On Sun, 18 Aug 2002 10:20:37 +1000
Daniel Stone <dstone@kde.org> wrote:
> Anyway. I was an OPN staff member for 3-4 months (I honestly can't
> remember exactly how long), and left to join a disgruntled group of
> ex-OPN staffers that would later make up OFTC.
Well, let's start here. When you first showed up, we weren't ex-OPN
staff. We were OPN staff. And "disgruntled" isn't the right word; we
were brainstorming about what to do if Rob Levin cut the cords on the
network. There weren't many options, as you'll recall.
> I was with OFTC for
> about 8 months, before its core committee asked me to leave (but more
> on that later). Indeed, I'm as much a "founding member" as David
> "cdlu" Graham, and David "ElectricElf" Harris.
In that you happened to be present, yes. Your opinions were listened to
and responded to, but they didn't reflect the final decisions made. I'm
not saying this to belittle you, but if you're going to claim the title
of "founder", then you should at least understand that it was simply a
result of your being there.
> I think that a move to OFTC would be somewhat counterproductive to
> Debian. Many people go around screaming "OPN iz da k4b4l d00d!!". And
> they're correct, it is. ElectricElf's assertions that lilo once
> threatened to shut down the network are entirely correct; I've seen
> the log (a tarball of a couple of damaging logs was distributed as a
> "new members' pack", back in the day). As someone (whom I have
> forgotten, apologies if it was you) said: "OPN: We redefine Open. Come
> check us out!".
Well, not "once threatened" .. several times :) The logs weren't
specifically designed to be damaging; they were given to people whose
opinions we respected at the time, so we didn't have to re-explain
everything. If you'll recall, we asked the opinions from a wide variety
of network people; mostly staff, ex-staff, and channel founders. We felt
that their opinions should be heard, so that anything we approached Rob
Levin with would truly be from the network's community.
The logs were pretty complete. We really thought they would be better at
bringing people up-to-speed than third- or fourth-hand accounts, or
rhetoric.
> However, that doesn't mean OFTC is any better. If you read through
> David G's email that reads more like a press release than anything,
> and cut through all the layers of double-talk and manager-speak,
> you'll see one alarming word: pseudo-democratic. He talks about the
> staff choosing new people "among themselves".
Yeah, we still haven't figured out how to allow every user on OFTC to
vote. So, for the time being, it's restricted to those who are staff.
Since your departure, there've already been many new staff additions.
Many server sponsors, a few programmers, and a number of "network
representatives"; people whose job it is to go out and get a feel for
what our users want.
I'd also like to point out that we've accepted like four or five
applications who were from people we'd previously never met - but who we
got to know over a period of time, then accepted.
<snip constitution paste, available at
http://www.oftc.net/policy/constitution/>
> So, basically, instead of having a cabal of 1, OFTC have gone the
> obviously far superior route of having a cabal of 16.
Right now there are more than 16 staff. So that's factually incorrect.
But regardless.
Now, just to quote from a dictionary here:
cabal
n 1: a clique that seeks power usually through intrigue [syn:
{faction},
{junta}, {junto}, {camarilla}]
2: a plot to carry out some harmful or illegal act (especially
a political plot) [syn: {conspiracy}]
v : engage in plotting or enter into a conspiracy, swear
together; "They conspired to overthrow the government"
[syn: {conspire}, {complot}, {conjure}, {machinate}]
We are, sort of, a clique. We actively recruit new staff, though, so I
dunno if it's entirely accurate. Our acts are not meant to be harmful,
and certainly not illegal :) There was little plotting or conspiracy. We
discuss options, and we act on them.
But you seem to be forgetting why we first got together in the first
place. It was because we felt that, ultimately, OPN was built on an
unstable base. A single person could do whatever they pleased, up to and
including shutting it down. We wanted to fix that ... but we couldn't.
There's nothing we could do about OPN, we'd already tried for (in some
cases) years, so we decided to start something which didn't have that
problem.
