There is more to Internet than meets the eye.
In the idyllic surroundings of REC, Kurukshetra
from where I completed my B. Tech Computer Science in 2001
Internet was inaccessible at best.
All you could do was answer your web e-mail every week
or sometimes twice a week.
I was a proponent of Intranet, lets pump in cheap PCQuest
CDROMs and other CDROMs in our homemade CD Server, Setup Apache,
Setup local FTP, Massive Integrated FileServer server using Samba+NIS+NFS+AMD.
PCQUEST distribution of Linux seemed to be a God given gift of TCP/IP knowledge.
Everything seemed to work.
Latest sources were out of question though.
Things changed for good when we finally got our massive Intranet project
for individual fileserver+webserver+email accounts on Intranet for
every student approved by Centre for Computing and Networking.
For the first time we had access to Internet on a Dual Dial up Gateway
device from D-Link which we could use during nights from our Special Operations Room.
Digging for varied information from the Internet on DEC Alpha Stations.
These beasts 15 of them had been junked by management for our use if we
could only get Linux to work on these which we finally got running after
upgrading the firmware and getting MILO to work.
From now on we had dedicated machines to experiment with and Internet
and to dig out information and sometimes even download the latest tar.gz packages.
Soon everyone was familiar with the ./configure and make install routines to
test the latest software code instead of relying on the buggy software shipped with
the default distro packages.
Soon we created our first client server apps.
Howto's were considered the best resources due to their practical nature.
