response 1 of 53:

Jul 17 15:22 UTC 1997

yeah, change policy and offer IRC access to everyone, instead of
making it sa member perk.  If these folks could IRC already, they wouldn t
be FTP'ing files and slowing grex down.  It is time to re-thnk grex's
IRC policy.

response 3 of 53:

Jul 17 16:32 UTC 1997

Eggdrop is an IRC bot.  IRC is just like the party program here on Grex, but
it spans all systems on the internet, so it's huge.  "Bot" are robots --
little programs that join people and respond to things people type.  Eggdrop
is a bot that can do things like send you files if you ask it too.  It gets
used to distribute warez a lot.  It has a reputation of being a *huge* drain
on system resources, and basically nobody on the entire internet wants it
running on their system, and thousands of people are looking for places to
run it.

response 5 of 53:

Jul 17 18:45 UTC 1997

Also, eggdrop is not used to access IRC.  You don't need eggdrop at all
to chat on IRC. So, access to IRC isn't really the issue here.  Even if we were
to allow IRC access to everyone (which we can't because of accountability) I
would definately oppose allowing eggdrop.

response 7 of 53:

Jul 17 21:53 UTC 1997

   I think the only solution to this, and the more general issue of
people bringing other types of files here (for storage or exchange)
is going to be modifying ftpd such that small transfers of say, 50K
or so come into Grex at the "normal" speed, but that the transfer
rate degrades rapidly beyond that for larger files.

   We see people using Grex to exchange image files (gifs, jpegs, etc)
all the time; eggdrop is just another one of this type of thing.
However, eggdrop is especially aggravating, in that it uses a
software package called TCL (pronounced tickle) so people bring
that over too, and then they have to compile both.  All told an
eggdropping uses up about 4M of disk, and slows the system down
for a time.

   I really don't want to see FTP going away for people, becuase then,
we'd have a REAL mess on our hands with mail.  People would
accumulate mail here, but not have any way of getting it out,
short of mailing it back out, or cating the mail file and doing
a screen capture at the remote end.  Ugh.

response 9 of 53:

Jul 18 15:40 UTC 1997

disk quotas!

response 11 of 53:

Jul 20 20:54 UTC 1997

We are now seriously drifted from the orginal topic.
however, nobody has any ideas on the original topic.

response 13 of 53:

Jul 21 16:20 UTC 1997

If the in-real-time disk quota enforcer doesn't work so well, would slow down
system performance, etc., then consider something like a nightly chron job
to "reap" files in excess of the user quota (e.g. 1M).  Send the user an 
e-mail detailing what was done and why, and say "your reaped files are in 
/tmp until the next reboot" or whatever.  If you're not going to approach 
this with some automated method, you're gonna have to rely on the vigilence
of the human staff.  

response 15 of 53:

Jul 21 19:02 UTC 1997

Re #7: The problem that people are bringing over 'tcl' and
compiling it could be addressed by installing it ourselves
and making it available to all users.  Tcl is a widely used
general-purpose programming language. Is there some reason we
shouldn't make it available to users, just like we make C and
perl available? Doing so would would seem to be consistent
with our general policy of providing public access to standard
Unix software tools.

So let's see, the problem with eggdrop is the resources
consumed by people ftp'ing it here and building it, not with
people running it (which they can't do because the kernel
blocks prevent it from running). I must say I'm impressed
by the single-minded determination with which people keep
trying anyway.

Short of instituting draconian restrictions which I would NOT
like to see (like disallowing incoming ftp, or access to the
C compiler), the only things I can think of are along the lines
of heading people off at the pass through better education.
Like maybe:

(1) Putting a wrapper around cc and gcc that watches for filenames
    that are part of the eggdrop source (and unlikely to be found
    in non-eggdrop source packages) and prints a polite yet
    reasonably detailed informational message when people try to
    compile something with one of those names -- explaining why
    we don't want to run it, and why the kernel blocks will
    prevent it from running anyway. That would address the
    building resource drain, though not the ftp resource drain.
    It would also be quite a kludge, of course.

(2) Publicizing our kernel blocks more widely, e.g. on a web page,
    with full explanations of why they mean that eggdrop won't
    work here. This idea has come up in staff discussions. We could
    also do it in the newuser text, although I'm told that newuser is
    already pretty bloated with information material. Maybe if enough
    people see the message, it will reduce (though probably not
    eliminate) the amount of ftp'ing of eggdrop.

response 17 of 53:

Jul 22 00:51 UTC 1997

It is.  The reason they can't run it goes beyond the kernel blocks, as I
understand it - even a member can't run it, because our orphan-killer will
kill any bot after its owner logs out.  I have had several people write to
me lately, saying they want to become members so they can run a bot.  I tell
them they're out of luck.

response 21 of 53:

Jul 23 20:25 UTC 1997

Do not install tcl on here, it's primarily used for bots and the such.

Lots of folks install eggdrop on nether.net even though I say in newuser don't
in the /etc/motd that no bots are allowed, and their accounts will be nuked,
it won't stop them.

response 23 of 53:

Jul 23 20:49 UTC 1997

Tcl is a general-purpose programming language that is used for
a great many things besides "bots and such".