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Grex > Oldcoop > #294: Why Grex lost its mail partition | |
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| Author |
Message |
| 25 new of 176 responses total. |
bhoward
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response 100 of 176:
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Dec 3 07:56 UTC 2005 |
Have you tried in the last few days. I reinstalled spamassassin and spamd
a day or so ago.
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keesan
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response 101 of 176:
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Dec 3 14:41 UTC 2005 |
I had been using a copy in someone else's account, because he said he updated
it more often. I will switch to the grex version, thanks. I had gone back
to my old filter, which is about 10 pages long and lets some things through.
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tsty
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response 102 of 176:
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Dec 4 07:35 UTC 2005 |
re #79 ... excuse me! it wouild seem, that *i* undrsatnd "the nature of the
upgrade," one hulluva lot better than either you or other staff or other borg!
shit!
"there was no path back" --- that is *precisely* the sysadmin situation
for which i have been * t r a i n e d * !!
whtether it is an air defense missle ssytem or a fscking os upgrade - the
cover-yur-ass attributes are identical.
somewhare along the line i copied this:
Worse, a great deal of the delay was because we as staff really failed to work
together effectively. We ran into deep differences in basic philosophy about
how grex should be run that cost us extra days. Because we didn't all agree
on what we were going to be doing before we started, our preparation for the
rebuild was not complete. We ended up redoing significant portions of the
job more than once.
i don t know, at this moment, where it came from, but i did *not*write it.
some rooty-tooty (not sTeve) did .. and borg & staff are imtimately
responsible for the fsxk-up.
mostyl borg!
'in-place' .... WTF!
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cross
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response 103 of 176:
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Dec 4 15:29 UTC 2005 |
I believe that Jan said that.
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naftee
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response 104 of 176:
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Dec 4 16:33 UTC 2005 |
StEve
steVE
sTeve
STeVE
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cross
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response 105 of 176:
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Dec 4 17:35 UTC 2005 |
Quick! What's 5 choose 2? Answer: (5!)/((5-2)!(2)!) = (5!)/((3!)(2!)) =
(5*4)/2 = 5*2 = 10. Think of the permutations of the capitalization of
letters in Steve's name this way: Given a string of 5 characters, taken
from the Alphabet {0, 1}, how many ways may I write such a string with
exactly two 1's? Clearly there are 5 choose 2 such ways, and as we have
seen, that means 10 possibilities. Now, I take a 1 to mean a capital
letter and a 0 to be a lowercase letter and enumerate:
STeve = 11000
StEve = 10100
SteVe = 10010
StevE = 10001
sTEve = 01100
sTeVe = 01010
sTevE = 01001
stEVe = 00110
stEvE = 00101
steVE = 00011
These make up the set of permutations of Steve's name with his preferred
number of capitals (though his preferred choice is one specific element).
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glenda
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response 106 of 176:
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Dec 4 21:22 UTC 2005 |
His preferred choice came about by accident. When he first started using
conferencing systems, he didn't release the shift key fast enough. He went
to the National Computer Conference and while in a conversation someone asked
him if he was the S T eve. He laughed and replied that he was and they had
a great time talking. He decided that it was a good thing to keep and has
used it, purposely, even since.
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scholar
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response 107 of 176:
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Dec 4 21:57 UTC 2005 |
I purposely pervert his choice by being a wiseguy and taking the other oddity
of his name ('), which is applied to his last name, and applying it to his
first name.
I didn't do this because I had a great time talking.
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naftee
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response 108 of 176:
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Dec 4 22:49 UTC 2005 |
re 105 I prefer using my calculator to solve those types of problems, but
really; i was just goofing around !@
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sholmes
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response 109 of 176:
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Dec 5 08:19 UTC 2005 |
that's also the number of handshakes in a party with 5 ppl, if everyone shakes
handswith everyone else.
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cross
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response 110 of 176:
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Dec 5 17:57 UTC 2005 |
That's true. Think of each bit as being two people shaking hands.
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janc
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response 111 of 176:
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Dec 5 21:50 UTC 2005 |
I agree 100% that we shouldn't have rebuilt the system by overwriting
the old disk partitions. One of the recommendations I made in my
post-mortem item immediately after the new system came up was to never
do that again. Alas, I did not make that recommendation before the
rebuild - though that was certainly part of the upgrade method defined
in Grexdoc - that's why the ALT partitions exist. But I'm really not an
experienced system adminstrator anyway. I'm not sure that the need to
avoid a destructive rebuilt was as clear in my head before this fiasco
as it was afterwards. Live and learn. In any case, I wasn't around to
give any recommendations.
Before the upgrade, John was really the only active staff member. He
was doing the reboots. He was debugging grexdoc on another machine. He
was reluctant to undertake the rebuild by himself though. My impression
was that there was something of a panic at the board meeting. Grex was
crashing regularly, and their wasn't much of staff plan to do anything
about it. STeve, a board member and a staff member, responded to the
emergency by committing his next weekend to a Grex upgrade.
