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Grex > Coop11 > #47: Banning a site from Grex; a discussion of when to do this | |
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| Author |
Message |
| 25 new of 264 responses total. |
steve
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response 175 of 264:
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Dec 16 06:18 UTC 1998 |
We're already in contact with the proper people at IIT; they're
working on it now.
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keesan
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response 176 of 264:
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Dec 28 03:50 UTC 1998 |
This was really informative, imagine over a quarter of the students at one
Indian university (all the freshmen?) using grex for email! I am starting
to get some idea of why chatting with India can be so slow, and why some
people tell me they can only communicate by email instead.
What percentage of Indian's go to college? It is probably much higher here,
where 5000 is a small college. But in India 500,000 is, I was told, a 'small
village'. I have found all Indians requesting to chat with me to be highly
intelligent and almost all of them exceptionally polite, too bad there have
been a few exceptions.
Is the IIT reconnected with grex? I have not been getting any chat
requests for a few weeks, but maybe that is due to the long vacation.
(By few exceptions I did not mean people requesting chats, but the fork
bombers).
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steve
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response 177 of 264:
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Dec 28 04:16 UTC 1998 |
The ban is still in effect; when the holidays are over I hope to
be able to report better news on this front.
Links to India cost money and the size of those links are small.
Often an institution will have a 64K link (Grex has a 128K link) for
the entire enterprise, which means that the pipe is always completely
saturated.
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mary
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response 178 of 264:
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Dec 28 11:09 UTC 1998 |
So, after we lifted the ban we had further instances of the
same vandalism from that same site? I was under the impression
the site was going to remain open unless problems continued.
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steve
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response 179 of 264:
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Dec 28 12:49 UTC 1998 |
The ban this time isn't from us, but the administrators at IIT.
During the brief time that access was allowed again, there wern't
any problems, but then poof, no more iit accounts--by order of
higher authorities there.
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mary
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response 180 of 264:
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Dec 28 21:47 UTC 1998 |
Yuck.
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keesan
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response 181 of 264:
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Dec 28 21:51 UTC 1998 |
Seems like the proper fix for much of this is to allow freshmen email accounts
at their own university. Free ones. What would this actually cost the
university there?
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steve
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response 182 of 264:
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Dec 28 22:54 UTC 1998 |
They already have free email. They've had it for a long time.
But its so slow compared to "fast" systems like Grex that they've
flocked en mass to us.
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steve
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response 183 of 264:
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Dec 31 19:30 UTC 1998 |
We have a new problem with regard to the the block of IIT-kgp
users.
We now have less than 2.5M free on /var/spool/mail, where mail is
deposited when Grex receives mail. We had even less than that a few
minutes ago but I did a couple things to give us a little more space
which means we have a little more time before we're *out*.
There are two staff mailboxes that are far larger than others, but
in the grand scheme of things, they don't matter. We normally have
about 50 - 70M available on this partition, but with the IIT users
having mail piling up that space is just about completely gone.
So the question is, what do we do?
Unforunately at the rate we're using up disk--far faster than
I had thought we would--we may have to do something drastic to
keep mail service running on Grex.
Ideas that come to mind are
- Start zapping IIT accounts that are at the 1M limit. There are
several there right now. Disgusting, but would give us space.
Option B would be to just zap the mailboxes, and let mail for
these accounts start piling up again.
- Start moving full mailboxes to their owners home directories.
Much nicer, but places the strain on the /a and /c partitions
and will fill them up before long.
Longer term, we have the 1.7G disk that is on the old Sun-4/260
that we decided to bring over here, which will give us some more
breathing room. Unforunately that takes a little time to do and
demands physical presence at the Pumpkin, and this isn't a great
time for that. Maybe on the weekend.
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albaugh
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response 184 of 264:
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Dec 31 21:39 UTC 1998 |
Compress the "large" mailboxes and place them in the users' home directories.
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rcurl
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response 185 of 264:
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Dec 31 21:58 UTC 1998 |
What's wrong with enforcing the space limits, after warning the owners?
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scott
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response 186 of 264:
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Dec 31 22:51 UTC 1998 |
Our space limits assume that not all users will use up their allowed space.
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tsty
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response 187 of 264:
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Dec 31 23:17 UTC 1998 |
what about forwarding to those iit accounts where the accounts *listed*
an alternate email address? i realize that wouiod take a buncha iindividuya
...individual work on the part of staff, however for the sake of keeping
our reputation (nad making it better) as well as not cutting off *cold*
the accoounts that were here . (yeh, *we* didn;t cut the accounts, iit did
the cutting of access) ... we would be providing a tail-end service
in *favor* of smoothing hteir transitin rather than truncating it.
another alternative would be for us to inform iit that their users could
be allowed to receive email on their 'slow' machine *IFF* the are allowed
to log back in here for a 'special consideratin from iit' and specifically
identify the address to which each grex account should be sent. that way each
grex account would maintain its privacy (logging back in here w/passwd), and
the (relative) assurance that a forward-to account would be under the control
of the grex loginid.
in the meantime, gzip the mail files - perhaps into a special partition -
to keep them somewhere.
i hereby volunteer to do this work - it aint hard, it just takes some
time, which i have to volunteer to grex.,
i believe this also would, by example, show iit and their/our users that
we/grex are more than usually compasionate and helpful.
getting truncated from email is NotNiceAtAll (tm).
