, 
             but the amount of work to create a coherent style with it is *scary*