Slashdot Mirror
Sysadmins Restore Iraqi ISP
Hen3ry writes "Brian McWilliams of Wired News reports on the dedicated staff of Iraq's State Company for Internet Services, or SCIS, and how they built, maintained, and rebuilt Internet access before, during, and after the war. Ba'ath Party loyalists still run SCIS but their dedicated employees continue to press on. Fascinating stuff about how one sysadmin managed to keep the country online up until a US missle struck the roof of the Ministry of Information building."
Why'd they do that? Saddam will only wind up beheading the sysadmins who did it when he gets back from Wal-Mart, picking up this week's armament.
Mom says my
pity about law and order.
Great pirorities, guys.
I'm not Seth.
"the ISP has not been restored, and its owners are committing suicide on the walls of Baghdad. I will take you there to show you. In ONE HOUR."
I thought it was standard sysadmin practice to stop DOS missle attacks.
Be you Admins? nay, we are but lusers!
More recent intelligence suggests that the explosion was actually the resulted of an SCIS server reacting violently to being /.'d. US military experts are now considering trying to harness the power of slashdot to use as a weapon against terrorists.
ALL YOUR ISP are Belong to US. good stuff, hopefully they can stop the continued attacks on US forces and restore order in general, but it's nice that Iraqis will soon be able to surf for pr0n again.
actually I am happy to see you, however that is in fact a banana in my pocket.
Fascinating stuff about how one sysadmin managed to keep the country online up until a US missle struck the roof of the Ministry of Information building.
The RIAA must have found out they were pirating music...
(come on, it was either that or a Bill Gates finding out about a Linux server)
I read the article and it said they did go around the UN embargo to get the equipment, but my question is who sold them the gear?
I'm not trying to troll or anything, I'm really interested in this paradox.
There were embargos put on Iraq following the war from the UN.
Everyone violates the embargos.
US goes around the UN.
Everyone bitches about the US.
No one bitches about the people who broke the UN embargo and thumbed thier noses at International Law.
As soon as they're available, I suspect that a lot of people will want to register numeric .iq domains. 180.IQ will probably be the first to go.
I think this might be what Sen Hatch has in mind for copyright violators.
.02
cLive ;-)
-- Trinity in high heels carrying a whip: The donimatrix - there is no spoonerism
> I don't know about anyone else, but I want to find out how I can get a ".iq" domain...
I heard that "low.iq" can be had at a bargain price.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
It would appear that the sysadmins literally poured blood, sweat, and tears into keeping the ISP up and running under Hussein. Not to mention going way above the "call of duty" to make certain that something of the equipment survived missle attacks, fires, and looting.
The real point here is that contact with the outside world is an extremely valuable commodity to these people, and something that we in the Western nations take horribly for granted. Think of Iraqi expatriates in other parts of the globe who don't know if relatives are alive or dead. Or, in the interest of balancing out FoxNews' reporting, a hypothetical Iraqi blogger can now give the outside world a better picture of what's going on in the country. I think that this is a positive step towards rebuilding. Yes, it's an odd, sideways step, given the other needs. But when you consider just how much emotional investment the sysadmins had in this project, their priorities are entirely understandable.
Doing my level best to piss off the religious right wing...
Well they aren't that effective against a DDOS by missiles. Prehaps they need to upgrade :)
Rus
Cheap UK and US VPS
Not so much electronic connectivity, but good old human communication. Iraq needs a free press among other things as well.
Well, at least you have the courage to admit it.
So, how many sysadmins do you know that would be good riot cops?
Sending US soldiers to put up fiber would be a little weird if crime is rampant; however, if a bunch of specialists want to do their part, let 'em - that's what your parent is saying.
Sigmentation fault - core dumped
had put in long hours cobbling together bootlegged software and
Someone needs to tell these guys about FreeBSD and Linux.
bash$
So they would be free to download pr0n. God bless America
I heard that "low.iq" can be had at a bargain price.
I don't understand.
I find it very telling that an unprovoked attack on the USA that killed around 2,795 is a "tragedy" and a "slaughter" and justifies destroying all our rights and 2 foriegn countries. And yet, another unprovoked attack that kills at least 3,240 civilians is just a "few sandy buttholes."
All this is really good, but what i really want to know is where can i register my pr0n.raises.your.iq ?
And PAYING for everything should be the responsibility of the occupying powers.
Unfortunately US Troops are shooting civilians so its still unclear who is upholding the Law.
I know I'm joing to take a Karma hit but honestly and moronic one-liner like that gets classified as Insightful days after US Troops fire into an unarmed crowd. If that happened in Zimbabwe everyone would condemn the goverment troops, but in Iraq its "reasonable force".
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
And their ability to play hardball office politics and survive could be an asset to the IT department.
So never mind that Saddam had WMDs, as the Kurdish and Iranian survivors of his WMD attacks will attest. Never mind that he never let your UN pals do their weapon inspections unobstructed. Sometime between the Iran-Iraq war and now those WMDs magically disappeared and we should all take Saddams word for it. After all, Iraq is only as big as California, where could he hide the things?
And the ~300,000 Iraqis Saddam's dictatorship murdered? No mass destruction there, no sir. No need to worry about such a dictatorship developing nukes.
I guess you Former Soviet Useful Idiots really were desperate for new employment.
Their foresight may have saved Iraq's only ISP. After Baghdad fell to coalition troops on April 9, the Information Ministry was vandalized and set ablaze. Internet cafes were ransacked. Looters ransacked warehouses containing millions of dollars of SCIS computer gear, according to Harif.
Hmmm, one guy takes gear to their house and it's "foresight" while others doing the same are called looters. I suppose it helps that Harif brought enough of it back for things to work. I imagine much of the stolen warehoused computers will be working too now. All around a good deal. People making use of equipment that would have sat in a warehouse forever should not be looked at in the same light as people breaking into hospitals and stealing airconditioning equipment. The fall of a totalitarian government is not easy.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.