🚀 go-pugleaf

davis@usenet.INS.CWRU.Edu (Palmer Davis) writes:

   A.G.Poole@newcastle.ac.uk (Ford (Alex Poole)) writes:
   >
   >I've also heard that American Uni's actually support MUDs.. or is this
   >folklore? 

   Depends on what you mean by "support."  We have one MUD up and going (well,
   it died a while ago of a database crash followed by a write over the only
   backup, but I hear rumors that it's back) due to its administrator's ability
   to scrounge a spare machine (half a spare machine, actually) to run it on.

This is exactly true.  I'm the person that runs TinyCWRU, and I've talked
with other MUD admins about this exact issue.  Most MUDs go through something
like this:

1)  JoeBob starts playing a MUD somewhere, and thinks "This is great,
    but I could do a much better one!"  
2)  JoeBob FTPs the source to one of the multitude of MUDs.
3) (optional) JoeBob sets it up on one of the workstations he's got access 
   to, but neglects to tell the sysadmin about it.  :-(
4) (optional) JoeBob's sysadmin finds out
5)  JoeBob's sysadmin is conned (or bribed) into allowing JoeBobMUD to
   stay up.
6)  JoeBob posts an announcement to rec.games.mud about JoeBobMUD, and
   millions of people come to play.  A huge database results, which 
   brings the VAXstation 2000 that JoeBobMUD was running on to its
   knees
7)  JoeBob's sysadmin tells JoeBob to take the MUD down.
8)  At this point, JoeBob can go ask another sysadmin with a bigger machine
   to let him run JoeBobMUD there (repeating the cycle), or can let it die.

This is pretty much what has happened with TinyCWRU over the last
couple of years.  I think that most sysadmins are willing to allow a
MUD on their machines, but not if the MUD will affect the real work
going on on the machine.  Clearly, if there are unused machines about,
no real work will be affected.  Unused machines are generally
incapable of supporting a MUD, tho.  The fundamental problem with MUDs
is that most are badly coded, and eat more system resources than is
necessary.  One of the reasons TinyCWRU has stayed up is that I've
continually rewritten it to make it less hungry.

--
Glenn Crocker                   |  Your milage may vary.
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