A 40 something senior network engineer, formerly the UKNOF Programme Committee PC, now involved with IXScotland, netmeetup.scot & a huge believer in building inclusive communities within net-ops.
Jack of many trades, master of little – a bit damn good at compartmentalising problems and going above, around and under teams to get something done with some help from Google.
This site is more a record of some of the fun stuff I get to put together in the playground.
The Origins of Nifry
Nifry came about by essentially a typo.
In the mid-90’s we were at the University of Sunderland, learning ‘C’ with lecturers transitioning from COBOL alongside us.
Downtime we frequented MUDS like Sushi and The Dyslexicon, ran by Passport, Canada – a telnet chat system based on NUTS.
To learn C more effectively, we ended up downloading the NUTS code, hacking it to pieces and running it on the Uni’s mail server (isis) – much to the Uni sys-admins horror.
That said, when we pointed out a weakly encrypted copy of /etc/password existed in /tmp, they quietly allowed us access to another server (horus) and allowed us to experiment there till that server was eventually decommissioned.
When we brought up our version of nameless NUTS2.3, Lukin came over from passport, liked some bits we had changed and said ‘this is nifry’, later correcting to ‘nifty’.
But by then it was a little too late and the name stuck 🙂