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234 responses total.

        lynx http://usenetchannel.com does not work for me.

        What is the least pages/keystrokes way to read newsgroups,
including alt.fan.weird-al, rec.music.dementia & rec.music.filk?

When I try to use Pine or even Pico in mail I get a bunch of gibberish.
When I try to backspace while entering a reponse I get {D [D.
(not {D but [D), I can't make corrections).  I was also treated as a newuser
when I typed bbs and only shown the first and last items of agora.
Isa it a system problem i or is my computer too hot or humid?
How can I send a file in mail, since I can't use pine?  I tryed ~r and then
return and entered the file name and return, is that right?  When I tried
to switch to pico to see what was in my message, I got gibberish again.

The read new command skipped most of the itesm in agora.

Whoah, now, one question at a time...  ;)


Problem #1 sounds like a terminal emulation mismatch.  Did you change your
computer's emulation, or possibly your Grex . files?

Problem #2 is the normal thing that happens when Agora is rolled.

Problem #3 depends on your local microclimate.  Are tornadoes attracted or
repelled from your computer?

Problem #4 should be fixed by solving #1, but in the meantime, the way to
include text in "mail" is to type    ~r   followed by the filename.  Mail does
not support attachments, though, so ~r just reads text into the message body.

(keesan slipped in).

To see all the items in a new conference, try "read all" at the Ok: prompt.
Do it now while things or small, *or* you can let the "missing" items appear
in full as new (relative to your first reading) responses are added.

I fixed the gibberish problem by completely exiting grex and redialing.  Must
have been one of those mini-tornadoes on the line somewhere.  I was also
getting miscellaneous things in mid-line all over the place.  Logging out and
then logging in on the same line had not helped at all.
        I had typed r n to read agora responses.  Will try read all now.
Thanks for all the help, Scott.

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When I use one of my telnet programs (through netlink and not WMU like I am
now), I can't read the last line of the last response in an item.  Is there
any way I can change my screen settings if I use that program, and how do I
find out what they are right now (so I can just add a line or two)?

So why would the wait list summary report 67 remote users + 6 local,
72 max remote, but have a queue of 40?  What happened to the other five
slots?

And while I'm complaining... what happened to the mailer?  Attempts to
send mail result in: "/usr/lib/sendmail: No such file or directory"

Tim, I don't know anything about http://usenetchannel.com
We usually recommend http://www.dejanews.com/ for usenet.

re 11: got it from running a "read news"--rn (or !rn):
News on Grex is down.  Sorry!
It may be back in several months.
In the meantime, please load Lynx and go to http://www.dejanews.com/
or http://reference.com or http://usenetchannel.com

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Pine has become very slow recently, especially in composing messages. 
Sometimes I wait 15 seconds to see a word appear after I type it.  Could this
be related to increasing the number of telnet ports?  And it is also slower
to display things from the inbox, and to send messages (I think).  If it gets
much worse, I may go back to using M-net for e-mail.  Someone from staff want
to check it out?  Twice today same problem, an hour or so apart.

The load average is quite high:

  4:40pm  up 6 days,  4:40,  78 users,  load average: 74.28, 75.37, 75.62

Ack!  Are we under cyber-attack?

4:54pm  up 6 days,  4:54,  76 users,  load average: 11.37, 11.70, 28.73

some mitigation...

        I thought a promise was made not to increase the ptys and
put you back into the cycle of need to raise money to improve system
to supoort the large number of connections.

The idea is to find out how many users we can support without bogging the
system down.  Bogging the system down is a bad idea, but we don't gain
anything by making people wait in the queue while there are spare CPU cycles.

Heh, I remember when I measured the quickness of pine in portions of hours.
I'd occasionally have to bump a key to prevent myself from getting lagged out
from inactivity while it loaded.  

  One thing to keep in mind is that Grex has had a couple of incidents
  recently with people abusing the mail system.  Sending out a huge
  batch of mail can cause the load to skyrocket very quickly..

STeve said there was a vandal on the system at the time when Pine was running
slowly, so it has nothing to do with number of users.  Pine is back to
amazingly fast again today.

