Computer Services: Competition? No Thanks.

This story keeps getting more interesting. About a week ago, the College was updating their servers, and in the process of doing that NetBlitz experienced an outage. NetBlitz was created by David Marmaros ‘01, who now works for Google while working on a masters in computer science at Stanford. Previously, whenever their had been outages the College had let Marmaros log into the server and get NetBlitz up and running again.

Here’s the catch. This time they didn’t. Apparently, Marmaros’ ability to log in had been suspended by Computer Services.

Marmaros said that he asked Computer Services to restore his access, but that the request was denied. Instead, he has installed NetBlitz on additional servers.

“I wanted to set up something for people to use in the interim,” he said.

One copy of NetBlitz, Marmaros said, is currently active on a Stanford server that he has access to as a part-time student in the university’s computer science master’s degree program. Another copy was installed by a system administrator on a server owned by the Dartmouth Institute for Security Technology Studies, according to Marmaros. The version of NetBlitz running on ISTS servers has since been removed.

David Bucciero, director of Technical Services, is stonewalling attempts to get NetBlitz running on a Dartmouth server again. On top of that, John Gaythorpe, director of Systems Services, has said, “We’d rather see it go away because there’s already Webmail and WebBlitz.”

So what’s going on? Blitz them and ask.

N.B. Here is the address of the Stanford server: http://www.stanford.edu/~marmaros/cgi-bin/Bl.cgi