The home of RobL...

About Me

My name is Robert Lister.

I am not the radio actor Robert Lister who plays the part of Lewis in the BBC Radio 4 Soap,
The Archers. (And several rather nasty rabbits in Watership Down!) Sorry about that.
(As far as I know, we are not related, but I've never traced that side of the family.)

(Although if the BBC wanted a cameo appearance for The Archers, then I can do a passable
sheep or cow in the background. moo. What's the radio equivalent of a walk-on part? A radio "extra"?... "Sheep were played by members of the cast...")

At the moment I am living and working in London, for LINX. My job title is Senior Network Engineer.

LINX is a not-for-profit organisation that looks after a network that switches lots of London and the UK's Internet traffic (between ISPs.) LINX also represents the ISPs and Internet Industry on their behalf to various government bodies and other organisations, and advises various people on Regulatory matters concerning Internet in the UK. (For example user privacy, child protection, porn, spam, encryption, on-line fraud etc.)
You find out more on the LINX web site.

You can read my CV (resume) here, if you want to know what else I've been up to.
My main specialist areas are Voice and Data Networks, Internet, and Computer Security but I have done many other things besides.

Web page design is not my greatest skill, however. I can only stand that world of kludges and fudges "Does one thing in Explorer and another in Firefox" hell for so long!

I have got back into cycling at the end of 2005 after not cycling for a few years. I was meaning to get round to doing this at some point, but I had to give up driving for a bit for medical reasons, so it seemed like a good idea to get a bike to retain a certain amount of freedom. Cycling in London is getting gradually better and better, and I was quite pleasantly surprised, plus I am using the packed tube less.

A question I get asked often is where do I come from?

I don't have any affinity with a particular place - the family moved around a lot when I was growing up. Over the years we lived at many different addresses at places including Warrington (where I was born), Cumbria, London, Leyton, Leytonstone, Sheffield, Lyme Regis, Bridport, Reading.

This means I went to about 5 different primary schools and 2 secondary schools.

After that, I moved from Reading to Southend-on-Sea for a bit (because of work) and then moved to Woking (again because of work) and then London.

I count about 26 different addresses that I know about/can remember from 1976.

I have an older sister called Nicci, and an even older brother called Patrick. We keep in touch occasionally, but they are off doing their own things. Since this page is about me and not them, I wont say anything about them here. :)

I expect you can find out all sorts of fascinating/boring facts about me from the web. I have a profile on orkut or Facebook which has a few more details on it. (If you're really stalking me!)

I worry about the web and its ability to store everything for ever...

I have a huge sort of intellectual curiosity about all sorts of random things. I read lots of news on the web, and everything from adverts that got complained about and why, to building of a gas pipeline to Norway, what medicines do and what the side-effects are, to completely random sites you can't make much sense of.

(It doesn't all have to make sense, and I don't have to agree with all of it.)

Not so long ago I discovered a whole new way of browsing the web, in the form of a plugin for the Firefox browser called StumbleUpon - You sign up, tell it what you are interested in, and then when you are bored or curious, you click on "Stumble". Then a web site that you might be interested in appears. It's like channel hopping with a TV that has 50 million channels. And it's completely addictive. Should you choose to try it, don't say I didn't warn you. And remember to go to bed at some point! :-)

I also read Private Eye because I like its unpolished, non-glossy, ugly version of the news that the politicians and bureaucrats would really rather you not know about, and if it makes ME laugh, and THEM squirm in their seats, all the better. :-)

So... what does that say about me? Does it make me a geek? a liberal idealist? just another nutcase on the web?
Probably.

Dreams and ambitions...

I have a vague dream that one day I will be able to start my own business of some form or other. I have had one or two ideas, but I think I would need a business partner as I think it would be a bit too much for one person to be able to cope with. I'd have to hire a good accountant as well, as I'm shockingly bad at numbers, but pretty good at English.

(Having said that of course, you will probably immediately spot a couple of errors on this page.) Nobody's perfect. :-)

I would really like to volunteer for something when I have the time to do it, where I can make some real difference to somebody else. Parts of the world take telephones and the Internet for granted, while in other parts of the world, there's not even reliable electricity, let alone telephones or Internet.

I guess I would just like to be happy, travel to new places I've never been to, settle down somewhere that's not rented. (And doesn't have furniture like this)

I have no desire to have children. The human race is quite vile, big and horrible enough and the planet not coping already without me adding to that. :)

Never say never though. Stranger things have happened. Mid-life crisis yet to occur. ;-)

About lentil.org

lentil.org has existed since about 1996, and evolved from a bulletin board before that, which was also called lentil. I honestly can't remember why I decided to call it lentil. I don't even like lentils. The domain was free and it seemed like a good idea at the time. :-)

The BBS existed from about 1995 until September 2003, when I closed dial-up access because of general lack of interest (Freeserve came along and most of the users finally had computers better than 8086 machines that were capable of dialling up to the Internet.)

Lentil BBS was different to other BBSs in that it was one of the few around that was just directly dealing with the Internet and SMTP e-mail, and not via Fidonet. It was also acting for a while a gateway between a viewdata system that I was an editor on, and Internet E-mail. (Remember Viewdata?)

The BBS worked using a demon dial-up account and KA9Q NOS software for MS-DOS, and some home-brewed BBS dial-up stuff, in the form of a frighteningly large array of scripts for Fred Brucker's terminal package {COMMO}. This was an amazing bit of software and it could be made to do just about anything. I even remember writing an access control and logging system for an obscure door-entry system with it.

There were one or two Amstrad PCW users, and a Commodore C64 user hanging on until the bitter end though! - I never want to go into that "Converting e-mail MIME types into some strange format that the Commodore can open" hell again!)

The system became a FreeBSD server on the Internet, and users could dial in on the modem for a while and use UNIX shell based things like pine, mutt and IRC, the dial-up part of this ended when I moved house, and the last dial-up users seemed to have disappeared, so I didn't want to continue with the second phone line for it.

So, no more modems occasionally chirping away in the corner of the room.

+++
*^^%%$%
ATH0
NO CARRIER

After a hardware change or two, my machine ended up on Redhat Linux, and eventually Debian Linux. There are still a few users that log in occasionally via SSH, and there is also a webmail service.

The old bulletin board also had a mailing list service, so users could create and manage their own mailing lists (for example clubs and other enthusiast group lists.) (This was in the days when users were trusted and generally did not abuse such things for spamming or other devious purposes.)

The mailing lists were moved on to the new system and put into Majordomo mailing list software, which works in almost identical way to the old "listserv" software that was on the old BBS with KA9Q NOS.

I am happy to continue to offer these services to people that I know, friends etc. (Shell accounts, mail, DNS, mailing lists etc.) These days you would probably be better served by the likes of Yahoo! groups for mailing lists, for example. Although one advantage of hosting it here is that everything is very customizable and can be made to work in exactly the way you want. And you don't get advertising banners shoved at the end of your list postings, or require users to have accounts on things.

I have re-vamped this web site in 2006, so if you are desperately after something that was on the old site (one of my crusty old articles or some file that was there that I'd forgotten about, then contact me and I'll try and dig it out.) Oh, and thanks to Matt Frost for hosting the old site for many years. (Mostly because I never quite got round to setting it up for myself.) But finally I have. Look! this site now has posh style sheets and everything!!