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steve
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response 188 of 264:
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Jan 1 01:56 UTC 1999 |
We can't reasonably put compressed mail in folks home dirs, as we
don't have enough space in /a and /c right now. Remember, these mailboxes
are filling up, through no fault of their owners. They can't get to us
to look at the mail.
Only a few people list other email addressed; those that did and have
given an indian address (ending in .in) would be likely horrified to find
that we were trying to send them their mail. Remember, IIT kgp has a 64K
link for mail (and everything else) to the outside world. We'd clog the
link up completely doing this. Until them mail cleared their sendmail,
it would be sitting here. So that option doesn't work very well.
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mdw
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response 189 of 264:
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Jan 1 08:56 UTC 1999 |
Chances are a lot of these people have subscribed to "very active"
mailing lists. MicroSoft, ziff-davis, and several other commercial
places seem to have some big collections of these things. There are
also some *very* active indian mailing lists.
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mary
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response 190 of 264:
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Jan 1 14:45 UTC 1999 |
STeve, would you suspect the administrators at this site have
blocked students from accessing it as a clean and easy solution
to a problem? Because they were frustrated with the more than
110 (and counting) pieces of mail you sent? Because
such access is simply not allowed out of India?
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keesan
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response 191 of 264:
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Jan 1 18:33 UTC 1999 |
My south Indian email pal says that Indians watch a lot of American movies
in which the women all talk dirty, and so expect all American women to be
interested in hot chats. They may be trying to act modern., or as they think
they are expected to act. It is hard to know what to believe from movies.
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steve
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response 192 of 264:
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Jan 1 20:29 UTC 1999 |
Mary, I suspect that the administrators there wern't at all familiar
with what their students were doing on the net, and were genuinely
horrified at the idea of the vandalous activites that occured on Grex.
I received a statement that said they wanted to talk to the student body
before opening access back up. Given that this whole thing blew up at
just about the worst possible time because of vacations and all, I can
see them in a beauracritic wait-loop 'till all the right people are
present before they can continue. Such is the ways of most colleges
(regardless of where they are).
If it is the case that this really is a "clean and simple" solution,
they'll find out it won't be, because I will personally lodge letters
explaining this situation to the farther up people in IIT. But I don't
think that will ever be needed. By Monday I expect the wheels to start
moving on this again. I'm going to do that which I can to ensure this.
I still feel very badly about this entire situation.
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dpc
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response 193 of 264:
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Jan 2 17:53 UTC 1999 |
<sigh> The trouble with cats is that they have kittens. I support
everything you've done here, steve. I had no idea that the IIT folks
would be receiving so much mail that it would be clogging our disk.
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steve
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response 194 of 264:
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Jan 2 18:18 UTC 1999 |
Well, we are talking of some 900 users.
However, the current mail situation may not be as IIT specific
as I first thought. I've taken some few IIT mailboxes and have
compressed them and found a place to store them for the time being.
Unforunately, the size of mailboxes has grown in general.
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janc
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response 195 of 264:
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Jan 2 19:28 UTC 1999 |
We should have some more disks within a few days. We can solve the
space shortage on the mail partition by adding more disk.
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davel
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response 196 of 264:
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Jan 2 19:52 UTC 1999 |
Temporarily ...
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steve
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response 197 of 264:
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Jan 2 21:23 UTC 1999 |
Actaully, we've been hovering around 25,000 users for more than a
month now. What isn't clear to me is why email storage has gone up,
but one good possibility as I've thought about it is that a lot of
people haven't been checking their email lately, becuase of the
holidays.
And, we're talking about a small amount of disk thats been used:
about 80M. Normally we've been around 80M of free space on the mail
spool partition. As Jan says, in a bit we'll have some new disks to
play with. Our current mail parition is 699M. I'd like to devote a
2G disk to this purpose and be done with it for a while.
We've gone through these growing pains before. Back on the Sun-2
we had about 65M for mail, when we jumped to the Sun-3 we had something
around 190M, moving to the Sun-4 we had about 300M and hoping onto the
current Sun-4/670 we made it about 700M. As Grex has grown, so has the
need for a larger mail parition. This only makes sense.
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steve
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response 198 of 264:
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Jan 3 16:44 UTC 1999 |
It's looking like our peak of mail was due to the holidays. About
another 3M of space has been freed up. Still, we need to make a much
bigger mail spool area.
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steve
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response 199 of 264:
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Jan 4 06:49 UTC 1999 |
In the 14 hours since I wrote that last response, another 5M
on the mail partition has become available. It's definitely looking
like this surge in mail was due to people being gone over the holidays.
Maybe, this has happened before, but we were never with 1068K of the
brink like we were a few days ago.
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