This item is for system announcements (new computer equipment on Grex, 
system upgrades, Grex meetings, etc.).  Personal announcements should go 
back in item 2; Grex system *problems* belong in the next item (#4). 

82 responses total.

This response has been erased.

You are very welcome.  I had fun putting it together.

(And I had fun eating the excess food that Mary didn't take to Valerie
and Jan. Those scones were world-class!)

REMINDER:

Grex Board of Directors meeting Tuesday, March 23, 6:30 pm upstairs at
Zingerman's Next Door, 422 Detroit Street, Ann Arbor. The public is
invited. See item 85 in the Coop conference (item:coop,85) for the
agenda.

  Grex was down for about four hours Sunday morning (3/28) for the
installation of a new 2G disk to hold mail.  Given that Grex is
growing, the mail parition size has grown from 699K to 1750K,
which should hold us for a while.

  Hopefully that'll see us through the latest MS Word macro virus fiasco.

  For those who are not aware, there's currently a "virus" making the
  rounds that arrives as an MS Word attachment that infects your computer
  with a Word macro virus if you open the attachment and then proceeds
  to mail copies of itself to everyone in your Microsoft Outlook address
  book.

  Grex users *cannot* contract the virus by reading the message on Grex,
  only by downloading the attachment to their own computers and opening
  the attachment with Microsoft Word.  However, users on Grex may find
  themselves receiving multiple copies of the trojan messages from their
  correspondents if their address is listed in infected victims' e-mail
  address books.

  If you read the online New York Times they have a decent article about
  it at:

    http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/99/03/biztech/articles/28virus.html

This just makes me all the more glad that I'm using completely Microsoft-free
computers.

re #3: I think he ment MB, not KB.
re #5: i'm not sure, but i think that page requests a password... you can
login as cypherpunks as both user name and password.
re #6: Long live unix! Death to Microsoft!

re 6: you do have your unix anti virus software up to date, don't you?

re 5, 7: You could just simply register online for free.
Most anti-virus software that you pay for (Norton, McAfee) have an updated
virus data file online as well.

for unix?

Re #8,#10: you can get an antivirus from www.linuxber.com under
console/anti-virus  i\\if  you are running linux. not sure where to get them
fo other unixes, but i heard macafee runs on many platforms.

I have a (legal) copy of Norton Antivirus.  It's about three years old.  I
recently dug it out, installed it, and ran LiveUpdate.  It proceeded to
download about ten megs worth of stuff and bring itself totally up to date. 
Best deal I ever got in commercial software.

re 11: www.linuxber.com: no such site.

Unix machines tend to not be very vulnerable to viruses.  It is important
to avoid accidentally leaving a disk in the floppy drive that has a boot
block virus when you boot the machine, though.

Unix machines are vulnerable to trojan horses, and buffer overrun bugs,
though.

  re #13:  presumably he meant "www.linuxberg.com", a software archive site
  run by the Tucows people..

I can't be affected by Melissa since I'm a Mac user, but this is a good
example of the problems of having a monoculture. The concept comes from
agriculture: if a single cultivar is too widely used, an infection (virus)
can wipe out almost a whole crop. Therefore wise agriculture uses many
different cultivars simultaneously and also retires some and introduces
others at intervals. The analogy would be to have a wide variety of
operating systems in different versions, and shift versions at intervals.
There is probably an uptimum sequencing of this that would make it no
longer any fun to write viruses.

The Melissa Virus runs under Microsoft Word, not directly under Windows.  Word
Macros are generally compatible with both the Mac and Windows versions of
Word, so the question for you as a Mac user is whether the communication that
virus does with mail software to send the mail out will run on your Mac. 
Either way, it can presumably infect documents which you can then pass on to
other people in other ways, if you're running Word.

It won't affect me since I'm not running Microsoft Word.

OUr departmental computer guru says Melissa does not affect Macs at
all, which I take to mean that the virus cannot grab control of the
Mac mail software. (I avoid all this by not using a mail client on
my machines.)

        Unix is quite virus-vulnerable;  there just haven't been many Unix
viruses.  There are currently four circulating around on the more popular
"eleet" sites, and I figure that means that there are two or three times as
many in existence.

        User policy on Unix systems has helped reduce the number of virii -
so I guess you could call it a design advantage to make Unix virus-proof -
in that root privileges are carefully restricted in many cases.  Not so with
most home Unix systems.

This virus makes me very happy that I don't use MS Word :)  No extra 
patches, no extra problems, no extra MicroSquash BS :)

This one's easily avoidable.  Just don't open any Word files from people you
don't know.  That's what I do.

