This item is for system problems.  If something on Grex isn't working 
right (line noise on a modem, weird behavior from a program, etc.), 
this is the place to announce it.  Except for security holes.  If you 
find a hole in system security, mail information about it to "staff".

170 responses total.

        Did someone shut of the terminal server Friday for the boot 
and forget to turn it back on?  I can't connect no matter what the
phone number.  But can telnet from arbornet.
        However that leads to a problem for me.  When I telnet from
arbornet, I don't seem to get proper pager control.

Grex was down for hours Friday afternoon/evening due to a glitch that
"hung" a reboot until staff could get to the Pumpkin to work on it.

This response has been erased.

I'm dialed in just fine.

Me too.

A big THANK YOU to whomever reduced the size of the mtod.

motd too....

        I got thru okay today and yesterday.  I wasn't around much
Saturday, other than in the morning.

This may or may not be a Grex problem, but

I have a website at http://www.cyberspace.org/~arrow/ for the ARROW radio
amateur club. It has always before worked well, but now suddenly it is
taking nearly a minute to bring up pages. I have edited and reuploaded the
page index.html, but the problem persists. Another website I manage on
Grex works fine. I would appreciate it if someone would try the page and,
IF THEY OBSERVE THE PROBLEM AND KNOW WHAT CAUSES IT, they would contact
me. 

Thanks!

I just tried it and it popped right up for me.

This is very mysterious. I reinstalled Netscape 4.77 and I still have the
same problem. However I do not have the problem with Internet Explorer.
The page is created with Netscape Composer, so it should be readable with
Netscape with no trouble - and it is readable just fine from my computer
directory where the files are before I upload them. It always worked
before - this just started happening the last couple of days. I can read
other websites I have created (with Netscape Composer) on grex with
Netscape with no trouble. 

I'm using Netscape Navigator 4.08 on a PowerBook 3400 running MacOS 9.0.4.
Your page comes up with text on a grey background and then starts a slow
vertical wipe to white, which erases the vertical scroll bar, too.  When
the Netscape window is all white, the text pops up again, and the scroll bar
reappears.

I suspect it is something to do with the graphpaper.gif you are using as a
background, but that's just a guess.

NB:  It doesn't _always_ wipe the scroll bar.

Yes, that description fits what I see. It appears that it is a bug that is
affecting reading *this* page *with* Netscape *from* Grex (since reading
the pages from my computer's directory works fine). I did not know the
background is a .gif (since I don't write the html code). If this is the
cause, the question remains, why did this just start to happen the last
few days? I have not edited the background for months. I am not sure about
manipulating a background - what/where is the procedure? 

Joe - that solved the problem, removing the background .gif (yes, I
am able to dig around and find things....  8^} ). Thanks for pointing
that out. Now the question is just a matter of curiosity: why did that
background cause the observed problem?

I think the background .gif got there because it was a default already set
up in the copy of Netscape Navigator I got from the UM "Blue Disk", after
I changed computers and had to reinstall Netscape. 

I think netscape gets upset and behaves weirdly if it wants an image and
gets something else, say, text.  I'm pretty sure I've seen your behavior
before under such circumstances, although I don't recall exactly what
was up.  If you had tried to store an image on grex, though, this could
well be your problem.

Marcus may be onto something there. ;)

I'm curious, too:  What did that background look like when properly loaded?
Netscape showed it as a featureless white, but the name implies that there
should have been a grid.

I didn't see the grid either. 

I've seen the behavior before took, on some commercial websites. I didn't
try to figure it out then as it wasn't *my* website. 

I have never intentionally stored an image on grex. I use another site
for images and link to them. 

It seems to be confirmed that the problem was the graphpaper.gif background
that was loaded as part of the ~arrow homepage. It was smart of Joe to
notice that in the code. (I've only looked at the HTML code on pages
where I want to save an image imbedded in a page, to get its name.)

I've now removed the .gif background, but of course anyone can experiment
with this by creating a page with it (and apparently with a Mac running
Netscape...). 

Has anyone experimented to determine whether it is this specific gif or gif
backgrounds in general?  I am not allowed to run Netscape at work, but maybe
tonight I'll do some testing.

I also inquired of grex staff ("help") and learned that grex runs a script
that captures .gif and .jpg files on websites and diverts them (if I
understood correctly) to a blank page. They did not seem to think, at
least immediately, that it would do what happens her with a imbedded
background .gif (and only for Netscape running on a Mac - so far). I
hope they will let us all know what happened in this instance.

