OT: The "missing" server (was Re: [Gllug] USB Securikey)

[John Edwards]

On Tue, Jul 22, 2003 at 12:01:12PM +0100, David Damerell wrote:
> Hey, Reply-To: stopped biting me. That's not a complaint. But
> apologies to Mr. Edwards who will needlessly get 2 copies of this.

That's not a problem, but this message when trying to send email to you is:
	450 Site not yet trusted, try later


> On Monday, 21 Jul 2003, John Edwards wrote:
>>On Mon, Jul 21, 2003 at 10:46:03PM +0100, David Damerell wrote:
>>>On , 21 Jul 2003, Mike Brodbelt wrote:
>>>>I read a story a while ago about some US university with a Novell server
>>>>which they had "lost".
>>>University of North Carolina. My partner's father works there - which
>>>makes it a friend of a friend of a friend story for you guys, but...
>>This has been retold many times (usually in the first week of April), 
>>sometimes it's Novell and other time's SparcStation running Solaris.
> 
> Hands up all the Solaris admins who believe that one. Oh, dear.

> I think it's generally agreed to be Novell.
> 
> <http://www.techweb.com/wire/story/TWB20010409S0012> thinks it's UNC.
> 
> Likewise <http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/5/18265.html>.

Neither have interviews, quotes, press releases or sources from either 
Novell or UNC. In fact The Register just rewrite the Techweb "report" 
and refers to that it as it's source.


> Aha. <http://www.novell.com/products/smallbiz/family_spread.pdf> is a
> document from Novell that explicitly claims UNC.

It's a marketing flyer, and does not add anything to the Techweb article.
In fact it reproduces it almost verbatim, and the date stamp is several 
months afterwards (yes I know that's not reliable).


> Frankly your dismissal of this as an April 1 story is absurd; I am not
> given to repeating unsubstantiated urban myths.

The Director of UNC's Academic Computing Systems seems to think it is an 
urban legend:
  http://www.sun.com/smi/Press/sunflash/2001-05/sunflash.20010521.3.html

Now that could be just a cover up to avoid embarrassment, or it may 
be that the Novell server belonged to a different department and was 
known to the main UNC networking team.

Either way I'm not dismissing it (it's a fun story), but I am very 
sceptical. Especially considering the lack of evidence that it is 
true and some that it is false.


-- 
#--------------------------------------------------------#
|       John Edwards    Email: John.Edwards at uk.com       |
|                                                        |
|  "SEP is intended as a management routing protocol,    |
|   and should not be used in a production enviroment."  |
#--------------------------------------------------------#

-- 
Gllug mailing list  -  Gllug at linux.co.uk
http://list.ftech.net/mailman/listinfo/gllug