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). 

80 responses total.

Agora 3 linked as Helpers 81.

The suit against Michigan Public Act 33 has been filed in Federal court
by the ACLU, with Grex as the lead plaintiff.  You can read about the
progress of the suit in Coop item 104 (item:coop,104).

The next Grex Board of Directors meeting is Monday, June 28 at 7:00 p.m.
in the Michigan Union Food Court. See item 107 in the Coop conference
(item:coop,107) for the agenda.

Note the change in location. Our regular meeting place was not available
this month.

   Grex took longer to reboot than normal Friday night, due to a 
problem with a disk.  We have some bad sectors on /a, which I don't
think present an immediate problem.  We're going to have to deal with
this in the near term however, so more downtime will result.  More
once we know more about it all.

"No space left on device...file system is full."

The Grex Board of Directors will meet this Monday, July 26, 7 p.m.
upstairs at Zingerman's Next Door, 422 Detroit Street, Ann Arbor. The
public is invited. See Item 112 in the Coop conference (item:coop,112)
for the agenda.

Grex may be shutting down as of Sunday, unless the lawsuit mentioned in 
#2 results in a quick injunction.  From the minutes of Monday's Board 
meeting:



AGENDA ITEM 6:  ACLU Suit

  - A hearing was held in which the ACLU asked for a temporary 
injunction.
    If granted this would prevent Michigan's new Internet Censorship Act
    (Michigan Public Act 33 of 1999) from going into effect on the 
scheduled
    date of August 1, 1999.  Jan Wolter was called as a witness.  John
    Remmers, Steve Gibbard, Mark Conger, and STeve Andre attended.  It
    appears to have gone extremely well, and everyone is confident that
    the injunction will be granted.  The ruling will be announced before
    August 1.

  - There still needs to be a trial to determine the constitutionality 
of
    the law.  This is likely to happen 6 to 9 months from now.

  - Although we think it almost a certainty that the injunction will
    be granted, the board felt it would be prudent to have a plan of
    action in place in case it was not.  Figuring out whether Grex can
    continue to operate in any way under this law is going to be 
extremely
    difficult and will probably require getting legal advice on a number
    of points.  We don't want to go to the trouble of formulating this
    plan unless we need it.  Mary Remmers proposed that if this law
    comes into force, Grex should temporarily shut down while a policy
    is worked out.  This lead to the following motion by Jan Wolter:

       In the event that Michigan Public Act 33 of 1999 goes into 
effect,
       all public access to Grex shall be suspended, with the exception
       of an informational web page, pending the formulation of new 
policies.

    Seconded by Dan Gryniewicz.

    Passed 7-0-0.

    Again, we do not think there is any large chance of this happening, 
and
    we think that it may be possible to bring at least a few services
    (like Email) back on line pretty soon.

Will this shutdown permit email forwarding?

I don't know.  There was very little advance discussion, and there is no 
information available other than the minutes of the most recent Board 
meeting.

I dunno, shutting down seems pretty drastic.

A partial shutdown is drastic but probably the 
best choice of action until we can get some
good legal advice on where the board and users
would stand in terms of liablity should this law
go into effect.

This is being discussed in Co-op, items #114 and #113.
Check it out.

Yes, it would be drastic. Also, I think it's unlikely to happen.

The possibility is being discussed in item 114 of Coop (item:coop,114).
I'm the board chair, so I posted a longish response there (#8) to attempt
to explain where the board is coming from.

(Mary slipped in.)

Such an amusing slip :)  

(We're a 2-computer, 2-modem household, so these things happen...)

I am HAPPY to announce that Judge Arthur J. Tarnow of the United States
District Court, Eastern District of Michigan, Southern Division, has
GRANTED Grex's and other plaintiffs' request for an injunction
preventing enforcement of 1999 Public Act 33.

In plain language, that means we won. The internet censorship law will
not go into effect on August 1. There will be no disruption of Grex's
services.

I think we owe many thanks to the ACLU attorneys who developed and
presented the case, and the Grexers who put a lot of work into it,
especially Jan Wolter (our declarant and witness), Mark Conger (our
contact person with the ACLU), and Mary Remmers (our press contact).

The judge has issued a 30-page opinion, which I'll post online as soon
as possible.

Temporarily, the judge's opinion is available from my personal
web directory, in Adobe PDF format. See

        http://www.cyberspace.org/~remmers/opinion.pdf

Not everyone can view PDF files, so I'm looking into getting it
converted to something else, like plain text or HTML. I don't
seem to have software myself that will do this.

Thanks, John!  Interesting document.

This response has been erased.

Well then we'd be faced with converting ps to html, which if anything is
harder. But you knew that.  :)

I think someone is doing the conversion. Hopefully a link to the result
will find its way onto the Grex 'lawsuit' web page before too long.

An HTML version of the ruling is at

  http://www.cyberspace.org/lawsuit/injunction.html

Congratulations to Grex - and all those that put in the effort on this
action - for a successful outcome. 

Thanks, Jan.  I'll let Mr. Steinberg know it's up.

the idle buster doesn't seem to be working...

I have a MS Word version of the opinion at
http://www.cyberspace.org/~dang/opinion.doc

Is it really necessary for 8 pages of mostly doublespaced text to take up 97K?

Out of curiosity, am I the only one having problems getting on with dial-in?
I've been dialing in, connecting, and then just hangig for 5-10 minutes
before I give up and try several hours later.

It is if you have all kinds of typesetting information involved.  Think
of it as a stored picture, and you won't be too far off.

HUH?????

Uh, eeyore, resp:28 was in response to drew's resp:26, not your res
p:27

Okey....I'm happy then. :)

(And my resp:30 showed up all on one line when I entered it...)

An online vote to rescind the board action referenced in resp:7 is now
underway. See Item 114 in the Coop conference for discussion. To cast a
ballot, telnet or dial direct to Grex and type 'vote' at a Unix shell
prompt or '!vote' at any other prompt. The polls are open through the
end of the day (EST) on Sunday, August 22.

   Grex was down for several hours (about 5pm to 11:30pm) Friday.
A system file had its contents changed, and was writable to the
world.  This is of course Not Good and for a little bit I thought
we'd had a real security breach, and took Grex down.

   This is of course the thing that all staff fear the most, that
someone has figured out some new way of getting into the system
and becoming root.  There haven't been many times that I've thought
that this might have happened, but this was one of those times...

   As it turns out, the file in question had the wrong permissions
because of the way the system booted up, and although we specified
a certain mode for the permissions (read only to the world) dear
old SunOS had a different idea.  We took out the code that caused
this to happen, and all is well now.

   Also tonight was the testing of a new method of dealing with
fork bombs, which is faster than previous forkbomb control--this
one should kill forkbombs nearly instantly.  We tested it a bit
and its now running.

text
help
a:
a text

Re #34: What the heck are fork bombs?

  Forking is the term used when a running program splits itself into two
running programs.  This is often done when a program wants to run another,
for example.  Forking is a good thing.  However, a runaway forking program
is a monster, creating endless copies of itself and ultimately clogging
the operating system by hundreds of copies of itself, to the detrement of
the rest of the system.

  A forkbomb is a very small program which does nothing but fork itself
so very quickly the compter is doing nothing but dealing with all these
tiny little programs whose idea of a god time is to replicate.  Think of
them as software tribbles and you have a good model.

  The new anti fork-bomb code deals with this kind of problem very quickly.

  I prefer to think of them as process-table cancer, though the "software
  tribbles" analogy works, too..

You can look at "insan3" for a typical example of a fork bomber.

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