The Internet is an amazing place, and occasionally you can find things on the web that have somehow lingered online for decades longer than you might expect.
Today I ll take you on a tour of some parts of the early Internet.
The Internet, of course, is a network of networks and part of its early (and continuing) promise was to provide a common protocol that all sorts of networks can use to interoperate with each other. In the early days,
UUCP was one of the main ways universities linked with each other, and eventually UUCP and the Internet sort of merged (but that s a long story).
Let s start with some
Usenet maps, which were an early way to document the UUCP modem links between universities. Start with
this PDF. The first page is a Usenet map (which at the time mostly flowed over UUCP) from April of 1981. Notice that ucbvax, a VAX system at Berkeley, was central to the map.
ucbvax continued to be a central node for UUCP for more than a decade; on page 5 of that PDF, you ll see that it asks for a Path from a major node (eg, ucbvax, devcax, harpo, duke) . Pre-Internet email addresses used a path; eg, mark@ucbvax was duke!decvax!ucbvax!mark to someone. You had to specify the route from your system to the recipient on your email To line. If you gave out your email address on a business card, you would start it from a major node like ucbvax, and the assumption was that everyone would know how to get from their system to the major node.
On August 19, 1994, ucbvax was finally turned off. TCP/IP had driven UUCP into more obscurity; by then, it was mostly used by people without a dedicated Internet connection to get on the Internet, rather than an entire communication network of its own. A few days later, Cliff Frost
posted a memoir of ucbvax; an obscurbe bit of Internet lore that is fun to read.
UUCP was ad-hoc, and by 1984 there was an
effort to make a machine-parsable map to help automate routing on UUCP. This was called the pathalias project, and there was a
paper about it. The Linux network administration guide even includes a
section on pathalias.
Because UUCP mainly flowed over phone lines, long distance fees made it quite expensive. In 1985, the
Stargate Project was formed, with the idea of distributing Usenet by satellite. The satellite link was short-lived, but the effort eventually morphed into
UUNET. It was initially a non-profit, but eventually became a commercial backbone provider, and later ISP. Over a long series of acquisitions, UUNET is now part of Verizon. An
article in ;login: is another description of this history.
IAPS has an
Internet in 1990 article, which includes both pathalias data and an interesting
map of domain names to UUCP paths.
As I was pondering what interesting things a person could do with
NNCPNET Internet email, I stumbled across a page on
getting FTP files via e-mail. Yes, that used to be a thing! I remember
ftpmail@decwrl.dec.com.
It turns out that page is from a copy of
EFF s (Extended) Guide to the Internet from 1994. Wow, what a treasure! It has entries such as
A Slice of Life in my Virtual Community,
libraries with telnet access,
Gopher,
A Statement of Principle by Bruce Sterling, and I could go on. You can also get it as a
PDF from Internet Archive.
UUCP is still included with modern Linux and BSD distributions. It was part of
how I experienced the PC and Internet revolution in rural America. It lacks modern security, but
NNCP is to UUCP what ssh is to telnet.
Another short status update of what happened on my side last month.
Notable might be the Cell Broadcast support for Qualcomm SoCs, the
rest is smaller fixes and QoL improvements.
phosh
Freexian is pleased to announce a partnership with 
For a long time I ve been wanting to try GitOps tools, but I haven t had the chance to try them for real on the projects
I was working on.
As now I have some spare time I ve decided I m going to play a little with 
Hi, I m Melissa, a GPU kernel driver developer at Igalia and today I ll be
giving a very inclusive talk to not let your motivation go by saving time with
kworkflow.
So, you re a kernel developer, or you want to be a kernel developer, or you
don t want to be a kernel developer. But you re all united by a single need:
you need to validate a custom kernel with just one change, and you need to
verify that it fixes or improves something in the kernel.
And that s a given change for a given distribution, or for a given device, or
for a given subsystem
Look to this diagram and try to figure out the number of subsystems and related
work trees you can handle in the kernel.
So, whether you are a kernel developer or not, at some point you may come
across this type of situation:
There is a userspace developer who wants to report a kernel issue and says:
What s the problem of this situation? The problem is that you keep creating new
scripts!
Every time you change distribution, change architecture, change hardware,
change project - even in the same company - the development setup may change
when you switch to a different project, you create another script for your new
kernel development workflow!
You know, you have a lot of babies, you have a collection of my precious
scripts , like Sm agol (Lord of the Rings) with the precious ring.
Instead of creating and accumulating scripts, save yourself time with
kworkflow. Here is a typical script that many of you may have. This is a
Raspberry Pi 4 script and contains everything you need to memorize to compile
and deploy a kernel on your Raspberry Pi 4.
With kworkflow, you only need to memorize two commands, and those commands are
not specific to Raspberry Pi. They are the same commands to different
architecture, kernel configuration, target device.
I don t know if you will get this analogy, but kworkflow is for me a megazord
of scripts. You are combining all of your scripts to create a very powerful
tool.
This is the list of commands you can run with kworkflow.
The first subset is to configure your tool for various situations you may face
in your daily tasks.
So how can you save time building and deploying a custom kernel?
First, you need a .config file.
Then you want to build the kernel:
Finally, to deploy the kernel in a target machine.
You can also save time on debugging kernels locally or remotely.
You can save time on managing multiple kernel images in the same work tree.
Finally, you can save time when submitting kernel patches. In kworkflow, you
can find everything you need to wrap your changes in patch format and submit
them to the right list of recipients, those who can review, comment on, and
accept your changes.
This is a demo that the lead developer of the kw patch-hub feature sent me.
With this feature, you will be able to check out a series on a specific mailing
list, bookmark those patches in the kernel for validation, and when you are
satisfied with the proposed changes, you can automatically submit a reviewed-by
for that whole series to the mailing list.
Last year, I decided to start participating in the Debian LTS and ELTS projects. It was a great opportunity to engage in
something new within the Debian community. I had been following these projects for many years, observing their evolution
and how they gained traction both within the ecosystem and across the industry.
I was curious to explore how contributors were working internally especially how they managed security patching and
remediation for older software. I ve always felt this was a particularly challenging area, and I was fortunate to
experience it firsthand.
As of April 2025, the 
After careful consideration, I ve decided to embark on a new chapter in my professional journey. I ve left my position at AWS to dedicate at least the next six months to developing open source software and strengthening digital ecosystems. My focus will be on contributing to Linux distributions (primarily Debian) and other critical infrastructure components that our modern society depends on, but which may not receive adequate attention or resources.
How long has it been since you last saw a conversation over different blogs
syndicated at the same planet? Well, it s one of the good memories of the
early 2010s. And there is an opportunity to re-engage!
I came across 
Most of my Debian contributions this month were