So, we started OFTC; staff put each other in varying positions of
responsibility primarily based on trust - but no one person is given the
ability to undo OFTC! Hence SPI holding the domain, for instance.
> (Interesting aside: I was banned from #moocows, OFTC's "official
> social
> channel" for a while, because I kept pointing out this very point
> whenever an OFTC staffer rambled about OFTC being open and
> democratic. They claimed it was going to be changed ASAP, but that
> was some months ago, and cdlu's email doesn't show any sign of
> wanting to change. Once people get power, sometimes they just don't
> want to let go).
Actually, you were banned for many other reasons as well. Primarily
lying. Nobody ever said it would be "changed ASAP" ... and even if it
had, "as soon as possible" doesn't mean "now". We've got a lot of stuff
going right now, and elections aren't for another few months anyways.
We're talking long-term, here, Daniel. We need to find a voting system
that works. One where if you aren't informed, you don't vote. Where if
you vote, you're voting for the person - not for a campaign speech.
This isn't Debian, which is one huge community. This is closer to the
United States; many smaller communities within a whole. Most folk from
the United States are disenchanted with their voting system, and I
personally think for good reasons.
Have you ever tried to come up with something like that? I'd guess not,
otherwise you'd be rather more patient. Or, you'd have told us how to do
it :)
> OFTC is also technically immature. I was involved with setting up
> various scripts et al for the servers at some point, and it's a rather
> hairy, ad-hoc setup. At the time, basically no-one knew what was going
> on with any of the servers. Recently, all of OFTC's DNS disappeared,
> because its major sponsor (terrabox.com) had severe difficulties, and
> OFTC didn't have an adequate backup DNS system.
About two or three months ago I replaced all your scripts. Long before
that, Matt London and a few others had worked on them extensively. With
the full replacement, they're in much better shape now; all the
configuration files are generated from a single .conf file (one line per
server), all pushed and reloaded automatically.
In addition, new servers are brought fully on-line within about three
minutes (depeding on compile speed) by a single command,
'./install-server <servername>'. This also work for uprading.
The DNS difficulties were primarily due to our change to having SPI hold
the domain; we were unable to access our glue records, and after about
two days we were dead in the water.
These things happen. But, as you can no doubt see, things have improved
rather dramatically since you left.
We also have an extraordinarily active coding staff, and extremely good
relationships with our upstream providers; in fact, one of our coders
was just invited to be part of the hybrid-7 ircd coding team (which is
what we'll be switching to within a week or two).
These are just the IRC parts of OFTC. The rest of it as of yet
nonexistent - there's been some delay in getting dedicated hardware to
run the other services on; the code will be in place shortly thereafter,
though, for project registration and mailing lists. Following that will
be web space.
Yes, we are technically immature then, in everything but the IRC parts
:)
> I won't run away from my point about OFTC being a "cabal", either. One
> day, as I was lazily poking about on IRC, cdlu /msg'ed me. I knew from
> the fact that he was even talking to me, instead of talking about me
> behind my back, that I was sacked, so effective is the communication
> between cdlu and staff.
Enlighten me ... the Chair of our board contacts you personally to tell
you that you were sacked ... and that's bad communication? Seems pretty
good to me.
> Core committee/NOC/whatever they're called
> this week, decided to sack me from my position as a network
> representative for "misrepresenting the network". How I did this, I'll
> never know; the only people I told about OFTC were staff/server
> sponsors I recruited early on.
That's patently untrue, we explained to you at least half a dozen times.
You never accepted the reasoning. If you still don't understand, then
nobody is going to waste their time explaining ... _again_.
> Apparently, I misrepresented it to its
> staff (!), but I couldn't cut through cdlu's "suit speak" well enough
> to tell. Interestingly, no-one bothered to even tell me core were
> considering sacking me, despite everyone having the agenda a couple of
> days before the meeting, which was about a week before I was told>
I warned you myself several times. I even did my best to explain why.
*shrug*, again. Things just didn't work out, okay? If you still don't
understand why you were sacked, then it's not through our lack of
effort.
