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".

74 responses total.

I haven't been able to dial in to grex and make a connection for 2 or 3 days.
The phone answers, but for some reason my modem can't hook up to the grex
modem.  any clues?  I've tried 4 or 5 of the numbers.

I could dial in today on the 5041 line, but not on the 3000 line.

I'm dialed in now.

I tried 3000 and 5041 just now.  The phone answers, then disconnects.

Similar problems to the above - get hangup instead of modem's connect
string a couple times on -3000, -3554 worked perfect the first time.

Why was Grex down from Monday afternoon to midday Tuesday?

Dunno why it went down, but we're having a little bit of weirdness when doing
fsck during reboots, and nobody could go bump it loose any earlier.

        What's with not being able to connect via the dial-ups and 
then not being able to telnet from M-net.
        Even now, the terminal servier disconnected by first call.

was grex attacked?

I've been able to dial in with no trouble since this (Tuesday) afternoon.

I've been dialing in fine since Grex came back up.

Grex was not attacked.  It crashed in a mode that required some mothering to
come back up.  For some reason it's been getting unhappy about the /tmp
partition, of all things (that's where worthless temporary files are kept -
it is normally erased on each reboot).  None of the staff was able to get
over there and talk to it for a while.

Whine: just now I got hung up on when I dialed in.

some l33t k-rad hax0r prolly hax0r3d grex

        Time to scrub /c again: The irc-toys like bnc have all but filled
        the drive.

Noticing a few new features with the backtalk upgrade.  Not really a 
problem, it just takes some getting used to.

First real problem that I've spotted with the new backtalk - while 
using Pistachio to read an item, the title bar says "Grex AgoraAgora 
Conference - Item 4 - Microsoft Internet Explorer"

Fixed that.

  Some jerk has filled up /tmp with a 56MB file called .data

(and now it's fixed..)

Right now I am unable to log on via backtalk.  I am getting error wrong
password messages.  If I go to http://www.cyberspace.org/cgi-bin/bt I get a
"500 Internal Server Error"

seems to be resolved now.

Httpd was running out of processes, so it sometimes couldn't execute the
external authenticator, and sometimes couldn't execute backtalk.  Some
idiot was running the web-based finger script on every user on the
system.  Could have been one of those obnoxious web spiders.

Having a problem accessing my mail.  If I ssh in to grex, then run pine, it
says cannot find /var/spool/mail/ea and then gives me a message about no inbox
being found.  If I just use Telnet without the ssh, no such problem.

It should be in the FAQ, but apparently isn't yet.  Something to do with ssh
not setting an environment variable, but I don't recall off the top of my head
which one.

As I recall the environment variable is MAIL.  Log in via telnet and see
what value it's set to, then put a line in your .profile to set that
value and export it.  Fixed it for me.

If you need more exact instructons, I can give them.  But I'm
Backtalking right now, and I'm too lazy to log in and look at my
.profile. ;)

  To complete scott and gull's answers -- 

    Grex doesn't stash your mail spool in the traditional place for a
    Unix system (/var/spool/mail/$USER) because with thousands of users
    on Grex the number of entries in the /var/spool/mail directory would
    then be huge and file system performance looking up entries in a
    directory with thousands and thousands of entries is comparatively
    "expensive" in terms of system time required.  To spread out the load
    a little and improve filesystem performance, mail spools are divided
    among subdirectories according to the first and second characters of the
    login id.

    So my mail spool would be in /var/spool/mail/m/c/mcnally because the two
    first letters of my login id, mcnally, are 'm' and 'c' respectively.
    ea's mailbox would be in /var/spool/mail/e/a/ea

    I have no idea how the scheme deals with the case of single-letter login
    ids, or even if such ids are allowed on Grex.

You get two guesses.

so where's your mail file kept, then, walter?

Try
        !man getmailfilename mailfmt
        !cat /etc/mailfmt
I hope to update sshd with a version of openssh sometime soon.

So to fix the problem in ssh, just add a line to my .profile that says
setenv MAIL=/var/spool/mail/e/a/ea

or is there something else that I need to do?

Since your login shell is .csh, you should put the line

        setenv MAIL /var/spool/mail/e/a/ea

in your .login file (note: no "=" character in the command).

That line should go in your .login (as csh is your login shell).
Those with sh/ksh variants should do:

        MAIL=/var/spool/mail/x/y/xyz
        export MAIL

Where xyz is their login ID.

Wups, remmers slipped in, but that's a good thing as I didn't look
closely enough to notice the extraneous "=".

Thanks John.  #32 seems to have fixed the problem.

/var/spool/mail/i/z/i

This response has been erased.

I"ve had trouble dialing in for the past few days.  Last night I tried 5 phone
numbers, starting with 3000, and made two tries on each number.  

!df says the /bbs partition is 100% full.

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