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".

292 responses total.

I thought I had created a .forward file.  Today I discovered mail here.
A .forwards automagically deleted?

Your forward file is still there.  The last date on your mail file is
Sep 23 23:42, and the date on your .forward file is Sep 23 23:44.  So it looks
like someone sent you mail just 2 minutes before you put the file in place.

When I dialed in this morning on 761-3000, the modem connected but
I didn't get the "few seconds to connect" message or a login prompt.
When I hung up and redialed on 761-3411, I was able to log in with
no problems.

There have been a number of reports of problems like this.  It's been
mentioned that giving your area code and first three digits of your
phone number may help staff in diagnosing the problem, so I'll do so:
734-665.

I had the same problem remmers had with 761-3000.  My home exchange
is 734-747.

734-995.  Dialed in to 7613000 and got only the connect message.  Then
immediately dialed in to 7615041 and here I am.

I think groovy has more flaky ports now.  Sigh, that's why I swapped groupie
out.  :(

Could someone post (here) the list of phone numbers, in order, and I would
be willing to phone in to all of them in order to see if I can pinpoint the
problem.  Again, 7613000 did not work, 761-5041 (at or near the end) did.

keesan, scott is suggesting that the terminal server is the problem, not the
modem.  that means that the phone number is not related to whether or not you
have a problem.

I just experienced the connecting- but no response from Grex problem.
I only know the 761-3000 number (I always forget to look up the other
numbers when I'm online) so I had to dial several times before getting
a connection that worked.

Oh and, 764-544

(er... 734-544 I have no idea what 764 is the area code for... <shrugs>)

Ok, on that list of NPA/NXXs, we seem to have Ann Arbor Main, Ann Arbor
Southeast, and Ypsi Main.  That would seem to suggest that it's not CO
specific.

Actually the phone numbers for Grex do map to specific modems and then onto
specific ports on the terminal server.  So trying numbers would be a useful
thing after all.  You can get the list of phones by typing    !phones   or
phones at a prompt.

oh, oops.   i thought the server just assigned connections to whatever port
was available...  sorry.

agora 4 linked to helpers 84

...and then Grex assigns a random telnet port to a terminal server port.  That
part is true, such that you can't tell from the tty what terminal server port
it is.  But phone numbers still map directly.

Re #2: No, my .forward was _not_ still there.  I (re-)created it when I
discovered I had mail.  Of course, I may have just thought I created one
originally.  It's still there, now, though, so I guess it's fine.

That sounds likely.  You're certainly allowed to have a .forward on Grex.

I have not been having any trouble connecting at 761-3000 for two days now.

I just connected to 761-3000 successfully.

        System load has been over 18 and back & forth between 11 and 14
        for over an hour now.. Systems acting weird as hell.

        My other session is now totally locked up and even AYT's are doing
        nothing at all.

        What gives?

I fear something Very Bad is happening to /var/spool/mail.  Pine gave me
this error when I tried to close my inbox:


           SERIOUS DISK ERROR WRITING: "/var/spool/mail/g/u/gull"
    The reported error number is 6.  The last reported mail error was:
       "Unable to sync folder: No such device or address"

Retrying got "Unable to sync folder: I/O error"

I had a similar problem.  When I logged in earlier Grex told me I had no
mail, although I have a lot of old messages in my mailbox.  I did an ls -l
on /var/spool/mail/a/r and saw this: 

ls: arrow: I/O error
ls: arunjun: I/O error
ls: arthur: I/O error
ls: aravind: I/O error

etc.  After a bunch of those, a bunch of normal output from ls, like

-rw-------   1 ar       humans       3345 Sep 21 00:04 ar
-rw-------   1 ara007   populus      5571 Sep 28 01:01 ara007
-rw-------   1 arabella people      74352 Sep 30 06:58 arabella
-rw-------   1 arabian  humans          0 Jun  4 20:21 arabian

Mine was among the normal files, so I ran Pine, and it tried for a while
to open my inbox, then Grex logged me out.  I tried to log in again a
couple times, and Grex hung up on me each time.  So I waited a few minutes
and tried again, and now everything seems fine.

I haven't been able to connect via Merit since last night - get a domain
not known error this morning (couldn't even get into Merit last night).
Anyone know anything about a problem there?

i don't know if this is connected to Merit or not, however, U of M had
a fire (apparently) in the computer area, so they've been trying to deal
with this.  I can't get into my U of M mail (apparently only a few boxes
were destroyed and thus some people can get access and some can't.). That
may have a connection to the Merit problem. <shrugs> dunno.

That's probably it. 

  Yep..  According to reports, a bank of batteries in the Computing Center
  building caught fire and began leaking acid.  Fire crews shut down power
  to the building and it's taken a while to straighten things out..