> (Aside 2: I was elected to the position of Network Operator, narrowly
> missing out on Core Committee/whatever. I later resigned from OFTC
> during a very difficult period in my life involving three consecutive
> 145-hour weeks, being dumped by my girlfriend, and other various
> things. I later came back, and was grudgingly put into the position
> of Network Representative [i.e. #oftc monkey, and the grudging was on
> their side, not mine]).
Well, it was grudging yes. In fact, I had to fight to get you
re-instated.
> Secondly, not everyone in #debian* IRCs on "irc.debian.org", whatever
> that may point to. A lot of people explicitly connect to an OPN
> server, because they have a closer server than rotation, they want to
> use IPv6, or whatever. The conversion won't just be clean-cut (doubly
> so if you consider DNS TTL issues), it'll be rather hairy.
Yeah, correct. Actually, me and a few #debian ops discussed it, and
nobody there plans on permanently leaving the channel. We'll continue to
provide top-notch tech support to people on both networks (I haven't
been doing so much of that as I'd like, lately, but hopefully I'll be
able to pick it up again).
> Some people might think I'm bitter because of my bad experiences with
> OFTC and its "leadership". I'm not really that bitter and hung up
> about it, but I've seen it from day 1, right up until they launched
> (it was still basically private when I was sacked, hence my being
> mystified at the "reason" for my being sacked).
I'll leave that alone.
> OFTC have also painted themselves as being very kind and nice. This is
> not, however, true. For a while, #iamacow (the disgruntled group of
> OPN admins before we decided to form a new network) toyed seriously
> with the idea of making a hostile takeover of OPN; ElectricElf and
> cdlu also seriously floated the idea of putting pressure on lilo's
> creditors to force him to repay his loans, hence sinking OPN.
> Thankfully, neither of those strategies came to the fore.
Those statements are blatantly false. Dave (other Dave :) made a joke
once about what would happen if Rob Levin's creditors went after him.
That was all for that. We did discuss what options would be available if
Rob Levin cut the strings - one of those was getting ahold of all the
server sponsors and rebuilding the network. Yeah, that's a "takeover", I
guess. But we ended up dismissing it, because a) it was pretty much
impossible to find out who the current server sponsors were, and how to
contact them, and b) we didn't think rebuilding it under a different
domain name would really have been "rebuilding it" after it had been cut
to the ground.
> I just think that moving to OFTC would be a bad and very
> ill-considered move. I think Debian should stay on OPN because OFTC is
> in so grave a situation.
It's not in a grave situation. I wouldn't expect that to change your
opinion, though.
I think this thread is dead. We've all had our says, I think.
--
David B. Harris
OFTC, Ombudsman and handyman
On Sun, 18 Aug 2002 10:20:37 +1000
Daniel Stone <dstone@kde.org> wrote:
> Anyway. I was an OPN staff member for 3-4 months (I honestly can't
> remember exactly how long), and left to join a disgruntled group of
> ex-OPN staffers that would later make up OFTC.
Well, let's start here. When you first showed up, we weren't ex-OPN
staff. We were OPN staff. And "disgruntled" isn't the right word; we
were brainstorming about what to do if Rob Levin cut the cords on the
network. There weren't many options, as you'll recall.
> I was with OFTC for
> about 8 months, before its core committee asked me to leave (but more
> on that later). Indeed, I'm as much a "founding member" as David
> "cdlu" Graham, and David "ElectricElf" Harris.
In that you happened to be present, yes. Your opinions were listened to
and responded to, but they didn't reflect the final decisions made. I'm
not saying this to belittle you, but if you're going to claim the title
of "founder", then you should at least understand that it was simply a
result of your being there.
> I think that a move to OFTC would be somewhat counterproductive to
> Debian. Many people go around screaming "OPN iz da k4b4l d00d!!". And
> they're correct, it is. ElectricElf's assertions that lilo once
> threatened to shut down the network are entirely correct; I've seen
> the log (a tarball of a couple of damaging logs was distributed as a
> "new members' pack", back in the day). As someone (whom I have
> forgotten, apologies if it was you) said: "OPN: We redefine Open. Come
> check us out!".
