It was a tough week for GCET, but I still love them.
Before moving here, I’d only heard of municipal internet. In my free and open source culture reading I’d seen it described as “the way,” and I’d read how communities (like Northampton) wanted it but hadn’t managed to pull it off yet. So I’m really pleased to have that option now, just as I am to shop at the local food co-op and see movies at the Greenfield Garden Cinemas . Speaking of movies, I hope other residents will see this as a George Bailey moment where we rally behind GCET and do not withdraw our accounts.
My sense of it, from their quite transparent communications, is that this was not incompetence but rather them being between a rock and a hard place. The seemingly limited set of options has a certain familiarity to me as computer programmer who used to program under MS Windows and now gets to program over GNU/Linux. Such crises require a range of options, first to get things up and running again, then to implement the proper and permanent fix. GCET at least could avail themselves of the option of prioritizing critical needs with what was left of the limping router. But beyond that it looked to me like their path was largely defined by the vendor. For instance, they didn’t have the option to have the new router come shipped with software updates already applied.
As a technical worker, now that I have source code access all the way down, I have a wider suite of options when things go wrong. Additionally, the understanding I can gain can go deeper, subject only to my own limitations. It’s like night and day from when everything was defined and controlled by Microsoft. Wouldn’t it be more the Greenfield way if the router could somehow be composed of cheaper commodity hardware (so they could have two with fail-over) running free and open source software, with GCET staff learning its ins and outs and bending it to their exact needs?
But perhaps there is already a wished for skunk project among them. These days, computer people do not tend to congregate without there being some members infected by free and open source software enthusiasm. Maybe some staff there point to the German OpenBSD developer Henning Brauer, who created his own routing software named OpenBGPD for his own ISP. They might point to the glowing testimonials from ISPs and Internet Exchange Point operators on that project’s testimonial page. Maybe they point to OpenBSD’s CARP, an open standard alternative to the costly vendor proprietary standard for automatic fail-over between routers. Or they could point to OpenBSD’s firewall software, pf, with its load balancing and traffic shaping features. Have the global free software programmers arrayed all the needed pieces, I wonder, to yield that perfect meld of their work with local work that would give GCET a more affordable and reliable solution while offering their staff less frustration and more personal fulfillment?
Mike Small lives in Greenfield.