Student Internet Services (SIS) was a group of interested students and staff that provided several Internet services to the entire Case community.

Primary contributors include:

• Brian Beck
• David Carlin
• Benjamin Chodroff
• Chris Hesse
• Lann Martin
• Brandon Siegel
• Greg Szorc
• Andrew Witte

along with the input and assistance of many others.

Contents 1 Overview 2 Services 3 History 3.1 The Beginning 3.2 The Dark Ages 3.3 The Renaissance 3.3.1 Letter from Greg McGuire

[edit] Overview

The primary goal of Student Internet Services (SIS) is to use the campus network to improve communication between Case members.

[edit] Services

• Forum (http://forum.case.edu)
• Filer (http://filer.case.edu)
• Start (http://start.case.edu).

[edit] History

[edit] The Beginning

From the home.cwru.edu site:

We began in 1998, serving students' personal web pages and organizations' web sites to the Case community and beyond. In the summer of 1999 we expanded to provide more services to the entire Case community. The system at that time included:

• discussion forums - available to everyone, the system included topics ranging from prospective student questions to the latest movie on the Quad.
• calendar - comprehensive calendar of events for the University. Groups and users could post events.
• news - the CWRU Triumph is an online news magazine for the Case community. (This section was under development, and possibly never completed)
• classifieds - an extension of the forum system, this was an online trade/sell/buy list for Case members

home.cwru.edu was a dual Pentium III 500MHz machine with 512MB RAM and about 150GB of hard drive space for home directories running Linux.

Here is a quote about the site from the original creators:

Beyond the operating system, many pieces of software work together to make the whole system. But there are a few notable programs that do the bulk of the work in making the server run reliably. We run two versions of the Apache web server: A main server for static content (any .html files) and a secondary server for dynamic stuff (mod_perl scripts and CGIs). We wrote all of the mod_perl programs and custom software for the server in the Perl programming language. We also use the PostgreSQL database server for our databases. Our content search engine is ht://dig, written by Andrew Scherpbier.

All of the software running on home.cwru.edu is entirely free. It is the result of a loose collaboration of thousands of programmers, and it's all part of the free software movement (also known as the Open Source movement).

If you're a big Linux or UNIX geek or if you have a question or comment for us, head over to the Feedback Page.

The appearance of the site was eventually updated a bit, as seen in the archive.org copy.

[edit] The Dark Ages

After the original founders left, the home.cwru.edu site entered a period of low maintenance, eventually falling into disrepair. It was rumored that the original founders no longer had the time or inclination to work on it. People volunteered but nothing happened. In 2005, after the user registration had broke, a message appeared on the home page:

SIS Needs Your Help!

SIS is looking for new leadership to take over maintenance and expansion of our system. Without assistance from the CWRU community the resources that SIS provides may not be available much longer! If you have any interest in helping out, please contact us via email at webmaster@home.cwru.edu, or talk to Dave Carlin in the Nord Hall Computer Lab.

Nothing happened for many more months. Eventually a mailing list, sis@home.cwru.edu was formed. Warren Volz sent out an introductory email. Discussion rampaged for days. Bystanders were shocked at the sheer volume of activity, which was pretty impressive considering the general apathy of the students. An instance of Phorum was set up at forum.case.edu with the assistance of Simon Kuhn. Traffic decreased exponentially until December the 2nd. Months passed.

[edit] The Renaissance

February 7th, Greg Szorc, Warren Volz and Andrew Witte spark the list back into action. Demands are made for "transition plans" and the preservation of existing code. These demands are largely ignored, citing how, previously, the project nearly died as a result of such worries. Access is granted to the home.case.edu and forum.case.edu servers. Talks of action suddenly break into actual things being accomplished and everything begins to happen at once.

The forum is finalized and working. Greg gets Phorum to work with CAS and fixes a nasty bug with Safari. Brandon makes an Anonymous posting mod to mimic the most used feature of the original home.cwru.edu forums. Andrew and Greg create a "portal" page in the style of my.case.edu, only far better, to be hosted at start.case.edu.

Filer, deployed by Simon Kuhn, serves as the replacement for the web hosting component of home.cwru.edu. Filer offers various improvements, such as WebDAV access, a legitimate SSL certificate to encrypt logins and content, a Web interface to modify files and access controls over the home.cwru.edu system. It is based on vtfileman, developed at Virginia Tech and has extensive deployment notes available. The migration from home.cwru.edu to Filer occurred on March 19, 2006. A few weeks later, several other services were moved to Filer, including the Survey tool, NNTP portal and Wiki.

[edit] Letter from Greg McGuire

The following is a letter to SIS from one of its previous members, sent after Filer and the Forum were put online.

Gentlemen --

I just read over your announcement regarding the retirement of home.cwru.edu, and wanted to write. I'm pretty surprised that it lasted almost 8 years, but am very glad to see people like yourselves carrying on the spirit of the SIS project.

In 1998 Carl and I had to beg money from the Case president at the time to get the original "SIS" project started, and it was a long road of bureaucracy to get approval for the hardware (we called it "wedge", after everyone's favorite Star Wars character). At the time students were expected to host their own web sites on personal machines, and aside from email, there were few collaborative services available online at Case. We saw that as an embarrassment to the "MIT of the midwest", and tried to change it. I'm not sure how successful the project was, but it kept us busy for a summer plus a few school years, and was a hell of a lot of fun. Warren and Brian took the project over from us in 2000 with zero documentation and a handshake, and kept the whole thing running for a long time.

I'm impressed by the quality of the collaborative tools you guys have built, and wish you all good luck. SIS was probably one of the most useful and interesting experiences of college for me, and I'm glad to see it still evolving.

Regards,

Greg