Well, not "once threatened" .. several times :) The logs weren't
specifically designed to be damaging; they were given to people whose
opinions we respected at the time, so we didn't have to re-explain
everything. If you'll recall, we asked the opinions from a wide variety
of network people; mostly staff, ex-staff, and channel founders. We felt
that their opinions should be heard, so that anything we approached Rob
Levin with would truly be from the network's community.
The logs were pretty complete. We really thought they would be better at
bringing people up-to-speed than third- or fourth-hand accounts, or
rhetoric.
> However, that doesn't mean OFTC is any better. If you read through
> David G's email that reads more like a press release than anything,
> and cut through all the layers of double-talk and manager-speak,
> you'll see one alarming word: pseudo-democratic. He talks about the
> staff choosing new people "among themselves".
Yeah, we still haven't figured out how to allow every user on OFTC to
vote. So, for the time being, it's restricted to those who are staff.
Since your departure, there've already been many new staff additions.
Many server sponsors, a few programmers, and a number of "network
representatives"; people whose job it is to go out and get a feel for
what our users want.
I'd also like to point out that we've accepted like four or five
applications who were from people we'd previously never met - but who we
got to know over a period of time, then accepted.
<snip constitution paste, available at
http://www.oftc.net/policy/constitution/>
> So, basically, instead of having a cabal of 1, OFTC have gone the
> obviously far superior route of having a cabal of 16.
Right now there are more than 16 staff. So that's factually incorrect.
But regardless.
Now, just to quote from a dictionary here:
cabal
n 1: a clique that seeks power usually through intrigue [syn:
{faction},
{junta}, {junto}, {camarilla}]
2: a plot to carry out some harmful or illegal act (especially
a political plot) [syn: {conspiracy}]
v : engage in plotting or enter into a conspiracy, swear
together; "They conspired to overthrow the government"
[syn: {conspire}, {complot}, {conjure}, {machinate}]
We are, sort of, a clique. We actively recruit new staff, though, so I
dunno if it's entirely accurate. Our acts are not meant to be harmful,
and certainly not illegal :) There was little plotting or conspiracy. We
discuss options, and we act on them.
But you seem to be forgetting why we first got together in the first
place. It was because we felt that, ultimately, OPN was built on an
unstable base. A single person could do whatever they pleased, up to and
including shutting it down. We wanted to fix that ... but we couldn't.
There's nothing we could do about OPN, we'd already tried for (in some
cases) years, so we decided to start something which didn't have that
problem.
So, we started OFTC; staff put each other in varying positions of
responsibility primarily based on trust - but no one person is given the
ability to undo OFTC! Hence SPI holding the domain, for instance.
> (Interesting aside: I was banned from #moocows, OFTC's "official
> social
> channel" for a while, because I kept pointing out this very point
> whenever an OFTC staffer rambled about OFTC being open and
> democratic. They claimed it was going to be changed ASAP, but that
> was some months ago, and cdlu's email doesn't show any sign of
> wanting to change. Once people get power, sometimes they just don't
> want to let go).
Actually, you were banned for many other reasons as well. Primarily
lying. Nobody ever said it would be "changed ASAP" ... and even if it
had, "as soon as possible" doesn't mean "now". We've got a lot of stuff
going right now, and elections aren't for another few months anyways.
We're talking long-term, here, Daniel. We need to find a voting system
that works. One where if you aren't informed, you don't vote. Where if
you vote, you're voting for the person - not for a campaign speech.
This isn't Debian, which is one huge community. This is closer to the
United States; many smaller communities within a whole. Most folk from
the United States are disenchanted with their voting system, and I
personally think for good reasons.
