Grex Helpers Conference

Item 107: Grex System Problems

Entered by i on Fri Mar 22 05:26:50 2002:

155 new of 215 responses total.


#61 of 215 by gull on Thu Apr 4 13:50:17 2002:

You'd need to write a procmail script, I think.


#62 of 215 by scott on Thu Apr 4 16:07:29 2002:

What other is talking about is sending all "other@cyberspace.org" mail into
/dev/null, not parsing it.


#63 of 215 by tsty on Fri Apr 5 04:32:44 2002:

...uhhhh, maybe, but i thought not ... regardless, gull, what sort
of procmal script would you suggest?


#64 of 215 by jhudson on Sat Apr 6 04:14:20 2002:

If they don't let up, try this trick (in .forward)
utc@ftc.gov.REDIRECT


#65 of 215 by tsty on Sat Apr 6 06:53:27 2002:

oh? !!


#66 of 215 by tsty on Sat Apr 6 14:14:54 2002:

iw that a legit address?? or is this an incantation newly implemented?
  
back to another situation

 when i    nroff   a file, the resultant file has 30 or more blank
  lines appended to the text. (no, they weren't in the original, smartie)

  this action has been consistant - is this a feature, bug, or user error?


#67 of 215 by remmers on Sat Apr 6 15:24:03 2002:

I stated a hypothesis on that nroff behavior back in response #32,
two responses after you asked the question the first time in #30.


#68 of 215 by oval on Sat Apr 6 23:08:45 2002:

tsty - about the procmail mail filtering, i found a good how-to on filtering
emails based on a certain keyword in the to, from, or subject lines.

http://camden-www.rutgers.edu/HELP/Documentation/Unix/S50-1317_email_filter
ing
.html

skip down to the pine part.



#69 of 215 by aruba on Sun Apr 7 23:52:51 2002:

Did someone upgrade Lynx just recently?  It's not happy.


#70 of 215 by keesan on Mon Apr 8 01:06:52 2002:

What is the symptom?  It was working as usual for me a couple of hours ago,
meaning it loads the same page 2-6 times before you can access it, and the
Tab does not work.


#71 of 215 by remmers on Mon Apr 8 12:23:04 2002:

Hm.  I ran lynx just now, and it behaved fine for me.  No multiple
loading of pages; tab works.


#72 of 215 by davel on Mon Apr 8 13:19:20 2002:

Whereas for me (quick test) it works "normally" - multiple page displays &
all.


#73 of 215 by gull on Mon Apr 8 13:28:24 2002:

Re #63: I don't use procmail, but I've run across various scripts on 
the web that would do things like query ORBZ-style blacklists.


#74 of 215 by keesan on Mon Apr 8 14:19:46 2002:

SOmeone said the multiple page display is related to n curses - what is that?
How would one fix it?


#75 of 215 by aruba on Mon Apr 8 15:07:10 2002:

I get the multiple loading problem, which has been around for a couple of
months now.

Hmmm.  My problems with Lynx seem to involve arrow keys, so maybe it's
because I upgraded Kermit recently.  So nobody did anything to Lynx on Grex?


#76 of 215 by aruba on Mon Apr 8 15:48:20 2002:

Yeah, looks like it's my problem.  Sorry to have bothered everyone.


#77 of 215 by tpryan on Mon Apr 8 15:56:21 2002:

        My solution:  my use of Liynx has been dramiticaly reduced.


#78 of 215 by kimaro on Mon Apr 8 15:58:35 2002:

bbs


#79 of 215 by mdw on Mon Apr 8 19:05:31 2002:

Lynx uses a library called ncurses.  Ncurses uses terminfo (or perhaps
termcap) to describe a whole bunch of terminals.  The variable TERM says
which terminal you have.  You in turn have stty settings (which may
among other things include terminal width & height), as well as a
terminal emulator (which probably does an imperfect job of emulating
some terminal.)  Problems with weird displays could be due to any of
these components, or due to a bad interaction between them.

For the terminal WxH case, you can say "!stty -a" to see what your
current rows & columns settings are, and if you running an ANSI
compatible terminal emulator, the Unix command "!resize" may be able to
determine what your current window size is and do the appropriate stty
calls.

If you're using the terminal emulator that comes standard with Windows,
you might have better luck with teraterm.