That would explain it.  I can't get to my email either. 

When I came into work this morning at UM North Campus, I was told that some
idiot severed a major internet connection with a backhoe in Ohio. The
university lost e-mail and internet access for the entire morning because of
it. I could only access UM sites from here until noon.

  That also happened.  (Backhoes:  nature's most fearsome predator of the
  helpless fiber-optic cable..)  If you're interested in reading about that
  one there was an article in today's (9/30) Wired News..

pass

Dpfitzen reports a problem with getting disconnected when trying to send
e-mails.  Has this happened to anyone else (using Pine)?  I suggested that
it might be caused by hitting Alt-X (a Procomm command to hang up) instead
of Ctl-X, but would like to know if other people are getting disconnected
while sending e-mail with Pine.

OK, this is really weird.  I tried to send mail just now and found that
somehow my .pinerc had changed, with a line added that said
  default-fcc=nagraj@diversion.com
THis caused pine to reject my mail, because I have no save folder called
"nagraj@diversion.com".  My .pinerc is permitted 644, so no one else should
have been able to touch it, and I don't remember ever seeing that address
before (and it isn't in my current mail file or any of my saved mail files).

I think I'll change my password, though as far as can tell from "last", no
one else has logged in as me today.  Any idea what happened?

see 21
see 22

Something funky has been happening that "isn't a problem".

Additionally, I'm experiencing periodic "seizure", which I can't explain
where: everything runs fine, then exverything seems to halt, no text, no
echo, no answer to AYT and even pinging grex tends to fail.

Seems likely to be two distinct problems, but oops - prolly not "problems"

fwiw   
[No name] (DIVER-HST)

   Hostname: DIVERSION.COM
   Address: 207.126.100.96
   System: ? running ?

   Record last updated on 18-Oct-96.
   Database last updated on 30-Sep-99 04:34:27 EDT.

ZDNet article on the fiber cut:
http://www.zdnet.com/intweek/stories/news/0,4164,2343896,00.html

Article posted to mtu.resnet, forwarded from Jeff Ogden, describing in
detail the UM fire: http://www.tech.mtu.edu/~dmbrodbe/fire.txt

I just got disconnected while in the Pine index and am now getting occasional
garbage in the middle of blank lines
Help (for more help), pine (fm
                              i   ia
                                   r 4 n

The above is typical.

I got to look at CCB several times -- once just after the fire, when
there still a very thick haze of smoke inside (we went in, turned power
off on the IFS machines, and got out of there), and again late today, to
salvage non-critical hardware like power cables and the like.  The smoke
was almost entirely gone today when I looked, so I was able to wander
around back to the UPS area and look at where the fire started.  It took
me a bit to find it -- I had never been back there before, and there is
a maze of low down concrete rooms which house the boilers and other bits
of ventilation system.  I knew I had finally found the room, though,
when I found one which had a *black* ceiling.  There was a lot of broken
glass in there, as apparently all the ceiling fixtures had exploded in
the heat (wonder where all the mercury went?)

The UPS system has a large number of big blue 70's style black boxes,
with various sorts of cryptic labels on them.  I never did figure out
which ones (if any) housed the diesels, but along the back wall, there
were a number of big anonymous looking boxes that turned out to be the
battery racks.  I could tell because the furthest one back was *the* one
that burned.  The blue paint had turned into white ash, the shiny metal
under it was black with corrosion and soot, and of course, the batteries
were still inside.  The ones in the bottom half of the case didn't look
too bad, they were still white plastic cases on shelves.  Along the top
half, though, the cases were severely melted and carbonized, and had
mostly slumped into a thick lumpy glaze on the tops of the batteries.
(The shelf probably kept the bottoms from getting so hot).  The wiring
conduits above these batteries had definitely undergone an unusual
experience.  These were basically aluminum tubing with really heavy
gauge wire rope conductors inside.  Presuambly they had once been
insulated, but evidently where the insulation had melted, the conductors
had touched the tubing, and vaporized it.  So the tubing basically had
very elongaged and slightly irregular holes chewed along one side of it.

There were several other UPS boxes next to the battery case, and while
these weren't in nearly as bad a shape as the battery case, they showed
distinct signs of damage.  These cases happened to have small control
panels on them, with some sort of meter (voltage?  current?) consisting
of a glass faceplate and black plastic framing it.  Much of this had
melted and deformed in the heat, giving it a very surrealistic
apparance.

Apparently, the fire put itself out.  Lucky us.

i'll bet that the sheer volume of smoke and already oxidized gases choked out
the fire by starving it of sufficient oxygen to keep it going.  between that
and the soot and acid gas, it makes a good argument for keeping these things
in a *poorly* ventilated, cool basement room.

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