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306 responses total.

The first problem. :(  I've had a report that the /b shell is broken.

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Yeah, first it was missing, then I fixed it, but fixed it wrong, now I've
fixed it right (I hope).

One bug down ... how many to go?

Two (depending on how you count) for the collection:  

Bad parameters near ""
message i got when i answered 'join' to the 'you are not a member of 
/bbs/agora25' prompt.  

'mail' can't find my mailbox (/var/spool/mail/i/z/i).  Doesn't matter
right now, though, for a couple reasons that 'll' will show you....

No hurry.  

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Yup, all one letter logins had their mail owned by root (they had to be moved
separately).  This has now been fixed.

Holy cow.  So far the processor response is splendid.

Something must be broken.  Grex isn't pausing long enough for me to take a
nap between conferences.  When am I supposed to sleep? ;)

The "who" command seems to be slower than the "w" command.  ???

We are now using gnu who, which does a lookup on all the domain names.  This
has the good effect that the whole name shows up, and the bad effect that it's
slow.

It's really very very slow because of that. Especially when you consider 
how fast everything else is.

   But you can always use /bin/who, which doesn't do lookups, if
you need the extra speed.

   The problems with gnu who is that if the lookup for the person
doesn't find a DNS entry (something which almost never happened,
but does today because places are too cheap to get domains), it
had to expend time doing that, which is why who listings will
seem to be going nice and fast, then pause for 5 - 15 seconds
and then go on again.

  unfortunately name resolution is a relatively complicated process
  that takes a non-negligible amount of time.  on the bright side,
  with optimal caching, each lookup only has to go out to the internet
  for a full resolution once and subsequent requests get checked against
  the info that's already been fetched.  on the downside, that doesn't
  help all that much because each user that logs in is highly likely to
  come from someplace different than the hosts that previous users have
  come from.
  
  if it really proves to be a problem it might be worth tuning the
  caching behavior of named to hold more reverse name records for longer..
  one would probably need to cache such records for unacceptably long,
  though, for it to help a great deal.

  and, as STeve points out, the big time killer with lookups is 
  when the resolver waits for a failed lookup to time out..

        I guess you can't do !w -n|more like on M-net where the -n
does no new lookups.  just returns numbers.
        tried, w: bad flag -n
        Maybe a local fix?

I'm still dropping some text, though

Pine's "-i" flag doesn't seem to be working; it used to take you directly to
the screen which lists the contents of your mailbox, but now it doesn't seem
to do anything.

  hmmm..  perhaps it's being overridden by a default value for the 
  'initial-keystroke' setting?  in any case you can miming the same
  behavior by going to the <M>ain menu, then <S>etup, <C>onfig, and
  changing the value for 'initial-keystroke' to "i" (for <I>ndex)

Interesting - didn't know about that.  THanks, Mike.

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If I don't want a list of users *and* their addys, I just type !users.  It
also keeps me from having to scroll back three screens.

        I didn't know about the -i flag. I tried it and it works fine but when
I used config to set it I got "bad initial keystroke (missing comma?)". What
am I doing wrong?

Thanks for the fix, Valerie.

I tried to abort (cancel) a message that I was writing using mail,
by hitting control-C twice, and what happened was that ther appeared
on
Well, the backspace is not working for me, but that may be something
else related to Jim's putting a mini version of z
zmodem on instead of procomm
The problem in mail, even before he changed to zmodem was:
^C@
^C@
appeared and there was no way to abort the message.
This happened twice already with the Ctl  Ctl-C.
Also, it took 25 sec to ket
get a response to kermit -r, and a minute and a half for zmodem sz, which I
think used to come up quite a bit faster.
Please excuse any other odd things that Jim's zmodem did here, I cannot get
pico to work eiether and hope you don't see what Isee.  Let's see if I can
abort this response now.
Well, I could have aborted the responses here, but not in mail.

My last two sessions have featured grex dropping massive amounts of text in
unprecedented fashion.  Alas, I believe that someone will actually have to
witness how bad it is to truly understand my difficulties.

Re Item #24: I recently encountered the problem with windows 3.1 (on
a lousy PC) that it will not pass several pine command codes but
instead interprets them as windows commands. Is this what you are
seeing? 

Procmail appears to be broken.  If any of you are using procmail, have someone
send you a message to see if it bounces.  Procmail seems to expect your mailbox
to be in the old spot, and die horribly when it isn't.

  hence the message in the motd about having to change your procmail setup..

  I suspect that the suspicion on the parts of staff members was that anyone
  using procmail would probably be knowledgable enough to make the changes
  themselves but if you really need help I can probably provide it..

Senna, I can probably check out your problem sometime this weekend...

re #26/24, I am using DOS, not Windows.  Still can't abort a MAIL message.
And Kermit is still taking about 25 sec to come up.

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kermit should use the "tty" program to determine your
tty, not who

When I'm in the 'mail' mailer and respond to a piece of mail I've gotten, a
copy of the response gets sent back to me, as well as to the indended
recipient.  (yes, I'm using 'r' and not 'R')  Any idea what's causing this?

I saw some mail on the staff mailing list that indicated that the extra 
mail problem was due to a global config file that had not been copied 
over during the changeover. If that is true, it should be fixed now. Is 
it?

Grace (gracel) reports that Grex hung on her yesterday, somewhere around
2 PM.  She read some conference items, ran elm, and went to email someone.
It took her into vi as usual.  She got into insert mode, & it stopped
responding.  She finally disconnected.  She says that she waited/tried
for maybe 5 minutes before giving up.  The session was still visible
when I looked at the screen last night; I can attest that there was
nothing like a timeout warning or anything like that, & she says it
was still connected until she disconnected.  She has vi configured so
that it displays the mode when you're in a text-entry mode, so she
is not likely to have been wrong about that.

Could someone please link this item to helpers?  I had to join agora just to
enter a system problem, & I prefer to maintain my non-involved status.

re kermit:  It can't use tty because the tty you're on has no corelation to
where you come in from.  kermit needs to know if you are in from groupie, or
if you're in over the link.  Tty can't tell it that.

   Dave, is there any chance that she hit ^S, such that things were waiting
for a ^Q?  In general its a good idea to try that when things appear dead.

re #24 (?).  Kermit now comes up in 3 sec, and zmodem in about 2.
~x works to abort a response in MAIL.  Ctl-C still does not work there.

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