Yes, but if somebody you know has gotten accidentally infected, that won't
protect you.  Anyhow, Rane, I think your department computer guru is wrong.
It may well be that this virus can't affect the Mac mail software, but Macs
running MS Word should still be able to get infected, and pass the virus along
to PCs if documents are transferred between the two.  That would make Macs
carriers, right?

Anyhow, this is probably way overblown.  Since about midnight last night, the
anti-Melissa virus filters at one of Metro Detroit's larger ISPs have caught
just 16 incoming messages that might potentially have contained the virus,
a few of which were tests to make sure the filter was working.  The server
that handles outgoing mail has intercepted only two messages, both of which
were tests.

Ummm...question.  How come all of the mathom has been erased?

A mailing list I'm on got hit by the HAPPY99.EXE virus a while back.  This
is an interesting one that you have to be kinda stupid to catch.  It
propegates as a mail attachment called HAPPY99.EXE.  If you run
the program, it wedges itself into your winsock.dll, watches for SMTP
connections (outgoing mail, in other words) and attaches itself to any
messages you send from your machine.  This can only affect mail you send
directly from your machine, of course, not mail you type into someplace like
Grex.

The solution, of course, is that if you get mail with a program attached, and
you don't know what the program is, don't run it!

        I think Barry wrote that one;  it also attaches silly little sayings
to any e-mail that doesn't have a signature already attatched.

Re #24:
    My winsock.dll on my doS/Win 3.1 installation resides on a drivespace
partition on a Ramdisk. This means that every time I boot the machine, any
changes made to Y:\RAMP\WINSOCK.DLL get destroyed, and the file is then
replaced by the copy sitting in the PkZip file containing all the other
internet software. Thus HAPPY99 should not last past a reboot, unless it can
somehow find Winsocks hidden in zip files.

  How nice for you..  If you know what to expect you can probably concoct
  countermeasures for just about anything the virus-authors can throw at
  you.  However, that doesn't help the millions of people who run with
  Microsoft's criminally lax default settings..

re 15 that was it, thanks

It's kind of amusing to live with someone named Melissa who works in
the computer biz... <grins>  Apparently she got a lot of calls from
customers, some of them jokingly asking her if she was responsible
for the 'Melissa' virus.

Re. Melissa:  In case it's not clear to some, it's not the MS Word doc 
itself that's infected, but the attachment that comes with it.  It has 
the title something like, "Important Msg. From <whomever>", thus making 
people think it's from someone they know.

I think you meant to say, "It's not the email message that's infected, it's the
Word document attached to it."

   Folks, this is the system announcements item.

   Grex is happily dealing with its new disk for email, but we're
still critically short pon disk space in other areas.  Sometime
very soon, like Friday night (tonight) I plan on using the old
mail area for var.  This will expand an important area by 228M
which will help.  The current /var can then be used for some
other directories that currently reside in my home dir, so I 
think I can give /a about 188M after I move some of them.  That
will buy us some breathing room for adding more disks.  I'll
be entering more about it in garage.

   In the second stage of dealing with disks, I have moved the
contents of the /var directory to what was the old mail directory.
/var holds all sorts of log files and such, and is fairly important.
With the continued growth in Grex, what used to be a large enough
partition, 471M, isn't now.  The old mail spool area was 699M, so
this has given us about 200M more storage for /var.

   This should halt /var running out of space, with the most immediate
and noticable problem being that party stops working.

   Stay tuned for stage three, in which the old /var partition is
used for some staff things that really should be in their own disk
partition, but haven't yet.  That will free up space on both /a and /c.
Details to follow.

   The third stage of disk partition games is over--a new partition,
/x exists.  Two 170M+ directories that staff uses (holding vandal
tools and a database of newusers) will be going on that partition.
Actually, the security directory has already, and you will notice
that /a actually has space, now!  /c will lose space too, once a
few changes are made.

   So then, as a result of all the games of the past week,

 - the mail spool area is 1.75G, up from 699M;
 - the /var area is up, by 200M or so;
 - the /a and /c partitions are or will be up by about 170M each.

   This solves all our immediate disk shortage problems.  We still
need to work on getting more of those donated disks online, but at
least we've stopped the disk shortages for the moment. ;-)

Thanks STeve!

 Thanks. STeve. Keep up the great work.

This response has been erased.

I can't imagine an ISP where people work as hard as our volunteers to keep
everything running smoothly.  Grex is wonderful!

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