For anyone interested in the multiuser aspect, the main "sdf" NetBSD host has 73 logins at the moment, "faeroes" has 46, and there are a handful of other systems on the network for interactive use like norge, the Linux MetaArray, etc. depending on membership type. The BSD hosts share storage via NFS.
One time my website was running rather slowly - I checked it out with top and found another user had runaway python processes using tens of gigs of RAM and pegging the CPUs. The solution was straightforward: I emailed them on the local mailer. A couple of hours later I received an apologetic reply and everything was working nicely again. :)
Amazing how political these things don’t have to be.
When I was at university someone logged into the Sun workstation I was on to run a remote X session. Whatever they were doing kept puking all over the framebuffer console in the middle of my Cadence session. I send an actual polite email asking them to stop as it was making it difficult for me to draw gates. Got no reply.
Two days later I got hauled in front of my tutor, accused of hacking and being rude to the guy. I suspect I was just logged into the X session on the box and the person I complained about was doing what was supposed to have gone on. I defended this religiously but had to deal with a written warning from the university anyway and the tutor actively tried to compromise my course afterwards.
That’s the day I learned about politics. And unix. Digging into the forensics and causality of this led to a long career as a sysadmin and programmer and not designing chips. And not a decade of poor pay or unemployment like my course peers. So no regrets.
One time my website was running rather slowly - I checked it out with top and found another user had runaway python processes using tens of gigs of RAM and pegging the CPUs. The solution was straightforward: I emailed them on the local mailer. A couple of hours later I received an apologetic reply and everything was working nicely again. :)