#80 of 215 by keesan on Mon Apr 8 19:42:06 2002:

I am using VT320 with Kermit and it worked on previous lynxes without the page
loading multiple times, or Tab not working.  It works at MNet.  MSKermit for
DOS.


#81 of 215 by tsty on Tue Apr 9 06:09:42 2002:

re #67 - remmers- i accepted your hypothesis at that moment but none
of the   wc   counts is divisible (evenly) by 55->68. now what?


#82 of 215 by keesan on Tue Apr 9 15:07:12 2002:

I read elcome to grex instead of Welcome to grex.


#83 of 215 by jhudson on Thu Apr 11 01:16:57 2002:

RE 81:
sed 's/ *$//' < oldfile > newfile


#84 of 215 by davel on Thu Apr 11 01:38:02 2002:

I think TS is complaining about extra blank (or empty) lines at the end, not
about blanks at the ends of lines.


#85 of 215 by davel on Sun Apr 14 02:13:47 2002:

This isn't the kind of system problem people usually complain about, so I
didn't remember to complain until now - and it happened at least 2 or 3 days
ago (but this past week, I'm pretty sure).  Problem may be fixed now.

Anyway, I was logged in to Grex & was called away.  When I returned, an hour
or two later (at a guess), the idle zapper had not reared its head at me. 
(I logged out anyway, then, as the problem that called me away was still
calling.)  But it seems pretty likely that the idle zapper was not working
at that time.


#86 of 215 by jep on Sun Apr 14 10:32:46 2002:

Backtalk has been running exceedingly slowly for the past several days.  I
logged in via telnet to get to this item moer quickly, to report it, and
ran an uptime.  It probably explained part of what's going on:

Ok: !uptime
  6:31am  up 76 days, 15:42,  31 users,  load average: 7.64, 7.04, 7.45


#87 of 215 by mvpel on Tue Apr 16 04:16:24 2002:

The clock is running nearly a minute fast.  Time to enable NTP, folks.


#88 of 215 by eeyore on Tue Apr 16 04:27:40 2002:

Oh no!  Not nearly a whole minute!!!!!

Okay, so every clock in my house is set to a differnt time.  I still do
pretty okay :)


#89 of 215 by jaklumen on Tue Apr 16 11:38:28 2002:

if you're worried about accuracy, why not get clocks that receive 
radio signals from the National Master Clock?  Its movement is based 
on the decay of atomic particles, I believe (plutonium?) and is super-
accurate.

C. Crane Company has some for sale. ;)


#90 of 215 by gelinas on Tue Apr 16 12:59:38 2002:

Because NTP uses those kinds of clocks.  Right now, my desktop machine is
-0.0002060 sec off from time-A.timefreq.bldrdoc.gov


#91 of 215 by jp2 on Tue Apr 16 13:17:57 2002:

This response has been erased.



#92 of 215 by brighn on Tue Apr 16 13:27:31 2002:

Oooo, a bug in a GPS transceiver! I'm sure *that* saved a lot of lives.
 
I'm with Meg. I'm within ten minutes of the rest of the world, that's good
enough for me.


#93 of 215 by jp2 on Tue Apr 16 13:29:49 2002:

This response has been erased.



#94 of 215 by gull on Tue Apr 16 13:30:32 2002:

NTP is nice, but unreliable.  I have several systems synched with it,
and every so often they just start drifting for one reason or another.

Re #91: I'm guessing you mean *receiever*, not transceiver, unless
you've got connections the rest of us don't. ;)


#95 of 215 by jp2 on Tue Apr 16 13:32:35 2002:

This response has been erased.



#96 of 215 by gull on Tue Apr 16 14:56:40 2002:

Okay.  That makes more sense.


#97 of 215 by tpryan on Tue Apr 16 16:38:17 2002:

        Hey, Karen Savelly has just flipped Harry Stien the bird and is 
playing the sweetest music hear in 1968 on WCSX, 94.7fm.


#98 of 215 by jmsaul on Tue Apr 16 16:47:02 2002:

Who's Harry Stein?


#99 of 215 by senna on Tue Apr 16 17:36:45 2002:

I keep my computer clock hours off of time, because otherwise I will look at
it in the morning and assume it's reasonably accurate.  That is a good recipe
for being late to work.  There are a couple of clocks I rely on to help me
keep time (it's only really important in the morning), but the accuracy is
entirely relative.