High load averages are almost never a function of user count. Really 
high numbers like in the 70s usually indicate a resource hog, which can 
be either a deliberate attack or clueless behavior. If a grex staffer 
finds the system in that mode, he or she will take steps to restore 
normal performance.

i just dialed in twice but got nothing after:
CONNECT 19200


actually, twice at 7613000 and once at 5041.
i'm on via telnet now.

Re. 25:  The terminal server had crashed.  I've rebooted it.

i'm not sure if this is the right item, but i've been getting severly large
numbers in waiting to telnet to grex, like usually around 40 or 50 in the
morning, any reason why, or just a lot of users in general around lately?

I thought you meant a *large* number...but only 40 or 50 - pshaw.

I've been getting either an immedite connection or a number between 12 and
20.  I got 33 once, but I just disconnected.  THe speed of the connections
has been more pleasant than expected.

Seems to me everyone wants to get in from work in the morning.  The
queues are quite long then.  There's just so many users...

        Modem server was also unable to do it's thing yesterday afternnon,
in the 5pm hour.

Whoa, this looks like a record to me:

  5:29pm  up 5 days, 12:40,  68 users,  load average: 107.91, 103.51, 91.55

Pipe can't access /usr/lib/sendmail : No such file or directory 
 
This is not a good sign.

On Thu, 2 Jul 1998, C. Keesan wrote:
(In connection with being told my terminal has been idle for more than
15 minutes and I would be logged off in another five, while in the middle
of a chat with Sreeni.)
> I think I was reading agora and typed !talk.  This has happened to me
> before.  Should I exit bbs to avoid this problem when chatting?  I don't
> know any other prompt besides the ok: in bbs where I can type !talk.  I
> get chat requests while using lynx but I think that I have to quit lynx
> before chatting, at least that is what I do. 

>  I was dialed in, Sreeni telnetted, as was the case last time I had this
> problem. 
> 

It is likely that you were experiencing a problem in your pager.  I
seem to remember that the "less" pager doesn't report idle time.  If 
you have a shell that supports multitasking (i.e. if you aren't 
using the Bourne shell [sh]), you can hit control-z to get back to a
shell prompt, from which you can issue your talk command.  Doing If
you do this, you should not be affected by your pager's inability to
accurately report its idle time.  When you are done talking, from 
the shell prompt you can issue the 

        fg 

command, which stands for "ForeGround," to return to your BBS session.

(I was also told that I can probably type !talk from lynx, but I will try
the Ctl-z and fg instead, as chats can last hours!)

> Sreeni said my write permissions were off another time when he tried to
chat with me but I know they were on. 
.  I think it is just that I was in Pine and pine must tell people that
> write permissions are off - I also cannot get tels while in pine.  So
> Sreeni e-mailed me about my permissions being off, and I then tried to
> chat with him but he was gone.
> 

Pine has a setting that automatically turns off your messages while
it is run.  You can disable this feature by typing

        msc

from within Pine, and by selecting the "Allow Talk" field from the
menu of options.  

Please let us know if we can be of additional assistance.  

____________________________________________________________________
Michael O'Leary                                      mike@oleary.org 

Another problem, when I tried to chat with someone using the menu shell we
were unable to connect until I went to the menu and typed T for talk from
there.  Why?

Possibly because they were trying to use talk & you were trying to use chat?

Nope, we tried it both ways, each of us typing talk, I think.  We ended up
without the split screen that I usually see in talk, and got our lines of
typing scrambled with each other's until we learned to do 'o'.  I have
had the no-split-screen mode before when doing talk from the menu.  Can
someone explain what is going on and how to tell talk and chat apart and how
you get into them?  I prefer the split screen.  (By both ways I mean that we
each requested chat, I think - I am not sure what John was doing, it was his
first attempt at online talk).

Dunno if this is a bug or a design enhancement, but Backtalk has
decided to display the 'view previous responses' line up near the 
top of the page instead of after the unread responses.  If it's a new
feature, I kinda liked it the other way.

I found that Backtalk falt refused to talk to IE 2.? for NT4.  It just
gave a crash screen that said contact the authors.  I didn't feel it was
important enough to report since it only seems to affect IE 2.?.

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