O ksein' angellein
I never slept at or near MIT before, and as I tried to fall asleep I was surrounded by thoughts of Jonas Klein's death. Jonas, I thought, studied here, walked around here, used this very subway station, and is dead. I got up, got on-line, and tried to ping spiffy.mit.edu, something I hadn't attempted for several years. This time, though, I discovered something distressing. I had believed -- I thought I had even been told by somebody -- that MIT permanently retired hostnames and IP addresses of students who died while attending school here, and preserved them as a memorial forever. I thought that somewhere in a DNS zone file there was a comment to admonish future generations of sysadmins:
; do not delete -- retired as a memorial
It's not true. spiffy's DNS record is gone now. What I'd thought was an intentional act of piety was merely a mistake. Nobody had gotten around to noticing that the person associated with spiffy was no longer associated with the school. But after nine years, someone seems finally to have noticed, and wiped out the DNS record entirely. Possibly spiffy's IP address has even been reassigned to some other freshman.
What memorial is left? Someone from SIPB told me five years ago that somewhere in a steam tunnel some explorer who knew Jonas has signed in, left a mark on a wall in Jonas's name. There are hundreds or thousands of tunnels beneath the MIT campus; I couldn't be more than a mile or two (and a few hundred vertical feet) away from it as I write this. But I don't think I could ever find it by myself. If you know where it is, please tell me. I want to see it.
