Jim O'Donnell, Faculty Fellow in Van Pelt College House, wrote:

A message popped up on our VPCH screens tonight from Meng Wong, who had caught an alert from two kids in VPCH whose resnet connection had gone bad somehow. They couldn't use netscape and their e-mail had gone away somehow. Typical incoherent problem report. So Meng said to our "sandbox" list, anybody there who can help? Rebecca Lee, who runs our home page off eniac and, oh yes, runs a linux server out of her dorm room -- just an ordinary average VPCH student, and I'm *not* joking, damn it, the admissions office actually does its job most of the time -- comes to the rescue and so an hour later the problem is solved. What did she do? I asked her to write it up.

Becca Lee wrote:
>From daemon Wed Dec 20 03:30:42 1995
Posted-Date: Tue, 19 Dec 1995 22:30:00 -0500
Subject: Re: one paragraph?
To: jod@ccat.sas.upenn.edu (James O'Donnell)
Date: Tue, 19 Dec 1995 22:29:59 -0500 (EST)
From: "Becca Lee"

Angela and Alexis originally went to Elliot for help, and he sent them to me. They told me that someone had erased Netscape from the computer, then when they went to download it again, Host Presenter didn't work. They had, among other things, tried unsuccessfully to reinstall the resnet software. The TCP/IP stack wasn't loading, and it looked like there were some /NET/BIN files missing (Angela said she had deleted a few), so I checked the ethernet card manual/setup program and did another install myself. Basically, if they had known that they needed to use a non-smc8000 driver in the EUSI config, they would have had a successful install.
I hope that was the kind of explanation you meant. First Call did the original installation, and it sounds like they almost didn't let Angela watch. If they had given her a short explanation, or left a little note that said "used the ez2000 driver", this probably could have been avoided. Not that I don't enjoy the practice!

Jim again: working with people who are looking at how to deliver more front line computing support through the Residential Colleges, and this seems like a good example of a way the system now does in fact work on pure volunteer effort from, uh, "ordinary students". Well, ok, so I lied when I said you were ordinary. :-)

Becca:this is a great idea; let me know how it turns out

Jim again generally:

My point is that we do that with a little more than Hey Joe right now. The kind of absolute front line support you need is often this simple and at the same time this sophisticated -- the end user can't do it, but the right smart person close to the scene can do it, do it quickly, and life goes spinning cheerfully on. The challenge is how to turn that into a system, but my guess is that it's *not* rocket science.