#100 of 215 by void on Tue Apr 16 19:08:53 2002:

http://www.junghansusa.com/


#101 of 215 by bru on Wed Apr 17 04:37:22 2002:

r.e. 89  No.  Do not get one of those clocks.  Graboids can track you by the
signal they put out.  (This is a reference to "Tremors 3")


#102 of 215 by jaklumen on Wed Apr 17 04:51:39 2002:

resp:91  Smell the stenchy fart coming from my huge dumbass.  That's 
right, take a big whiff.  I may be a huge dumbass, but I can admit I'm 
wrong and learn, and you're a dolt bent on riling everyone up.


#103 of 215 by krj on Wed Apr 17 19:43:07 2002:

The network connection is down.  From the party log, it looks like it went
down at 15:15.


#104 of 215 by russ on Thu Apr 18 00:32:50 2002:

Login      Name               TTY  Idle  Login Time   Location   Work Phone
i        Walter Cramer        *u2        Apr 17 19:49
jazz     the Jazz-man          uc     1  Apr 17 20:25 Van M.     rules
keesan   Sindi Keesan          p3        Apr 17 19:50
rcurl    Rane Curl            *s9        Apr 17 20:17
russ     Russ Cage            *u1        Apr 17 20:29

finger @arbornet.org
finger: connect: Host is unreachable
[arbornet.org]

Looks like the internet connection is down.
.


#105 of 215 by davel on Thu Apr 18 12:25:20 2002:

      8:23am  up 2 days, 17:49,  2 users,  load average: 0.12, 0.09, 0.00
    User     tty       login@  idle   JCPU   PCPU  what
    davel    ttyrb     8:21am            1         w
    tpryan   ttysc     8:10am     3      5      1  more -d -q

    finger @arbornet.org
    [arbornet.org]
    finger: connect: Host is unreachable

It looks like we're still off the net.


#106 of 215 by cmcgee on Thu Apr 18 13:27:36 2002:

Could some knowledgeable staff person explain what's happening?  Is it
time to send emails from another address to stop the bouncing of my Grex
emails?


#107 of 215 by scott on Thu Apr 18 13:47:31 2002:

Ah, well:  "We're off the net".

Trouble is that support for our DSL is only during business hours.  I think
Valerie was going to call when they open.


#108 of 215 by eeyore on Thu Apr 18 15:35:25 2002:

Grex is currently running verrrrrryyy slooooooowwww


#109 of 215 by scott on Thu Apr 18 17:33:22 2002:

Grex is back online, and has much mail to catch up on.


#110 of 215 by lynne on Thu Apr 18 17:38:18 2002:

Several times in the past few days I've had Grex freeze up and then kick me
off the telnet connection.


#111 of 215 by rksjr on Fri Apr 19 10:55:17 2002:

Re. #106: Along with cmcgee, I too would like "some knowledgeable staff
person [to] explain [what happened]" given that I was probably the user at
IP address front0.cpl.org
last | more
krj       ttyr9    216.93.104.37    Wed Apr 17 15:37 - 15:52 (00:14)
exit      ttyq4    216.93.104.37    Wed Apr 17 15:28 - 15:28 (00:00)
phenix    ttyq4    216.93.104.37    Wed Apr 17 15:28 - 15:28 (00:00)
exit      ttyr5    216.93.104.37    Wed Apr 17 15:19 - 15:19 (00:00)
robh      ttyr5    216.93.104.37    Wed Apr 17 15:15 - 15:19 (00:03)
exit      ttyt5    front0.cpl.org   Wed Apr 17 15:04 - 15:04 (00:00)
tk51      ttyua    207.203.64.97    Wed Apr 17 15:04 - 15:13 (00:08)
exit      ttyt5    front0.cpl.org   Wed Apr 17 15:04 - 15:04 (00:00)
kolonya   ttys3    212.253.180.176  Wed Apr 17 15:04 - 15:15 (00:11)
sxp       ttyre    151.204.224.98   Wed Apr 17 15:03 - 15:06 (00:02)


#112 of 215 by cmcgee on Fri Apr 19 12:49:30 2002:

Aw, I know what happened now.  It wasn't us, it was them.  Our staff couldn't
fix the problem because it wasn't our equipment that was causing the problem.
Had to wait on the convenience of our DSL provider.


#113 of 215 by keesan on Mon Apr 22 15:57:09 2002:

Is the DSL provider the reason that lynx is now fetching webpages at 96
bytes/sec and was also doing so last week?  Mail is being sent okay.


