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".

222 responses total.

Grex seems to be acting slow lately, although it's probably just me, 
because a lot of other sites have been slow lately for me too.

I believe we were low on disk space...

I've been having sporadic trouble getting the modems to answer.  I'm dialing
in on both 3000 and 3411.  Sometimes I get a "does not answer" response from
my software, and sometimes I get connected but never get the "Welcome to Grex"
or a login prompt.  

This response has been erased.

It's April 1, and I haven't seen any evidence of the April Fools Day 
"pager jokes"  Do you have to be telnetted in to see them?

Read the MOTD lately?

        Should the collection of five names change on each login?

the MOTD joke is fairly tame, compared to some of the stuff that's been 
done in the past.

(I vaguely remember something to staff saying that, with popcorn
focusing on arlo, others would have to pick up the April slack.
that might have been last year, tho'.)

I think everyone was busy this year.  April Fools!

Hm, if I'd been around on April 1, I could have set up the
legendary Mary Poppins Filter.

Or perhaps not.

So what was in the MOTD?

A birthday announcement.  Unless it did change somehow, it was for 5 users
whose logins all began with "a", I think.

I think it may have been left over from last year.  I'm not sure if anybody
got around to doing anything here for April Fools this year.

I *was* coming to the US for the board meeting (a day or so late, though:)

Grex is off the net.  scg reported in party that the P50 router at the 
Pumpkin was not responding to telnets from Grex, so he's going to 
reboot it unless someone else on the staff beats him to the pumpkin.

 3:39pm  up 19 days,  8:07,  3 users,  load average: 0.09, 0.01, 0.00
Login      Name               TTY  Idle  Login Time   Location   Work Phone
rcurl    Rane Curl            *pc        Apr  8 15:38
scg      Steve Gibbard         co        Apr  8 14:46
wplemmer William P. Lemmer    *sa     6  Apr  8 15:30

(I guess everyone is over on the walk.....)

        Could not get a connect thru on 3000.  Had to dial 5041.

/var is full, and this seems to have broken party.  When I entered party,
I got the "/var full" message, and I could do nothing further except
break the connection to Grex.

hey, I got a  message that Im moare than halfway to my "mailbox quota"..
when did grex institute a mailbox quota?  I dont remember seeing any
discussion about this.  I'd hate to see grex become too militaristic...
whats next file quotas>

Both have been around for years.

Many, many years.  I've been hovering near my quota for at least three.

hmm..maybe I just hadnt noticed, Im probably rarely near the levels where
quota message need to be sent out

Grex has mailbox quotas because otherwise there would be no disk space
for incoming mail.  For a few years, grex staff tried to handle this
"manually", but when the usual procedure became (more & more often)
delete the offending account (because usually the person couldn't be
contacted, hmm!) mailbox quotas went into effect.  When the quota is
exceeded, grex will no longer accept mail.  We tried using a "temporary"
failure for this at first (which means if you caught it quickly enough,
you wouldn't lose any mail) but we had to give that up as well & return
a permament error because some mailers, when they get a temporary error,
try again right away, and grex couldn't afford the CPU to keep rejecting
that mail many times a minute.

I had a rather unusual occurance with BackTalk today.  I tried to 
connect at www.cyberspace.org/cgi-bin/bt and it timed out.  When I tried 
www.grex.org/cgi-bin/bt everything worked fine.

This response has been erased.

I hit CNTL-X to send an e-mail, only to get the message "illegal command: core
dumped" The system froze until I exited out of the program entirely.

I don't think there is any difference between the names 'grex.org' and
'cyberspace.org'.  There may be some weird situations where Backtalk is
temporarily slow in responding (due to a locked file or some such). 
This is especially likely when the load on Grex is high.

Is ther any particular reason why in the middle of reading Agora through
backtalk that I can't get into backtalk at all? I was halfway done when I 
was asked for my password, after typing it in a half a dozen times it
still won't let me connect and now I'm logged in through telnet, which is
working fine. Help?

/var is full, bringing party to a complete halt.

confirmed, not that confirmation was needed

Party is complaining that /var is full. (/var/spool/mail is a separate
partition, and thus not to blame.)

/var got better for a little while but it is full again.

Wish I knew what was filling it up. :(

/var has gone this afternoon from 100%, down a little bit, then up 
to 103% and now 105%.

Today's problem is that telnet connections are being very unstable.
See the party log over the last hour to read lots of people, from 
different ISPs, whining about being dropped or having connections
freeze.

Re #29: The same thing happened to me too; a couple of times in the last 
few days.

        something very funny is going on.
        there seems to be no lag at all.

        well that's an exaggeration but still.
         this is very unusual.

I think /var/log/bt_crash.log is filling it up.  Backtalk seems to be
crashing a lot.  I've turned off logging of this for a bit, but haven't
removed the last file put there, because I need time to analyze it some
more.

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