I had been neglecting Grex so completely that I didn't even know about
it until I talked to John and Mary on the Grex walk the morning before
the upgrade. There was never really any staff meeting to discuss the
upgrade. If there had been, we might have given it enough thought to
realize that there were alternatives to doing a destructive rebuild. In
fact, I think we have a spare (rebuilt) 18G drive laying around. I
think with that we could have managed the rebuild without buying a new
disk. But buying a disk would have made sense too. We rushed into the
upgrade. It felt like Grex was in crisis. If we had held a staff
meeting first, I'm not sure anyone except John would have shown up.
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tod
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response 112 of 176:
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Dec 5 22:45 UTC 2005 |
Tod said the board should be trying harder to get more staff. Well, I'm not
on the board right now, but I think I speak for them when I say, they're
open to suggestions.
Could have fooled me. I see nothing but excuses being made and "we do/did
ENOUGH already"
Excuse me for asking for something more than an MOTD, decent backup, and
effort to find staff with more availability. How dare me for making
suggestions. Shame shame.
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naftee
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response 113 of 176:
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Dec 5 23:07 UTC 2005 |
shame on you.
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tod
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response 114 of 176:
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Dec 5 23:50 UTC 2005 |
THanks Michael Moore!
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naftee
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response 115 of 176:
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Dec 6 00:23 UTC 2005 |
thanks tod :L)(
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ric
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response 116 of 176:
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Dec 6 15:03 UTC 2005 |
re 100 - I'm not suggesting that staff doesn't do the best they possibly can
to avoid email loss and other such things. I'm suggesting that we as users
should not expect or demand anything more. The fact is, if this were a
commercial organization, there would be daily tape backups, stored off site,
our hardware would probably be more "enterprise" level and all sorts of such
things - policies in place to prevent such occurences, and paid employees
whose PRIMARY responsibility is maintenance of the server(s).
Grex is nobody's primary responsibility. I'm pretty sure it's nobody's
secondary responsibility - at the very best, I would expect Grex to come
somewhere after job and family.
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tod
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response 117 of 176:
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Dec 6 16:45 UTC 2005 |
Grex is nobody's primary responsibility.
Grex is the fiduciary responsibility of all elected volunteer board members.
If someone is not willing to be responsible for Grex's operation, they
shouldn't be on the Cyberspace board of directors. Its that simple.
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mcnally
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response 118 of 176:
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Dec 6 17:29 UTC 2005 |
re #117: Are you seriously arguing that the board has an *obligation*
to ensure that Grex is run at the same level of service and reliability
as a commercial service?
If not, what *does* your statement imply?
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tod
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response 119 of 176:
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Dec 6 18:52 UTC 2005 |
re #118
Obligation: "ensure that Grex is run"-ning for such purposes as "public
education and scientific endeavor through interaction with computers, and
humans via computers, using computer conferencing.." because "The Corporation
assumes all liability to any person other than the Corporation or its members
for all acts or omissions of a volunteer director incurred in good faith
performance of their duty as an officer"
I'm not saying people are going to get sued or that businesses will crumble
as a result of downtiem. What I am saying is that "good faith effort" should
be a minimum goal of any director of Cyberspace Communications when assuring
Grex stays online and maintained.
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other
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response 120 of 176:
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Dec 6 21:37 UTC 2005 |
And who says that it isn't?
You're talking about an obligation which is so vaguely defined that in
legal terms, someone would have to be actively subverting the system or
sabotaging it to be provably NOT complying with your demand.
It is a volunteer organization, with a volunteer staff, and a volunteer
board. As such, the reality is that it will get whatever benefits of
goodwill it gets in terms of money and time, and that's it. You can't
make it something it isn't, and something that it isn't is a service
with the possibility of being held to the standard of performance of a
commercial service provider with contractual obligations.
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tod
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response 121 of 176:
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Dec 7 01:18 UTC 2005 |
re #120
I'm not making demands. I'm simply reflecting on the current status of
Cyberspace. A status that lacks some leadership in the management of
Grex when it craps out. Is that so much to ask?
These cries of pay-for-service levels are spin.
We've had numerous outages and waited days on end before someone could
get to Grex. And then when they did, it was ad-hoc, and files were lost.
I'm simply looking for a lil assurance from the Board that somebody is in
charge and that everyone knows who that is.
Who is accountable next time Grex goes offline for a week? Answer that.
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cross
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response 122 of 176:
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Dec 7 02:26 UTC 2005 |
No one. It's all volunteer. But then, you're saying that's a problem (and
so it is).
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slynne
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response 123 of 176:
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Dec 7 04:27 UTC 2005 |
It is a problem but it isnt one I see an easy answer to. I am not going
to demand that a volunteer give more time than they offer to give. I try
to remember to let them know I appreciate their efforts but I am
admitedly not the best at that. I do really appreciate all the volunteer
time that goes into running this place though. And frankly, if someone
with more energy than me were to step up to do a better job, I would
gladly step out of their way to let them do it.
So who is accountable the next time Grex goes offline for a week? I dont
know. Whichever staff person steps up. We are pretty lucky that we have
anyone at all really. Maybe next time no one will do anything and then
the board will have to scramble to figure something out although I hope
it never comes to that because I honestly dont have any idea what I
would do in such a sitution.
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tod
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response 124 of 176:
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Dec 7 04:29 UTC 2005 |
I refuse to believe that Cyberspace's elected directors can't do a better job
with staffing Grex.
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