Williams Students Online

Williams Students Online, or WSO, is a student computer group that offers several computer- and internet-related services to members of the College community. Current projects include a multi-featured web site, this Wiki, listservers, Linux parties, and web hosting for students, student organizations, and alumni.

WSO

Type of group	Service
Selective	No.
Membership	12
Meeting time	9:00pm Tuesdays
Meeting place	TCL or TPL 2nd floor
Office	Transient
Established	1995
Website	http://wso.williams.edu/

Many people often confuse WSO with the college-run Office for Information Technology.

Services

For more information on WSO services, projects, policies, and staff, please see About WSO.

Web Hosting

WSO lets students and alumni put their web pages on our servers. To apply for an account, email Richard Oot (root@wso). Please supply a williams.edu email address to send the password to. Organizations can also get web pages through WSO.

Our web hosting supports PHP and server-side includes by default. If you want more advanced features, such as CGI, MySQL, or PostgreSQL, contact a Richard Oot (root@wso).

http://wso.williams.edu

This is our fancy web site, featuring blogs, a calendar, a campus facebook, photos, floor plans, choose your own adventure, and surveys. We wrote it all ourself with the help of Ruby on Rails and, formerly, Apache PageKit. If you have ideas for it, please come to a meeting (above). Or scribble something on Stuff WSO Definitely Should Do.

Linux Parties

See Migrate to Linux

Listservers

A listserver is an email address that distributes messages to a bunch of people. WSO hosts listservers for student groups broadly defined, and other organizations around campus/Williamstown. You can apply for a listserver at http://wso.williams.edu/lists/create, and we'll try to get to the request in a few days. A complete list of WSO listservers is available from http://wso.williams.edu/mailman/listinfo.

WSO uses Mailman to power its listservers. Steven Rubin (srubin@wso) is our list admin. Contact him with list administration questions.

Secure Instant Messaging

WSO users can communicate with each other using the WSO Secure iChat Service.

wso/wiki

You're reading it now. We host Willipedia.

Servers

The current roster:

Emma is Nancy's replacement.

Ursula, lean and sleek, is an Xserve with dual G5 processors and 2 gigs of RAM. Don't bump into her, though, unless you're a deaf person in need of a metronome. Ursula runs shell logins, email forwarding, and lists.

Nancy houses dual P4-Xeons at 2.7GHz a pop, and due to a hyperthreading kernel she's faking another two. With over fifty Gigs of RAID-5 storage and 2GB of ram, she can handle pretty much anything we ask her to. Also, there's a cool quadruply redundant power supply that lets her operate even if two (three?) power supplies break down, and a neat blue LCD on the front that turns orange when something's wrong. Nancy is currently doing all of our web and database serving. Here's a picture of Nancy:

Spiker has dual Pentium III 500MHz processors under the hood, 1024 MB of ram, and over 100 GB of RAID storage, plus another hundred in a shameful IDE drive running at 33 MHz that's hanging out of her front side. See:

Spiker is currently taking up space in the cage, having been Officially Unplugged after a long stint in Non-booting Purgatory. It's quieter in the cage now.

Olga and the Firewall are nearly identical Dell PowerEdge 300's running at 800 MHz. Olga has much more hard disk space (600 GB), though, because she's (was) our backup server. The Firewall is the only machine in the Cage without a scary aunt name. As you might guess, she acts as a firewall, connecting incoming traffic to the proper machine in the cluser, and protecting the machines from requests on ports that we don't run official services on. Here the are pictured together. The Firewall is on the left, identifiable by the red FreeBSD demon sticker:

Read about the retired aunts.

Choice excerpts from WSO files

See code comments.

History

WSO was founded in January of 1995 by DeWitt Clinton and John Kim, with help from Jon Zeppieri, Jason Gladstone, Jessica Mintz, and others. Originally, the first server was an Apple Powermac 7100 running WebStar, on loan from the College Council. The original mandate from the CC was to create an online version of the daily advisor. John and DeWitt successfully ignored this mandate for serveral years.

1996 saw the beginning of the Internet boom, and the arrival of many new recruits to WSO. With the strong Unix background of Jon Zeppieri, Iein Valdez, Geoff Hutchison, and DeWitt Clinton and a blazingly-fast Pentium I 100MHz machine, WSO was migrated to a FreeBSD-based server. Meanwhile, WSO attracted the artistic talents of Kate Tan, Eric Smith, and Kenric Taylor. Others lending their computer expertise and love for technology included Matt Garland, Ken Fowler, and Christine Soarse. Finally, Jonah Wittkamper served as general all-around cheerleader for WSO.

The fall of 1996 saw the arrival of a new crop of freshmen, including Chuck Hagenbuch (would would go on to design Horde/IMP, the Williams College Webmail system), Dan Mason (HTML coder extrordinaire), Chris Richards (security and FSH enthusiast), David Ramos (designer and typographer), and Jason Healy (future all-campus listserver nazi). By winter, the website had been overhauled (sporting a scan of Chuck's right hand), and new services were cropping up like crazy: the online Facebook, all-campus and dorm listservers, online Daily Advisor and calendar announcements, and a small software archive.

