About Maintain

In 2001, an Oregon State University ad on Highway 34 in Corvallis, Oregon, USA, invited drivers to visit www.orst.edu. The sign was spotted by the university's president, who happened to think the school was not, in fact, the w.orst.

The resulting overhaul of the school's Web address (it now resides at www.oregonstate.edu), computer network, and E-mail system led to the development of Maintain, a web tool for DHCP and DNS management. Before, administrators across campus used a couple of shell and Perl scripts to edit DNS config files.

Initially, Maintain was created using PHP, Perl and MySQL. Since version 3, for consistency reasons, the Perl parts were entirely rewritten in PHP.