Here is the (approximate) story:

The index.html page had a background specification of graphpaper.gif. I am
not sure when that got in there, but I vaguely recall playing around with
backgrounds for web pages, several years ago, but didn't like the effects
I got. However I inadvertently left that spec in the page, even though the
associated gif was discarded. It didn't do anything to bring itself to my
attention since a broken background .gif doesn't show anything. All was
fine until... 

A grex staff member recently put in a trap for .gif calls in web pages on
grex and redirected them to a .gif of a 1x1 blank pixel. So grex dutifully
tried to fill in the background of the page by tiling it one pixel at a
time with a blank. It took a minute to fill a window with blanks, and then
the foreground was plopped on top of it. 

Joe (gelinas) found this by looking at the html code for the page. I
hadn't because, as I've said, I have settled into just using Netscape
Composer for the web pages I create - fully adequate for all my purposes.
I did learn elementary html at one time, but it was a lot more work
writing it without mistakes than just using Composer. 

The only answer I got to why this problem dragged Netscape to a crawl but
had no effect upon the speed at which IE displayed the page was to the
effect that Netscape and IE work differently. Sure. Perhaps IE just
doesn't try to tile a background with a .gif of 1x1 pixels?  I'll leave
this question to the experts. 

        The dial-ins hung up on me, twice when I tried 761-3000.
I got in on 3554, about 4 down the list.

I'm not quite sure this is a "problem", since I don't much like the way it
"works", but . . .

When I use telnet and mistype my password, grex reports a failed login when
I retype it correctly and get in.  When I use ssh, I get a "permission denied"
error, but grex doesn't say anything about failed login attempts.

If we are going to warn people that someone mistyped their password, we should
do so in all instances, I think.

I don't know for sure whether this is the same problem as Tim (#21) reported,
but:
Yesterday I dialed in (& entered chat session); after a couple of minutes or
so, I was suddenly disconnected.  I dialed in again, and the same thing
happened.  (I'm not sure whether I tried a third time, but if so, it happened
again.  In the end I gave up.)

This could be all kinds of things, most notably a problem in the phone lines
somewhere; but I kind of suspect one of Grex's modems.

I got this error this morning, after sshing in:

mesg: Unable to find your tty (ttyp6) in utmp file

Okay it's been a real long time since I tried to use Grex's e-mail, but 
here's a problem I had the last time I did.

I telneted in and used elm, and it worked fine.  Another time I did the 
same, worked just fine.  All other times it has told me that there is 
something wrong with my terminal type.  I have changed absolutely 
nothing about my computer.

A few times lately, I've gotten sessions that could not be given a tty (next
time, I should copy the error report exactly, eh?).  These sessions don't
have a good terminal, so the standard stuff I use (vi, less) doesn't work.
I logout and try again later.  I wonder if that is what the folks above,
like Bjorn, are seeing?

 vidar says he's telnetting in.  The "failed to allocate pty" message
 is generally what you get when you try to ssh in when the telnet queue
 is full:  different problems.

And you expected me to remember when I was using ssh and when I was using
telnet?  Silly you. ;)

But thanks for explaining the cause of the error.  :)

Grex just disconnected me without warning, again.  Modem?  Idle zapper gone
amok?

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Re #20:  IE is a crummy browser used by Microsoft as it's primary weapon in
a number of repulsive monoplistic campaigns.  Unfortunately, the main
competition against IE is Netscape Navigator/Communicator which are much
crummier.  The hope for the free world rests on Opera and Mozilla as far
as I can tell.

No, on Lynx!  Lynx is much better are removing the advertising matter.

Lynx is for those who either cannot, or refuse to enjoy the world wide 
web as it is designed to be experienced.  

Using a nice little utility called Webfree 
(http://www.falken.net/webfree/), I experience just about as much or as 
little advertising online as I choose, without sacrificing the ability to 
enjoy the multisensory world of the web.

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Lynx fills the screen with words - all the same size and color - as opposed
to using other browsers with graphics turned off.  But some sites are written
to be confusing unless used with graphics (and tables) so I do sometimes have
to use a graphical browser just to be able to make sense of the site.  Lynx
for DOS or UNIX on your own computer lets you see all the graphics (one at
a time).  I have not got it working with sound but there seems to be a way
to listen to midi files with it.

I've got nothing against Lynx, SIndi, but if the hope of the free world
rests on it, I'm afraid we're doomed.

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THose in motion weather maps just aren't the same in text.

I'd like to see an animated weather map in ASCII...  ;)

- Backtalk version 1.3.30 - Copyright 1996-2006, Jan Wolter and Steve Weiss