If you felt a strange disturbance in the Force it was just me finally turning off the email/DNS services that I've been running for decades. This is somewhat bittersweet for me, so hang on for some stream of consciousness storytelling about 30+ years of email management.

In 1986 I was attending a small liberal arts college that had a CS program with a single faculty position that was cross-listed with the math department. So the CS students got to run the small network of Sun3 machines.

When I became a student Sys Admin, my task was to get Sendmail working with out 1200 baud UUCP email feed (yep, no broadband Internet to our school in those days). Honestly, I couldn't do it and had to punt to one of the more senior admins.

But all that experience with UUCP and Sendmail really helped out at my first job doing computer support at Bell Labs Holmdel. We were replacing Sys V VAX systems with these new Sun Sparc machines.

Oh and we were replacing the old 9600 baud Datakit serial infrastructure with 10baseT (and in some cases 10base2) TCP/IP. The old-timers wanted to to UUCP over TCP/IP and I said "Hell no! Welcome to SMTP!" This was 1989.

And that's how you start down the slippery slope of being the local email admin. You were stupid enough to volunteer and to care that things worked. Bell Labs was also the job that got me into Information Security. Fun times!

I jobbed around quite a bit, and eventually ended up working at NASA Ames in the early 1990s. As part of the Network Operations group, I managed the DNS and also managed to melt down the entire network when my automation scripts produced broken zone files. That was a Bad Day.

Back in that era the root name servers were actual physical machines. Our NASA project ran the root name server at the "Federal Internet eXchange West Coast" (FIX West) inside a secure building at Ames. In those days you could run a root name server on a Sun Sparcstation.

OMG Hal, I took over management of this system after you were gone, in 2007!!