WSO continued to grow at a rapid pace, as new services were added and members signed on for web and e-mail accounts. Free University HTML courses were taught to students and members of the community by David Ramos, Ben Isecke, and Jacob Eisler, and several clubs and organizations at the college created web pages about themselves.

As the use of technology grew, WSO acquired more and better equipment. Better funding was provided by the IT department of the college, and WSO soon got a new server. A new naming scheme was conceived for the servers: Scary Aunt Names. The new machine was christented "Ethel", and replaced the aging Pentium I ("Mabel"). In the years that followed, several new servers came on board: Gertrude, Spiker, Olga, Nancy (and others?).

In the fall of 2002, abuse of the WSO Forums continued. A thread entitled "Gays Suck" prompted the Queer Student Union to print out the thread and post it in Baxter Hall, inviting responses with paper and pen. Abuse escalated at the end of October, at which time there were several pornographic images, violent threats, and racist, sexist, and homophobic posts to be found in the forums. On October 30, the forums were removed.

But they were to return. Shimon Rura led a site re-write in the spring and summer of 2003. One goal of the re-write was to authenticate users, so that their postings and doings could be identified. The site was written with Apache PageKit. Shimon wrote the authentication system and the WSO Ride Board, Josh Ain wrote a new menu feed, Tom White re-wrote the WSO Forums, Evan Miller re-wrote some screen scrapers, and Topher Cyll re-wrote the WSO Facebook and wrote WSO Blogs from a hole in Scotland. The site went live in July of 2003 and has grown in features and popularity since then.

In January 2004, Tom White and Steve Winslow noticed the timestamp on a system file on WSO servers with a shared user base reflected a date and time that was inconsistent with that of the same file on independent WSO servers. Their further investigation showed that WSO had been compromised. They notified the rest of WSO and temporarily took systems off-line. Over the next seventy-two hours, Tom led the response team which rebuilt all WSO machines and services and tightened security. By this time, WSO was supporting thousands of users and over a hundred student organizations. Not a single piece of email was lost. Chris Douglas reported the incident to the WSO community of users on behalf of WSO; Tom White and Jacob Eisler reported the incident to College Council.

Toph, Tom, Brent, Jacob, and Steve graduated in the spring of 2004, and around that time Ben Cohen and Dan Weintraub were given root. During the summer, Evan and Dan converted WSO Plans from its standalone PHP/MySQL incarnation over to PageKit, so that students could access it from off-campus without setting up a proxy server. Also, they converted the Postgres database and the website over to UTF-8/Unicode. With the help of Masha Lifshin and Sam Dreeben, the duo made much-envied but never-imitated Quicktime VRs for their Facebook pictures.

In the fall of 2004, Kai Steverson rewrote Factrak on hire by College Council, to enhance the abilities of the admin, make comments expire, and allow raters to "agree" with comments left about professors. Kai also wrote My Survey that semester. Evan re-wrote the WSO Facebook (again) to include faculty and more information fields. The new Factrak's interface pulled entries and faces from the new Facebook.

In February 2005, WSO was hacked by a group of Brazilians calling themselves Simiens Crew 2005.

Migration to Ursula: October 2005

In 2005, WSO bought Ursula to replace Spiker. Migrating a 3000-user FreeBSD system to Mac OS X Server is not, in the end, recommended. The play-by-play was delivered on the old WSO announcements system. Copies of the posts are stored here.

Initial Oct. 2 announcement
Progress report, later that day. So close!
Regress report, posted at 3 AM after a few... mishaps.
Post-mortem and admission of failure the next morning.

Things actually went smoothly the next time (a week later), with Jason Healy '01 scoring an assist by providing some migration scripts.

Spring 2006

Ben Wood, James Ritterpusch, and Jessica Chung were made root over WSO dinner at Coyote Flaco in the spring of 2006.

2011 - 2012

In the spring of 2011, former root president Steven Rubin '11 passed his title on to Chuan Ji '12 and also made Ian Nesbitt and Ben Seiler (both '13s) roots. In the fall, the root group had a successful bout of recruiting at the Purple Key Fair, convincing a number of promising '15s to sign up for the WSO listserve. Chuan showed off his new Facebook interface which is coded in Python and includes instant suggestions and a better search function.

Former WSOers

Josh Ain
Kashif Akthar
Francisco Alarcon
Ben Birney
Beth Budwig
Jason Busch
Jing Cao
DeWitt Clinton
Michael Chanin
Jessica Chung
Ben Cohen
Christopher Cyll
Chris Douglas
Jacob Eisler
Matt Garland
Mike Gnozzio
Geoff Guile
Chuck Hagenbuch
Jason Healy
Cheng Hu
Geoff Hutchison
Brian Hwang
Ben Isecke
Ayesha Johnson
Jason Law
Joe Masters
Evan Miller
Steve Moore
David Ramos
Jeremy Redburn
Chris Richards
James Ritterpusch
Todd Rogers
Shimon Rura
Jess Scott
Josh Solomon
Fritz Stabenau
Kai Steverson
Robin Stewart
Mandy Stockley
Bartley Tablante
Kate Tan
Kenric Taylor
Ken-ichi Ueda
Iein Valdez
Dan Weintraub
Tom White
Wayne Wight
Steve Winslow
Jonah Wittkamper
Steve Wollkind
Brent Yorgey
Ben Wood
Jon Zeppieri