#114 of 215 by oval on Wed Apr 24 17:22:12 2002:

i can't ssh in. only telnet...and i don't think it's a queue thing ..



#115 of 215 by gull on Thu May 2 16:49:13 2002:

Anyone else getting lots of spam from someone named Sasha?  I've gotten over
40 copies of the same message in less than an hour, and they're still
coming.


#116 of 215 by gull on Thu May 2 16:52:31 2002:

Incidentally, a point of irony:  The subject line is "Block Bad Content".


#117 of 215 by oval on Thu May 2 18:36:50 2002:

i haven't .. but all the sashas i've ever known have been creepy.



#118 of 215 by gull on Thu May 2 19:06:56 2002:

The mail seems to have stopped.


#119 of 215 by jp2 on Thu May 2 22:41:23 2002:

This response has been erased.



#120 of 215 by keesan on Thu May 2 23:04:48 2002:

No Sashas recently but I have received porno mail from Ukraine.


#121 of 215 by other on Sat May 4 03:07:43 2002:

re#119:  I think that borders on paranoia.  I would be very reluctant to make
any changes on that basis.


#122 of 215 by keesan on Sat May 4 15:32:46 2002:

Today I just got one Viagra and one Penis Enlargement spam.  I am still
waiting for a good explanation of how to use the Pine email filter to filter
out emails with these words in them, if that is possible.


#123 of 215 by gelinas on Sun May 5 01:59:51 2002:

No good explanation is possible:  filtering is not a feature of the version
of Pine currently installed on grex.


#124 of 215 by keesan on Sun May 5 02:07:35 2002:

Is it a feature of the latest Pine, or that at M-Net?  How hard is it to
upgrade Pine? (Can you do it for grex?).  Three spams a day is getting to be
a nuisance even with Spamcop to help.


#125 of 215 by gelinas on Sun May 5 02:56:48 2002:

*three*?  I'd be glad to get so few each day.

No, I can't upgade the Pine here; I've made no progress on procmail, either.

It looks like filtering was added by version 4.33, but I don't know when.


#126 of 215 by oval on Sun May 5 09:02:04 2002:

but of you use procmail .. you CAN



#127 of 215 by remmers on Sun May 5 12:29:46 2002:

Grex uses a non-standard hierarchical system for the location of
inboxes, and the version of procmail installed here isn't smart
enough to figure it out.  But you can get procmail to work by
setting the MAIL variable explicitly in the .procmailrc file:
for example

    MAIL=/var/spool/mail/g/e/gelinas



#128 of 215 by keesan on Sun May 5 14:05:53 2002:

Remmers or oval, can you post a quick explanation of how to use procmail at
grex?  I thought it was something I had to download.  Do I have a .procmailrc
file?  I would like to filter out anything coming from *stayhard@hotmail.com
as I got cstayhard and astayhard in the past 24 hours (with predictable
subject line).  Is that possible?


#129 of 215 by jmsaul on Sun May 5 14:10:11 2002:

It's even simple once you know how to use procmail.


#130 of 215 by rcurl on Sun May 5 18:43:46 2002:

Is there a down side to using procmail?


#131 of 215 by keesan on Sun May 5 20:38:58 2002:

Can procmail filter out any address that has stayhard@hotmail.com?  Such as
astayhard, cstayhard, and today stayhdard?  s?t?a?y?h?a?r?d?   

The down side would be that you could not report this spam to hotmail.com as
you would never see it.


#132 of 215 by oval on Sun May 5 21:15:46 2002:

you need to make these 2 files named .procmailrc and .forward in your home
directory. 

the .procmailrc file could look like this:

MAILDIR=$HOME/mail 
DEFAULT=$HOME/mail
SHELL=/bin/sh
LINEBUF=4096
LOGFILE=$HOME/.procmail/procmail.log (mkdir .procmail, touch
.procmail/procmail.log - CLEAN IT ONCE A MONTH)
LOG="--- Logging ${LOGFILE} 4 ${LOGNAME}, " (WILL GIVE add info procmail.log
file)
VERBOSE=off 
PATH=(could someone fill this in?)
FORMAIL=/usr/local/bin/formail
SENDMAIL=/usr/lib/sendmail