Have you ever tried to come up with something like that? I'd guess not,
otherwise you'd be rather more patient. Or, you'd have told us how to do
it :)
> OFTC is also technically immature. I was involved with setting up
> various scripts et al for the servers at some point, and it's a rather
> hairy, ad-hoc setup. At the time, basically no-one knew what was going
> on with any of the servers. Recently, all of OFTC's DNS disappeared,
> because its major sponsor (terrabox.com) had severe difficulties, and
> OFTC didn't have an adequate backup DNS system.
About two or three months ago I replaced all your scripts. Long before
that, Matt London and a few others had worked on them extensively. With
the full replacement, they're in much better shape now; all the
configuration files are generated from a single .conf file (one line per
server), all pushed and reloaded automatically.
In addition, new servers are brought fully on-line within about three
minutes (depeding on compile speed) by a single command,
'./install-server <servername>'. This also work for uprading.
The DNS difficulties were primarily due to our change to having SPI hold
the domain; we were unable to access our glue records, and after about
two days we were dead in the water.
These things happen. But, as you can no doubt see, things have improved
rather dramatically since you left.
We also have an extraordinarily active coding staff, and extremely good
relationships with our upstream providers; in fact, one of our coders
was just invited to be part of the hybrid-7 ircd coding team (which is
what we'll be switching to within a week or two).
These are just the IRC parts of OFTC. The rest of it as of yet
nonexistent - there's been some delay in getting dedicated hardware to
run the other services on; the code will be in place shortly thereafter,
though, for project registration and mailing lists. Following that will
be web space.
Yes, we are technically immature then, in everything but the IRC parts
:)
> I won't run away from my point about OFTC being a "cabal", either. One
> day, as I was lazily poking about on IRC, cdlu /msg'ed me. I knew from
> the fact that he was even talking to me, instead of talking about me
> behind my back, that I was sacked, so effective is the communication
> between cdlu and staff.
Enlighten me ... the Chair of our board contacts you personally to tell
you that you were sacked ... and that's bad communication? Seems pretty
good to me.
> Core committee/NOC/whatever they're called
> this week, decided to sack me from my position as a network
> representative for "misrepresenting the network". How I did this, I'll
> never know; the only people I told about OFTC were staff/server
> sponsors I recruited early on.
That's patently untrue, we explained to you at least half a dozen times.
You never accepted the reasoning. If you still don't understand, then
nobody is going to waste their time explaining ... _again_.
> Apparently, I misrepresented it to its
> staff (!), but I couldn't cut through cdlu's "suit speak" well enough
> to tell. Interestingly, no-one bothered to even tell me core were
> considering sacking me, despite everyone having the agenda a couple of
> days before the meeting, which was about a week before I was told>
I warned you myself several times. I even did my best to explain why.
*shrug*, again. Things just didn't work out, okay? If you still don't
understand why you were sacked, then it's not through our lack of
effort.
> (Aside 2: I was elected to the position of Network Operator, narrowly
> missing out on Core Committee/whatever. I later resigned from OFTC
> during a very difficult period in my life involving three consecutive
> 145-hour weeks, being dumped by my girlfriend, and other various
> things. I later came back, and was grudgingly put into the position
> of Network Representative [i.e. #oftc monkey, and the grudging was on
> their side, not mine]).
Well, it was grudging yes. In fact, I had to fight to get you
re-instated.
> Secondly, not everyone in #debian* IRCs on "irc.debian.org", whatever
> that may point to. A lot of people explicitly connect to an OPN
> server, because they have a closer server than rotation, they want to
> use IPv6, or whatever. The conversion won't just be clean-cut (doubly
> so if you consider DNS TTL issues), it'll be rather hairy.
Yeah, correct. Actually, me and a few #debian ops discussed it, and
nobody there plans on permanently leaving the channel. We'll continue to
provide top-notch tech support to people on both networks (I haven't
been doing so much of that as I'd like, lately, but hopefully I'll be
able to pick it up again).
> Some people might think I'm bitter because of my bad experiences with
> OFTC and its "leadership". I'm not really that bitter and hung up
> about it, but I've seen it from day 1, right up until they launched
> (it was still basically private when I was sacked, hence my being
> mystified at the "reason" for my being sacked).
