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Comment by nluken | Hacker News Reader

Similar story: In college much more recently (2019), I had a linux server running at my boyfriend's apartment since he was off campus and we were blocked from doing anything like that on the school's network. Sometimes, I would say hi to him or wish him goodnight by playing a little tune on the PC speaker hooked up to that computer. He'd always text me back with a smiley face or something like that. Feels like that kind of interaction is really rare on the web these days, but we had fun with it for a little while.

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Wow cool but that’s bizarro world to me. In my days college was where everything awesome was happening because it had fast and basically unrestricted internet. A lot of the Napster and other P2P stuff that followed was being seeded from someone’s dorm. The best game servers, etc. On IRC in the early 00s, I did a lot of trading of video (live music footage) and one kid in a dorm somewhere could host an enormous amount of content by most home internet standards. Once I got off dialup download speeds, I could easily download more than I could afford to store. The cheapest thing for me to do was buy a massive stack of CDRs and start burning. If I remember correctly, the largest HDD at the time was about 40GB.

Our school's IT department used to go around with wireless scanners to make sure nobody was running networks without the school's permission. I knew people who got busted for stuff like that, but my roommates and I eventually hacked a way around this by naming our network "Dave's iPhone Hotspot" and never had any issues. At that point, the webserver moved from my boyfriend's place back to my own until we moved off campus the following year.

That's exactly why schools started filtering data.

The school I was in had to do a complete wipe of 5 TB of random shares (back then that was a lot of data)

and they expelled a bunch of students for pirating and hosting extreme content

After that the network filtering was standard policy.

In my college days the filtering started because half of the IT students were playing World of Warcraft from the school network. Which obviously triggered a cat and mouse game of introducing new blocking measures and trying to get around it. When we were not trying to get WoW to work we were busy showing off our Compiz rotating desktop cubes. Those where the days.

In those days, the profs were the ones playing the video games.

They were "testing the newly pulled fibre optics" by trying to saturate it with Wow, Diablo, Counterstrike, Doom, Quake, etc.

They would book the computer labs of 60+ computers and tell everyone to boot up a copy of (ahem pirated) Half Life and get everyone one on games and then run a traceroute/ping/packet trace, etc to measure what was happening.

Those were the days...

Games generally use very little bandwidth so that was not a clever test imo... :)

Games tend to need low latency though, so it's not a dumb test.

DR-DOS / Novell DOS actually shipped with a basic multiplayer space sim (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NetWars) in the box, with the official explanation for its existence being "to test network topology and configuration".

Similar memories and tales here :) I had a 100Mbit unfiltered connection in my dorm room in 2001 (!). Pretty wild for the time. I guess it took until about 2018 before I finally surpassed that speed at home. Nuts really.

Lots of pirating but also, thanks to it having a public static IP, a fabulous way for me to learn all about running and configuring my own web server, irc server, mail server, dns server, ftpd etc. etc. It was my gateway into experimenting with linux, discovering luminaries like DJB & RS, learning about RFCs, appreciating the open source/free software movement and probably a major reason why I ended up on a sysadmin/ops/infra trajectory after uni that still serves me well to this day.

Yeah I started and sold a web hosting company around that time based on the skills I picked up with all those things. I didn’t host it from my dorm but just commodity servers with a shared hosting app installed. If I remember correctly I had about 5000 users and sold because I didn’t want to hire help when it started to encroach a bit too far into my leisure time.

A few of my customers were running legit and decent sized businesses and they had no idea it was being hosted by a college kid who actually wasn’t even monitoring things all that much. When I encountered a problem I couldn’t figure out from searching the internet, I’d usually just write some script and cron job to restart the service periodically. It also served as my everything (nameservers, support, e-mail, etc) so I remember one time there was a fire in my data center and it went down for about 36 hours. I had no way to communicate with my customers and the site was unavailable. Luckily I think only about 10 customers even noticed.

I remember seeing lots of jokes on the Internet about guys going to college "for the bandwidth"

In early 2000s we used to send each other messages using Query Strings or X-Headers....

or MSN Messenger or ICQ

Then again that kind interaction was rare in its hey day.

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