* ^From.*stayhard@hotmail.com
/dev/null

look at the LOGFILE line. you will need to create the .procmail directory,
then touch the procmail.log file, the 2 commands are listed in parenthesis.
do not include them in you .procmailrc file. don't include any comments in
parenthesis. this will filter anything that says 'stayhard@hotmail.com' to
a blackhole of nothingness. you make one for the subject line too, and can
specify a 'spam' folder or something if you prefer that over /dev/null.

the .forward file i *think* will look like this:

"|IFS =' ';exec /usr/local/bin/procmail #[login name]" (include the quotes;
[login name] is your login name)

could someone fill in the PATH line above? i will test this out later. you
could also do a 'man procmail'.

welcome to the world of linux sindi! :) heh



#133 of 215 by keesan on Sun May 5 22:12:37 2002:

I will try to extract this response and make it into a file, thanks.
What do you mean by 'touch'?
To also exclude stayhdard do I put *stay*h*a*r*d?  The latest was trying to
sell something 'legal'.

So this will send spam to a folder that I clean out once in a while?
What is dev/nul?


#134 of 215 by gelinas on Mon May 6 00:16:38 2002:

The latest version of procmail *does* understand grex's heirarchical mail
spool, and I've volunteered to build it, I just haven't yet.  A few other
projects are beginning to come together, so I should be able to get back to
procmail RSN.


#135 of 215 by keesan on Mon May 6 00:57:15 2002:

So I should wait until the latest version is at grex?  Thanks for volunteering
- wish you could also upgrade PINE to filter mail as it sounds simpler.

MSN writes back that astayhard@msn.com is a forged address and they will
prosecute.


#136 of 215 by oval on Mon May 6 03:38:11 2002:

sindi, you could put just *stayhard if you want. 

touch will just make the procmail.log file. try it. 

mkdir .procmail
touch .procmail/procmail.log

it's not even neccessary if you don't want a log..

/dev/null is the blackhole of nothingness.



#137 of 215 by keesan on Mon May 6 15:27:37 2002:

So touch sends all the spam to one place where I can look at it?
I cannot just do *stayhard.  Today I got satayhard@yahoo.com and also
stayhahrd@excite.com.  Some are for Viagra, some for legal stuff, and they
are being routed through Poland and Korea.  This is getting to be a sport,
maybe I don't want to filter them.  Except I do get some normal mail
which I would like to read without being swamped by three spams
for each real mail (the recent ratio is gettin worse).
I think I still need PATH.  Perhaps someone could post, in some readily
accessible file at grex, templates for creating the two needed files,
that everyone could use.  Or even a little program that steers the user
through the needed changes (make it part of the Change program, like
password?).
Thanks for all the help and I hope I can take advantage of it soon.


#138 of 215 by remmers on Mon May 6 17:10:42 2002:

Hm, incorporating procmail setup into "change" is a nice idea!


#139 of 215 by gull on Mon May 6 18:49:53 2002:

Re #137: 'touch' is a program that creates zero-length files, or changes the
modification time of an existing file.  That's all it does.  In this case,
it's being used to create a logfile for procmail to append to, if I
understand correctly.


#140 of 215 by keesan on Mon May 6 19:10:59 2002:

Remmers, do I hear you volunteering?


#141 of 215 by gull on Mon May 6 20:57:28 2002:

Things are really slow, at the moment.  Especially logins via ssh.  
Load average is around 30, which is high, but I've seen it that high 
without this kind of slowdown before.


#142 of 215 by gull on Mon May 6 21:02:17 2002:

Also...and maybe this is a feature I just never noticed before...when I 
telnetted in from my FreeBSD machine, Grex didn't ask for my username, 
just my password.  (It skipped straight to "gull's Password:")  My 
username is also 'gull' on that machine -- is telnet passing it 
through, somehow?



#143 of 215 by remmers on Tue May 7 00:06:43 2002:

Hm.  That's standard behavior with ssh, but I've never encountered
it with telnet.


#144 of 215 by mdw on Tue May 7 00:48:28 2002:

Some versions of telnet can do that.  Most modern versions have a "-a"
flag that turns it on, or "set autologin" in .telnetrc can also turn it
on.  I've also found versions where it defaults on - in theory it should
be possible to turn that *off*...


#145 of 215 by gelinas on Tue May 7 02:14:34 2002:

I've only seen it with kerberised telnet.


#146 of 215 by mdw on Tue May 7 02:44:43 2002:

I found it in debian telnet the other day.  Luckily I had a k5 telnet
client that didn't have this annoying behavior.