I'll leave that alone.
> OFTC have also painted themselves as being very kind and nice. This is
> not, however, true. For a while, #iamacow (the disgruntled group of
> OPN admins before we decided to form a new network) toyed seriously
> with the idea of making a hostile takeover of OPN; ElectricElf and
> cdlu also seriously floated the idea of putting pressure on lilo's
> creditors to force him to repay his loans, hence sinking OPN.
> Thankfully, neither of those strategies came to the fore.
Those statements are blatantly false. Dave (other Dave :) made a joke
once about what would happen if Rob Levin's creditors went after him.
That was all for that. We did discuss what options would be available if
Rob Levin cut the strings - one of those was getting ahold of all the
server sponsors and rebuilding the network. Yeah, that's a "takeover", I
guess. But we ended up dismissing it, because a) it was pretty much
impossible to find out who the current server sponsors were, and how to
contact them, and b) we didn't think rebuilding it under a different
domain name would really have been "rebuilding it" after it had been cut
to the ground.
> I just think that moving to OFTC would be a bad and very
> ill-considered move. I think Debian should stay on OPN because OFTC is
> in so grave a situation.
It's not in a grave situation. I wouldn't expect that to change your
opinion, though.
I think this thread is dead. We've all had our says, I think.
--
David B. Harris
OFTC, Ombudsman and handyman
On Sun, 18 Aug 2002 10:20:37 +1000
Daniel Stone <dstone@kde.org> wrote:
> Anyway. I was an OPN staff member for 3-4 months (I honestly can't
> remember exactly how long), and left to join a disgruntled group of
> ex-OPN staffers that would later make up OFTC.
Well, let's start here. When you first showed up, we weren't ex-OPN
staff. We were OPN staff. And "disgruntled" isn't the right word; we
were brainstorming about what to do if Rob Levin cut the cords on the
network. There weren't many options, as you'll recall.
> I was with OFTC for
> about 8 months, before its core committee asked me to leave (but more
> on that later). Indeed, I'm as much a "founding member" as David
> "cdlu" Graham, and David "ElectricElf" Harris.
In that you happened to be present, yes. Your opinions were listened to
and responded to, but they didn't reflect the final decisions made. I'm
not saying this to belittle you, but if you're going to claim the title
of "founder", then you should at least understand that it was simply a
result of your being there.
> I think that a move to OFTC would be somewhat counterproductive to
> Debian. Many people go around screaming "OPN iz da k4b4l d00d!!". And
> they're correct, it is. ElectricElf's assertions that lilo once
> threatened to shut down the network are entirely correct; I've seen
> the log (a tarball of a couple of damaging logs was distributed as a
> "new members' pack", back in the day). As someone (whom I have
> forgotten, apologies if it was you) said: "OPN: We redefine Open. Come
> check us out!".
Well, not "once threatened" .. several times :) The logs weren't
specifically designed to be damaging; they were given to people whose
opinions we respected at the time, so we didn't have to re-explain
everything. If you'll recall, we asked the opinions from a wide variety
of network people; mostly staff, ex-staff, and channel founders. We felt
that their opinions should be heard, so that anything we approached Rob
Levin with would truly be from the network's community.
The logs were pretty complete. We really thought they would be better at
bringing people up-to-speed than third- or fourth-hand accounts, or
rhetoric.
> However, that doesn't mean OFTC is any better. If you read through
> David G's email that reads more like a press release than anything,
> and cut through all the layers of double-talk and manager-speak,
> you'll see one alarming word: pseudo-democratic. He talks about the
> staff choosing new people "among themselves".
Yeah, we still haven't figured out how to allow every user on OFTC to
vote. So, for the time being, it's restricted to those who are staff.
Since your departure, there've already been many new staff additions.
Many server sponsors, a few programmers, and a number of "network
representatives"; people whose job it is to go out and get a feel for
what our users want.
