Congratulations, class of 2005. A lot has happened in the past four years.
I remember the first big batch of accounts I created — the class of ‘05. Looking for collisions, checking them by hand.
This class saw the expansion of the general server pool from one to eleven, plus or minus. That first server is still in service, although it’s probably headed for retirement soon. They’ve gone from a single server which crashed frequently to a pool that normally gets restarted only when we have power shutdowns.
This class saw the shift from the single general server running Linux to the elimination of Linux from the server pool (in favor of FreeBSD and Solaris).
This class has always seen servers with their names taken from various languages’ words for “peace”.
This class has always had a Windows 2000 domain, run by Samba acting as the domain controller.
This class saw the replacement of TWIG with SquirrelMail, but probably barely remembers the former. They saw the introduction of e-mail quotas, and later home directory quotas.
The disk space used by this class’s home directories has grown by an order of magnitude since the end of their first semester. The number of e-mail messages they’ve sent and received has increased by a factor of five. They have always had their mail scanned for malicious attachments.
This class has gone from 10mbps shared hubs to 100mbps switched networks in their dorm rooms. When they were able to live in campus houses, wireless was there for them.
I’m sure there’s more, but that gives a taste of what’s happened in four years.
Posted by Rowan Littell at May 8, 2005 11:30 AM