#147 of 215 by mcnally on Tue May 7 03:33:56 2002:

  Was the spam from "satayhard" tips on how to cook Malaysian style?


#148 of 215 by mooncat on Tue May 7 17:44:50 2002:

re #115- I chastised my cat about sending spam and Sasha has promised 
not to send you, or anyone else, any more mail. Though, she's not sure 
what all the fascination is about the whole internet thing, she just 
likes the mice. ;)

re #117- Well, you should come meet my cat... she's a bit too fluffy to 
be successfully creepy.


#149 of 215 by oval on Tue May 7 18:29:57 2002:

good idea remmers.

i think you're not understanding me. i have yet to test what i posted, but
once i finally get around to it, i will email you the two text files. that's
all they are. 2 text file i will omit the logfile to simplify things.



#150 of 215 by gull on Tue May 7 18:34:37 2002:

Re #148: Thanks. ;)


#151 of 215 by oval on Tue May 7 18:51:02 2002:

jesus. i sound like sarkhel in 149.

i am so sorry.



#152 of 215 by mooncat on Tue May 7 21:53:07 2002:

re#150- no problem. :)


#153 of 215 by coreyh on Tue May 7 23:22:40 2002:

I'm using freebsd also.  I turn off the autologin with the -K option.


#154 of 215 by keesan on Wed May 8 02:27:45 2002:

I think the satayhard spam came via Poland or Korea, not Indonesia.
The Koreans bounced my mail informing them of the open relay.  I have heard
they don't care.


#155 of 215 by scott on Wed May 8 13:29:05 2002:

(little random typos in spam is usually on purpose, to get around spam
filtering.  You're filtering "stayhard", but "satayhard" gets past the filter)


#156 of 215 by brighn on Wed May 8 13:39:27 2002:

"Satayhard"? Erotic Indian cuisine?


#157 of 215 by jmsaul on Wed May 8 14:22:14 2002:

Satay's not Indian.


#158 of 215 by brighn on Wed May 8 14:49:50 2002:

Thai. I'm half-awake this morning.
(Somebody else already made a similar joke anyway)


#159 of 215 by jmsaul on Wed May 8 21:24:33 2002:

Thai, Indonesian, Malay... the concept got around.


#160 of 215 by jep on Mon May 13 15:25:18 2002:

I can't connect via Backtalk.  I had to telnet in.


#161 of 215 by aruba on Mon May 13 17:03:49 2002:

The terminal server was hanging up on me earlier, but now it seems OK.


#162 of 215 by jep on Mon May 13 17:25:01 2002:

Still can't connect via Backtalk.


#163 of 215 by other on Mon May 13 17:55:19 2002:

ditto.  httpd dead?


#164 of 215 by jhudson on Thu May 16 00:50:55 2002:

It's working now.


#165 of 215 by rksjr on Wed May 22 16:08:39 2002:

Bug or feature?

  I have been unable to suspend emacs via the "C-z" routine
when emacs is accessed from the menu as "!emacs".

  Attempts to use the "C-z" routine result in nonresponse to
the "fg" or "%emacs" routines and have required exercising
the terminal hangup option.

  Is there a means of suspending emacs when emacs is
accessed from the menu as "!emacs"?


#166 of 215 by tpryan on Fri May 24 11:09:02 2002:

        Help!  I was trying to clean out my ~tpryan/mbox and when
I exited, I was left with a lot less then I intended.  I have a 
lot, including Job Search infor in there.  Is there a way for
it to be restored from the last save?
        Why did this happen?
        I keep on getting punished for trying to clean it out.
Previous times, I would spend time and before being able to 
save it, I get booted from the system.


#167 of 215 by russ on Sun May 26 02:20:17 2002:

nslookup has stopped working again.


#168 of 215 by bdh3 on Sun May 26 07:40:45 2002:

Works for me.


#169 of 215 by keesan on Sun May 26 15:43:33 2002:

A few minutes ago I was terminated after hitting Enter after reading an item,
and getting an error message including the number 12, out of memory and the
word forking.  Was this a fork bomb?


#170 of 215 by glenda on Mon May 27 01:21:09 2002:

No, it was not a fork bomb.  The error was:  Error 12 out of memory trying
to fork.  Forking is a program trying to spawn another process as a normal
function of the program.  When several such things happen at once you can have
a momentary halt because there isn't enough ram to handle all of them.