I'd also like to point out that we've accepted like four or five
applications who were from people we'd previously never met - but who we
got to know over a period of time, then accepted.
<snip constitution paste, available at
http://www.oftc.net/policy/constitution/>
> So, basically, instead of having a cabal of 1, OFTC have gone the
> obviously far superior route of having a cabal of 16.
Right now there are more than 16 staff. So that's factually incorrect.
But regardless.
Now, just to quote from a dictionary here:
cabal
n 1: a clique that seeks power usually through intrigue [syn:
{faction},
{junta}, {junto}, {camarilla}]
2: a plot to carry out some harmful or illegal act (especially
a political plot) [syn: {conspiracy}]
v : engage in plotting or enter into a conspiracy, swear
together; "They conspired to overthrow the government"
[syn: {conspire}, {complot}, {conjure}, {machinate}]
We are, sort of, a clique. We actively recruit new staff, though, so I
dunno if it's entirely accurate. Our acts are not meant to be harmful,
and certainly not illegal :) There was little plotting or conspiracy. We
discuss options, and we act on them.
But you seem to be forgetting why we first got together in the first
place. It was because we felt that, ultimately, OPN was built on an
unstable base. A single person could do whatever they pleased, up to and
including shutting it down. We wanted to fix that ... but we couldn't.
There's nothing we could do about OPN, we'd already tried for (in some
cases) years, so we decided to start something which didn't have that
problem.
So, we started OFTC; staff put each other in varying positions of
responsibility primarily based on trust - but no one person is given the
ability to undo OFTC! Hence SPI holding the domain, for instance.
> (Interesting aside: I was banned from #moocows, OFTC's "official
> social
> channel" for a while, because I kept pointing out this very point
> whenever an OFTC staffer rambled about OFTC being open and
> democratic. They claimed it was going to be changed ASAP, but that
> was some months ago, and cdlu's email doesn't show any sign of
> wanting to change. Once people get power, sometimes they just don't
> want to let go).
Actually, you were banned for many other reasons as well. Primarily
lying. Nobody ever said it would be "changed ASAP" ... and even if it
had, "as soon as possible" doesn't mean "now". We've got a lot of stuff
going right now, and elections aren't for another few months anyways.
We're talking long-term, here, Daniel. We need to find a voting system
that works. One where if you aren't informed, you don't vote. Where if
you vote, you're voting for the person - not for a campaign speech.
This isn't Debian, which is one huge community. This is closer to the
United States; many smaller communities within a whole. Most folk from
the United States are disenchanted with their voting system, and I
personally think for good reasons.
Have you ever tried to come up with something like that? I'd guess not,
otherwise you'd be rather more patient. Or, you'd have told us how to do
it :)
> OFTC is also technically immature. I was involved with setting up
> various scripts et al for the servers at some point, and it's a rather
> hairy, ad-hoc setup. At the time, basically no-one knew what was going
> on with any of the servers. Recently, all of OFTC's DNS disappeared,
> because its major sponsor (terrabox.com) had severe difficulties, and
> OFTC didn't have an adequate backup DNS system.
About two or three months ago I replaced all your scripts. Long before
that, Matt London and a few others had worked on them extensively. With
the full replacement, they're in much better shape now; all the
configuration files are generated from a single .conf file (one line per
server), all pushed and reloaded automatically.
In addition, new servers are brought fully on-line within about three
minutes (depeding on compile speed) by a single command,
'./install-server <servername>'. This also work for uprading.
The DNS difficulties were primarily due to our change to having SPI hold
the domain; we were unable to access our glue records, and after about
two days we were dead in the water.
These things happen. But, as you can no doubt see, things have improved
rather dramatically since you left.
We also have an extraordinarily active coding staff, and extremely good
relationships with our upstream providers; in fact, one of our coders
was just invited to be part of the hybrid-7 ircd coding team (which is
what we'll be switching to within a week or two).
These are just the IRC parts of OFTC. The rest of it as of yet
nonexistent - there's been some delay in getting dedicated hardware to
run the other services on; the code will be in place shortly thereafter,
though, for project registration and mailing lists. Following that will
be web space.
