In the mid-90s I had several encounters with the FBI while running an ISP in Oklahoma City. They asked me to write code to pull out specific entries in our massive amount of dialup logs and when I told them they had to pay me, they refused based on budget constraints.

I can well imagine jedberg has had to deal with them just being a systems admin for such large deployments as reddit and paypal.

Just curious - which one?

I started out teaching "Welcome to the Internet" classes once a week, and then was the first tech support guy at ioNet / Internet Oklahoma.

Worked my way up to assistant sysadmin before I moved to Austin to be a sysadmin for Texas.net. April 95 to September 96.

And my first day on the job was April 19, 1995.

Talk about a hell of a first day... We pretty much switched into full "get news about the bombing online in some form or fashion, however possible" mode for about 48 hours. This was before CNN had a huge online presence, so we had stuff going like a RealVideo stream of a webcam pointed at local TV news, a couple of people went down to take pictures, etc, etc...

The Internet Shop: https://web.archive.org/web/19990423075248/http://www.thesho...

Started it in mid to late '96.

Those early ISP days both sucked and were fun in their own special way. Trumpet Winsock for Win3.x users! Getting OS/2 online and older Macs! Trash-talking in the local Usenet groups!

Where you kept a copy of the Solaris Operating system for all of your coworkers to peruse. We use to track you back then as you were one of the larger pirates of our software. :P

What? That's a bit libelous, I'd appreciate an explanation.

If it happened at ioNET after September '96, I wasn't involved.

All of Texas.Net's systems ran legit copies of Solaris; a large amount of them were brand new and came with OS entitlements. I remember going to the post office one day to pick up our brand new copies of Solaris 2.6.

Are you talking about me running SUNHELP.ORG, which started in '97? That was (and is) a third-party user community and resources, along with mailing lists. It did not provide Solaris downloads.

I happen to have a (personal) archive of Solaris releases, but it's not public access.

The closest thing to "piracy" I could ever be accused of was reposting design documents for an unreleased system that I found on Sun's own publicly-accessible website in 2000.

That whole scenario is explained in detail here: http://www.sunhelp.org/letters/

If anyone at Sun held me in bad regard, it was never mentioned to me by anyone, and I had a lot of contacts at the company.

- I was one of 250 people to be picked as an external pre-release beta tester / community liason for the release of OpenSolaris.

- In 2005, Sun donated a fully loaded T1000 server (8 cores, 8G RAM) for use by me in running the site. I'd think that if I was a huge software pirate the company wouldn't encourage it by giving me expensive hardware for free.

Pictures: https://www.flickr.com/photos/mrbill/sets/72057594124431136/

Thanks.

Texas.net is what we're talking about. And by software, I mean Solaris source code.

This is the first time I've ever been accused of being a pirate! There's a first time for everything I guess.

To be perfectly honest: I vaguely recall source of an older Solaris version being passed around the user/hobbyist community, but I wasn't the originator. I'm sure I downloaded it at one point, but don't remember ever doing anything with it OR putting it up for coworkers to browse.

Like the (released and quickly discontinued) version of Solaris 2.6 for PPC that ran on certain RS/6000s, it was "out there" and easily obtainable by anyone in the hobbyist community if you asked enough people.

No idea what was done at TN after I left; I had issues with how management treated the technical staff and resigned in late '98.

It's been 18 years, my memory is a bit fuzzy.

Anyone who has ever met you has heard you mention this. :P

Nice karma you have there.

MrBill is famous for more than just solaris.

Dunno if I want to be called "famous". Tried my best to do what i could for the Sun / hardware rescue communities, but I'm still a relative nobody in the grand scheme of things.

What's really weird is being called a "peer" by people who I looked up to when learning and just getting started. Massive case of impostor syndrome...

There are a ton of people out there, who are better talented and have contributed more to UNIX / Linux, open source, and the hobbyist/maker community in general that deserve recognition and fame.

I'm just a fat old fart sysadmin who's had a good run and was lucky to be able to enjoy most of it. The best I can hope for is to be thought well of by others.

Ebay and PayPal. The secret service doesn't like it when foreigners steal from Americans (their main job is to protect the currency, protecting the President is an add on).

I would expect Paypal/ebay are involved in umpteen investigations at any given time, from money laundering to fraud to drug dealing and so on.

Reddit is also a cesspool of activity from all sorts of people, so there might be some monitoring involved there.

Probably via criminals that were posting on reddit