#171 of 215 by keesan on Mon May 27 02:13:13 2002:

So what program was doing this?


#172 of 215 by bdh3 on Mon May 27 05:14:04 2002:

Yours.


#173 of 215 by keesan on Mon May 27 13:49:55 2002:

Why did it do that yesterday when I pressed the enter key but this hads never
happened before or since - was something else using up the memory?


#174 of 215 by glenda on Mon May 27 14:53:24 2002:

Everyone else that was logged on and all the accounting/auditing programs.
I got the same message around the same time as you did.  I went upstairs to
wake STeve up and by the time I came back downstairs everything was ok, so
I told him to go back to sleep.


#175 of 215 by janc on Tue May 28 23:10:59 2002:

Actually, it could have been a fork bomb or something similar.  
Something was running Grex out of resources so that it couldn't do 
ordinary forks.  Grex's defenses against fork bombs will generally 
terminate them pretty quickly, but there may be a brief period in which 
you'll see problems like this before the system sets itself right 
again.  Grex has two layers of fork bomb defenses - the kernel blocks 
will kill the more aggressive fork bombs pretty quickly - probably 
within ten seconds.  Robocop responds more slowly, possibly taking as 
long as 8 minutes, but kills more categories of annoying programs, 
including memory bombs.


#176 of 215 by gelinas on Wed May 29 04:28:38 2002:

Do we know why the network goes away every now and again?  traceroutes tend
to end at rback0.flnt.mi.voyager.net.


#177 of 215 by tpryan on Wed May 29 22:45:17 2002:

        Any news on when I can get my ~tpryan/mbox restored to the 
last back-up, 1/27/2002?


#178 of 215 by krj on Thu May 30 20:00:02 2002:

Grex has been yo-yoing on and off the net.  You can sort of see the 
interrupts if you look at the party log.


#179 of 215 by neevor on Mon Jun 3 05:42:22 2002:

grex isn't updated enough.


#180 of 215 by jaklumen on Mon Jun 3 08:18:32 2002:

Grex doesn't have money enough.

It's a non-profit organization and is essentially run by volunteers.  
That isn't really conducive to bleeding-edge technology.


#181 of 215 by jmsaul on Sun Jun 9 04:04:25 2002:

This may have been reported already, but if you do a finger, you'll see four
sessions reporting idle time in days.


#182 of 215 by jp2 on Sun Jun 9 17:53:22 2002:

This response has been erased.



#183 of 215 by other on Sun Jun 9 21:05:21 2002:

I built my own control window which provides some additional 
functionality and ease-of-use to backtalk.  I know it's easier to 
complain, but if you really try, you might be able to figure out 
something similar.


#184 of 215 by jp2 on Sun Jun 9 21:07:58 2002:

This response has been erased.



#185 of 215 by oval on Mon Jun 10 08:13:16 2002:

whereis nano



#186 of 215 by gelinas on Mon Jun 10 13:05:29 2002:

What is "nano"?


#187 of 215 by twinkie on Mon Jun 10 14:00:33 2002:

Nanoo Nanoo!



#188 of 215 by oval on Mon Jun 10 14:24:28 2002:

GNU clone of pico. http://www.nano-editor.org/



#189 of 215 by jp2 on Thu Jun 13 04:08:41 2002:

This response has been erased.



#190 of 215 by twinkie on Thu Jun 13 05:44:47 2002:

Strange...chfn worked fine for me.

Respond, pass, forget, quit, or ? for more options? !chfn
Use <return> to keep, or "none" to delete.
Name [Kevin Nicholls]? 
Location [none]? 
Work Phone [none]? 
Home Phone [none]? 
Finger information unchanged.



#191 of 215 by jp2 on Thu Jun 13 16:30:17 2002:

This response has been erased.



#192 of 215 by jazz on Thu Jun 13 17:42:47 2002:

        The implementation of ssh here has some problem passing on vars.

        Or, maybe, it doesn't like you.


#193 of 215 by jp2 on Thu Jun 13 17:52:45 2002:

This response has been erased.



#194 of 215 by mynxcat on Thu Jun 13 18:20:40 2002:

This response has been erased.



#195 of 215 by jp2 on Thu Jun 13 18:23:28 2002:

This response has been erased.



#196 of 215 by mynxcat on Thu Jun 13 18:54:09 2002:

This response has been erased.