Yes, we are technically immature then, in everything but the IRC parts
:)
> I won't run away from my point about OFTC being a "cabal", either. One
> day, as I was lazily poking about on IRC, cdlu /msg'ed me. I knew from
> the fact that he was even talking to me, instead of talking about me
> behind my back, that I was sacked, so effective is the communication
> between cdlu and staff.
Enlighten me ... the Chair of our board contacts you personally to tell
you that you were sacked ... and that's bad communication? Seems pretty
good to me.
> Core committee/NOC/whatever they're called
> this week, decided to sack me from my position as a network
> representative for "misrepresenting the network". How I did this, I'll
> never know; the only people I told about OFTC were staff/server
> sponsors I recruited early on.
That's patently untrue, we explained to you at least half a dozen times.
You never accepted the reasoning. If you still don't understand, then
nobody is going to waste their time explaining ... _again_.
> Apparently, I misrepresented it to its
> staff (!), but I couldn't cut through cdlu's "suit speak" well enough
> to tell. Interestingly, no-one bothered to even tell me core were
> considering sacking me, despite everyone having the agenda a couple of
> days before the meeting, which was about a week before I was told>
I warned you myself several times. I even did my best to explain why.
*shrug*, again. Things just didn't work out, okay? If you still don't
understand why you were sacked, then it's not through our lack of
effort.
> (Aside 2: I was elected to the position of Network Operator, narrowly
> missing out on Core Committee/whatever. I later resigned from OFTC
> during a very difficult period in my life involving three consecutive
> 145-hour weeks, being dumped by my girlfriend, and other various
> things. I later came back, and was grudgingly put into the position
> of Network Representative [i.e. #oftc monkey, and the grudging was on
> their side, not mine]).
Well, it was grudging yes. In fact, I had to fight to get you
re-instated.
> Secondly, not everyone in #debian* IRCs on "irc.debian.org", whatever
> that may point to. A lot of people explicitly connect to an OPN
> server, because they have a closer server than rotation, they want to
> use IPv6, or whatever. The conversion won't just be clean-cut (doubly
> so if you consider DNS TTL issues), it'll be rather hairy.
Yeah, correct. Actually, me and a few #debian ops discussed it, and
nobody there plans on permanently leaving the channel. We'll continue to
provide top-notch tech support to people on both networks (I haven't
been doing so much of that as I'd like, lately, but hopefully I'll be
able to pick it up again).
> Some people might think I'm bitter because of my bad experiences with
> OFTC and its "leadership". I'm not really that bitter and hung up
> about it, but I've seen it from day 1, right up until they launched
> (it was still basically private when I was sacked, hence my being
> mystified at the "reason" for my being sacked).
I'll leave that alone.
> OFTC have also painted themselves as being very kind and nice. This is
> not, however, true. For a while, #iamacow (the disgruntled group of
> OPN admins before we decided to form a new network) toyed seriously
> with the idea of making a hostile takeover of OPN; ElectricElf and
> cdlu also seriously floated the idea of putting pressure on lilo's
> creditors to force him to repay his loans, hence sinking OPN.
> Thankfully, neither of those strategies came to the fore.
Those statements are blatantly false. Dave (other Dave :) made a joke
once about what would happen if Rob Levin's creditors went after him.
That was all for that. We did discuss what options would be available if
Rob Levin cut the strings - one of those was getting ahold of all the
server sponsors and rebuilding the network. Yeah, that's a "takeover", I
guess. But we ended up dismissing it, because a) it was pretty much
impossible to find out who the current server sponsors were, and how to
contact them, and b) we didn't think rebuilding it under a different
domain name would really have been "rebuilding it" after it had been cut
to the ground.
> I just think that moving to OFTC would be a bad and very
> ill-considered move. I think Debian should stay on OPN because OFTC is
> in so grave a situation.
It's not in a grave situation. I wouldn't expect that to change your
opinion, though.
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