Grex Staff Notes: Introduction

This series of web pages is produced by the Grex Staff to describe various administrative and technical matters related to Grex. These pages are meant as a way for staff members to share knowledge and information about how Grex works both with other staff members and the general public.

Some of these pages are meant for the general reader, while others delve very deeply into technical details of how things work on Grex.

Grex's staff believes that good system security should not depend on obscurity. Therefore, there is quite a lot of detailed information included here about things like how passwords are stored on Grex.

We encourage anyone who has comments or suggestions about the contents of these pages to send mail to staff@cyberspace.org.

Grex's Staffers

Grex has always been staffed entirely by volunteers. Staff members don't have fixed areas of responsibility, but tend to accumlate specific areas of primary activity. Currently, the staff consists of the following people:

Name	Login	Activities
Steve Andre	steve	General system configuration. Sun hardware. Security monitoring. Reaping expired accounts. Speaker-to-ameritech.
Greg Cronau	gregc	System configuration. Sun hardware. Guru-in-the-wings.
Steve Gibbard	scg	Network configuration. Terminal servers.
Dan Gryniewicz	dang	Webmaster. Postmaster. Account deletions.
Scott Helmke	scott	Modems. Conference administration.
Jeff Kaplan	kaplan
Valerie Mates	valerie	Author of mathom, change, and various scripts. Author and maintainer of birthday wisher. Maintainer of idle daemon, joe, figlet, nethack, pine, pico. Daily monitoring of system performance and staff mail. Postmaster. Password changes. Keeper of Pumpkin keys. Conference administration.
Michael O'Leary	nephi	Centrex configuration.
John Remmers	remmers	Author and maintainer of vote program. Termcap expert. Conference administration.
Marcus Watts	mdw	Author of picospan, newuser, and queuing telnet daemon. Maintainer of grex versions of sendmail, mail, login, passwd, finger, and fingerd. E-mail guru. Network configuration. Sun hardware.
Steve Weiss	srw	Co-author of backtalk. Webmaster. Staff mail. Password changes. Kernel blocks.
Jan Wolter	janc	Author of party, write, gate, web-newuser, watch, orphaned process killer. Co-author of backtalk. Staff notes.

Past staff members include Tom Dohne, Meg Geddes, Rob Henderson, Dave Lovelace, Carl Miller, Marc Unangst, and TS Taylor. Several people assist in the running of Grex but do not have superuser access. Ryan Antkowiak is a party administrator. Charles (arthurp) and Dru Void are conference administrators. Morena Vasquez is a webmaster. Mary Remmers is the Grex archivist. A number of other users, including Jared Mauch, Rob Argy, Mike McNally, Dave Martinelli, and Sri (nt) have been very helpful in assisting the Grex staff in various ways, as have all the users who volunteer as helpers, assisting other users with problems.

Staff Notes

A Tour of the Pumpkin: Photos of Grex's computer room, with descriptions of our equipment.
Security Goals: A general description of Grex's security.
Privacy on Grex: A discussion of the kinds of circumstance under which Grex's staff might look at private user files or E-mail.
The Kernel Blocks: A detailed description of how Grex's Kernel has been modified to enforce our restrictions on outgoing telnet and ftp connections.
The Password Database: A detailed description of how passwords are stored and encrypted on Grex.

Document History:

Aug 21, 1997: Jan Wolter (janc) - Initial Revision.