#197 of 215 by russ on Sat Jun 15 01:03:13 2002:

We *still* have a modem with defective flow control, which disconnects
when an application (like sz) dumps more data than its buffer can handle
instead of dealing with it more gracefully.


#198 of 215 by keesan on Sat Jun 15 01:34:06 2002:

I fixed it at my end by dialing 761-5041, which always works for me when doing
fast downloads.  761-3000 almost never works unless grex is really clogged.
I hope some day someone can get around to removing the first modem in the
queue.  I also wonder if there is any progress on the 28.8K modems.  I had
to use grex to download a pdf file (a large one) just now after not being able
to connect to my ISP with lynx for DOS all day (other browers work but the
one I use tends to dump pdf files which are large, after trying to read them).


#199 of 215 by oval on Sun Jun 16 01:48:54 2002:

i've had a problem with pine. when i run it, the text is cut off on the side
and wraps over to the other side, and when i go into my inbox it's all warped
in tehre too. i've tried resetting up my terminal, but it doesn't fix it. any
ideas?



#200 of 215 by keesan on Sun Jun 16 14:03:46 2002:

Sometimes Control-L fixes problems with odd looking screens, or you might try
exiting and redialing (or retelnetting).


#201 of 215 by oval on Sun Jun 16 18:53:18 2002:

nah it happens everytime .. only the pine in grex, not my pine, or my other
shell's pine.



#202 of 215 by oval on Sun Jun 16 18:59:46 2002:

actually it's my terminal setting or something which i can't seems to fix.
ls -a looks like someone vomitted a bunch of words in my terminal.

my other account here does not have the same problem. i'll check out my .rc
files..

  :(



#203 of 215 by gelinas on Sun Jun 16 19:03:48 2002:

Check out your terminal settings, first:

        printenv TERM
and
        printenv TERMCAP

I usually use vt100, but I found that my xterminal passed its termtype to grex
and just messed up everything.


#204 of 215 by oval on Sun Jun 16 19:18:09 2002:

well it's fixed. everytime i ran 'change', it wouldn't fix it, and had my cols
set to 195, while the other account is set to 95.

'stty cols 95' seems to have fixed it. my terminal is vt102, but used to be
vt100, perhaps the switch did screw it up ..



#205 of 215 by gull on Mon Jun 17 19:09:42 2002:

/a is full.


#206 of 215 by jor on Mon Jun 17 22:46:00 2002:

        /usr is at 99%


#207 of 215 by gelinas on Wed Jun 19 22:12:23 2002:

I just discovered that ssh does not work very well with grex's password-aging
system:  the report is merely "permission denied".  Switching to telnet
revealed that the password had expired and needed to be changed.  'twould be
really nice if ssh would let folks in and then something else would prompt
for a new password.  Or, if nothing else, ssh could say, "Try telnet".


#208 of 215 by jor on Fri Jun 21 13:04:38 2002:

        I'm wondering how automated the agora rollover is.
        U.S. Naval Observatory estimate for start of summer
        today is 9:24. Let's see how timely we are.


#209 of 215 by davel on Fri Jun 21 13:33:07 2002:

Unless Walter's written something, it's not automated at all.


#210 of 215 by aruba on Fri Jun 21 14:50:41 2002:

Right, I believe Walter does the change manually.


#211 of 215 by i on Sat Jun 22 02:04:33 2002:

The critical /bbs/conflist file lives under an old version control system;
i'd have very little interest in trying to write all the boring check-for-
and-handle-all-possible-errors code in any case.

Peeking in /bbs/agora42 suggests that our fair fw entered the first item of
the new agora about 8:30 last evening (Ann Arbor time).  I'll actually do
the roll when the fates have the right person ready to get the very first
response of summer in.


#212 of 215 by jep on Sat Jun 22 02:27:14 2002:

Go ahead, Walter, I'm ready.


#213 of 215 by carson on Sat Jun 22 03:51:15 2002:

(hmm.  it was about six months ago that the race to become the first
to respond to a new Agora led to an irrational feud that has yet to cease.)


#214 of 215 by davel on Sat Jun 22 13:46:05 2002:

I didn't think Walter had written something to automate it.  I wouldn't.


#215 of 215 by jor on Sat Jun 22 16:02:30 2002:

        When I mentioned auto-agora-roll on M-Net they
        laughed at me. Laughed I tell you.

        My only consolation will be to dig back
        to six months ago.
 


There are no more items selected.

You have several choices: