222 new of 293 responses total.
I'm dialed in now. Thanks again, Scott.
Working good. Thank you.
Thankyouthankyouthankyou.
Thanks from me and from dpfitzen, who phoned yesterday to find out whether the attachment in her email might have caused grex to stop working for her. She writes that it is doing fine again now, thankfully.
RE.64: It wasn't so much random as it was what I was listening to.
The system is really slow giving login prompts tonight.
Still taking upwards of 50 seconds to get a login prompt.
I think the dialins may be down again. I got nothing beyond my own software's notice of a connect. Then I hung up and telnetted in from M-Net. I got in immediately with no delay.
Lynx has not been working for a while - just times out after taking forever to get the DNS number on the screen for any URL.
That might be a result of work on Gryps, which we use for a web proxy (among other things). I'll send an email to the appropriate staffer.
Still got long delays for login prompts on the dial-ins.
It just took 38 seconds between my software showing that I was connected, and Grex asking for my login.
Right, still getting long delays from the terminal server, and it has stopped saying "it may take a few seconds to connect". Instead I just get: /---------------------------------------------\ | CONNECT 14400 V42 | | <long delay> | | Grex is the Midnight Snack of Champs | | | | New to grex? Type help at the login prompt | | | | grex.cyberspace.org login: | \---------------------------------------------/
Item regarding the long delay for login prompt on the dial-ins: the usual note "Welcome to Grex! Please wait..." that I usually use as an indication that I can start typing, is missing.
Still getting 32-35 second delay, but my screen is saying all the right things. (it may take a few seconds....)
You people whine a lot.
this is probably not the appropriate place to post this but i'm having trouble using bbs with this putty client. i get the Ok prompt and repond or pass prompt but no posts. i tried redoing everything via 'change' but still nuttin. can anyone give me some advice?
Lynx is still not working - it finds the DNS number and says 'making HTTP connection to 123.44.....'.
Re #89: There's a note in the MOTD about the proxy server being down. That means Lynx isn't going to work until it's fixed.
oval, try
printenv TERM
or
echo $TERM
I'd guess it *won't* say vt100. You could then try
setenv TERM vt100
and see what happens.
resp 87: Speak for yourself, Phillie boy.
uhhhh... looks like exiting and logging back in after running change in neccessary. oops.
I have now begun to receive spam sent to comments@grex, board@grex, and possibly other alias addresses. All in favor of spammers being subjected to spontaneous combustion, say "Aye!" (You don't have to type it in, though.)
you could always get the senate to add spammers to the new 'life behind bars' bill - see Nucking Futts item.
I could, if I had a few hundred million dollars to strategically give away for the privilege of writing my own legislation...
(ssh appears to leave birthday announcements out.)
The idle timer seems to be failing. I got a whole bunch of messages telling me I would be disconnected for idleness, but the disconnect never happened.
Hmmm... it's possible that the number of open connections dropped between the warning and its execution, of course.
Whatever the problem was with teh dial-ins, it's fixed.
They are behaving better. Thank you. even to the point of hanging up when I log in as bye to get disconnected. before it was just handing me another log-in.
I think pwho is broken: pwohbash-2.05$ pwoh wohpwohpowhpwhowphobash: pwoh: command not found w bash-2.05$ pwho User Started Channel bash-2.05$ pwoh bash: pwoh: command not found bash-2.05$ pwoh bash: pwoh: command not found bash-2.05$ wohpwohpowhpwhowphow bash: wohpwohpowhpwhowphow: command not found bash-2.05$ hppwohwph bash: hppwohwph: command not found bash-2.05$ pwohpwohp owbash: pwohpwohp: command not found h pbash-2.05$ owh hpbash: owh: command not found bash-2.05$ pwohpwhpop hbash: pwohpwhpop: command not found bash-2.05$ h bash: h: command not found bash-2.05$
It's also possible that no one was using party at the time. According to the log, party seems to have been empty from 14:53 to 15:00 this afternoon.
I think polytarp is broken: See resp:102
I'm sorry, but he's working exactly the way he's designed to.
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What I said in item 3.
Most of the users on the system are acting like complete untersmench. This MUST be corrected. Of course, like all systems of class, I, the creator, am in the highest. Feel free to ask me who is untersmench, and who it not.
so pwho returned a null set . untersmench probably returns a null set as well.
Hmm. I spelt that word wrong!
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Dialing in to 3000 or 5041 gives me a blank screen. I repeated this several times just now. It worked earlier today. I can telnet.
Ditto at this time.
We had that problem earlier, too. Couldn't get on without dialing in, so couldn't post to say so. Tried repeatedly with no success. Waited maybe 15 minutes, tried again, got on. We were dialing 5041, but I suspect that it was in use & we got something else.
It works now. 5041. Scott said something about replacing the hub again.
Why is Grex chasing away those that dial into the advertised
number of 761-3000. I dial, and no answer. 5041 worked.
?
Scott explained that there are actually two sets of modems in use at grex and they are not all interchangeable but he will try his best to fix things. The 28.8 modems came without instructions so are not yet installed. Perhaps some other grexer with infinite experience can get them working. Perhaps grex could start telling people to dial 761-5041 instead, as this does not crash downloads with zmodem or kermit the was 3000 does, if it is not possible to simply switch the modems on these two lines.
Grex (pine) is taking forever to send email and I cannot get out of the wait (I don't know if waiting would help) even with Ctl-C, I have to hang up. Tried this twice. Things worked earlier today.
(assorted weirdness going on. system's going slow, there was a spike in the load, and, as of right now, attempts to telnet in are closed upon login.)
did grex get mail-bombed by some evil slimeball tonight>?
(valerie reports that Grex is closed to telnet connections while the mail spool catches up. no bomb, just a minor op error.)
Advertised number of 761-3000 is still sending people away.
Hmm. I'd changed that modem because of the complaints about flow control. Tim, do you get connected when you dial 761-5041? There are two different types of modems in the pool, and I have to be careful that fixing one person's annoyance doesn't cause complete failure for somebody else.
Scot, thanks for trying so hard. You can't win (;
I would be willing to do some online research to try to find either the instructions for the modems that dang got, or another set of used modems that come with the manual, if someone will tell me what to search for. My ISP says they have Portmaster with 48 modems and they think that is the minimum number, but I ran across a 1996 reference to a PM3 with 20 modem possibility that was being used with 7 modems. The ISP started wtih 56K modems so has no old ones lying around unused.
When I dial 761-5041 I get connected. When I dial 761-3000 I get ignored.
Isn't 761300 a 2400 baud modem? Or has it been upgraded?
761-3000 works fine for me...but i have to wait a few rings for it to answer.
That may mean that the modem on that line has now been turned off, so that it eventually hunts to another line, or something like that.
Not likely. Dunno how grex is provisioned from the CO but the only time a number dialed will hunt a trunk is before the first ring. Thus this is more likely a DTR-not on the RI. Its been thankfully a number of months since so I forget but the last time I delt with such an issue it was the modem cable and not the modem itself. Also one should consider the bigger picture, just because yesterday one number on an hunt trunk rolled over to the next is no reason to assume the same is today or that it will in the future. Most of the folk that know how a POTS should work are long since gone and been replaced by 'yo's on minimum wage who haven't a clue unless the hi-tech laptop tells them. Welcome to the world of 'deregulation'....(you pay more now for less).
Backtalk is down.
Grex's net connection seems really sluggish today, but maybe it's just my path.
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Same here.
Slowness is gone and the web server is back. Apparently there were vandal problems. From the motd: Grex's web server is temporarily down, and Grex is very slow due to vandals requesting the same web page over and over again. -vm
Backtalk is still down.
See #20 in the System Announcements item (#3). Grex is being hit with a DDoS attack. The webserver has been taken down to reduce the impact.
Cannot send out mail - is that related to the webserver?
A couple of hours ago e-mail to me from her work at cornerhealth.org was bounced, saying Grex was not accepting e-mail from that address. Any ideas why?
I got an odd message after trying to send some mail, something about "grex.cyberspace.org does not seem to exist", or words to that effect (they scrolled off because of the Agora login message).
My wife tried (again) to send mail to me from cornerhealth.org. Here are the basics of the bounce message she got: The following addresses had permanent fatal errors - dpc@cyberspace.org Reason: 553 I can't accept mail from XXX@cornerhealth.org via w162.z208177186.det-mi.dsl.cnc.net. What, if anything, is Grex trying to say here?
(that it's overloaded with connection attempts from other places? possibly? just maybe?)
Backtalk is back. The system is a bit quicker this afternoon, too. Many thanks to the hero(es) who have been dealing with this mess. If you folks aren't the best, then you're definitely up and coming contenders.
A transformer supplying the building grex is in, and the whole block, apparently blew up. Grex was down until we were pretty sure power was back (ie, when I stopped by to see if the power was on a few minutes ago). The power does work now. The DSL router is deader than a door nail now though -- I guess it didn't survive whatever the transformer did.
Since the DSL router has departed this life, does its demise mean that (1) all off-site incoming e-mail is being bounced, and/or (2) that all outgoing e-mail is being blocked? FWIW, the last off-site e-mail I received came in at 12:51 p.m. August 1.
(outgoing mail wouldn't necessarily be blocked, but it's not going anywhere until a DSL router is put in place. incoming would be another matter; I know that [either] we [or another system] have had mail queued for delivery at an alternate location in the past. dunno what's being done in this instance.) (glad to hear Grex itself is OK. what's the prognosis for getting another router? do we need a bake sale?)
/a/r/c/rcurl who raheim ttypf Aug 2 11:56 (216.93.104.37) rcurl ttytb Aug 2 11:57 (216.93.104.37) All alone, by the telephone.... Tra la trala....
Generally mail that can't be delivered due to network problems is held at the system trying to send it. Usually error messages are sent back to the sender periodically until the message is about 4 days old, and then it's bounced. So if Grex can get a new router within the next three days, you probably won't lose any mail. Mailing lists may kick you off, though, depending on how the software is configured.
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The router has been replaced, at unknown expense. Grex itself has slightly more generous time limits for mail that can't be sent right away -- it will wait a whole day before complaining about queued mail (the default is 4 hours), and will wait 5 days before bouncing it (default is 3 days).
I *AM* on a dialup, and sz is refusing to work claiming that I'm telnetted in.
Okay, it worked that time. It must have freaked out on the abandoned process, which I deleted.
From the MOTD: Grex's web service is back up. It turns out the problem was not an attack, but instead somebody trying to host an extremely popular web page on Grex. Who was the "extremely popular web page"?
It had something to do with IRC bots. It wasn't a big page, but basically it suddenly had a huge number of people accessing it.
Now I'm confused. Was it too many web hits, a power supply problem, or both?
Sounds like three separate problems, consecutively:
1) A popular web page saturated the DSL link
as that got resolved
2) A transformer blew its coil
which resulted in
3) A dead router
Dave, your problem with cornerhealth may be related to anti-spamming rules.
(Just a guess; I've not tried to look at grex's mail configuration.)
"cornerhealth.org" does not have an address record in DNS, and
it's "mail-exchange" record eventually resolves to something to the
w162.z208177186.det-mi.dsl.cnc.net name you mention. In other words,
a quick check would make it seem that someone is claiming to be something
(someone) they are not.
Some might argue that is not sufficient cause to reject mail; I don't
know what grex is actually doing.
grex sendmail will say "I can't accept mail from", but will also always include a url that points to badsys.html after that. This is why reporting the complete error message is of value; people like Joe who don't know much about mail at grex, would still have given you a much better answer if they had known about the URL. Actually, the url points to a very old web page complaining mostly about obselete reasons why we didn't accept mail from certain machines (in the bad old days with ppp, where path mtu discover broke some things,) but at the end, I think we also had something about that non-specific catchall, spam. That is to say, we block mail from machines which we think only send spam. We've done this for a while, but we've recently become much more aggressive about this. We've seen spam from machines at "cnc.net" for a long time. The earliest record I have is from 20001201, when I blocked one subnet I think in San Jose California, which appeared to be used for DSL lines. Another staffer blocked more DSL lines in what might be Miami, Florida, 20011130, for sending "smut spam". That same staffer added *.cnc.net on 20020706, after apparently concluding that the entire domain ".cnc.net" was only used for sending "Spammitty spam!"
question is what can grex do about its susceptibility to somebody setting up a grex web page as a pointer to something else that gets a lot of hits. I mean what if somebody sets up a grex web page to use as a pointer to some popular porn site or something. it would be easy for someone to use such methods to attack grex. just that one page getting all those hits slowed down grex considerably.
So, we should stop hosting web pages then?
<carson suspects that a certain someone misunderstands the problem, but that someone is trying, to say the least>
Threetimes in a row kermit has dialed, gotten nothing, then redialed before reaching grex.
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Grex was slashdotted?
That's JP's interpretation of the situation. But who, besides grexers, would note a DoS against M-Net?
Dialing works okay now.
Re #164: MNetters. Like me.
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(I know, Joe; 'twas a poor attempt at a joke.)
Hmm... with 37 people on, I'm 5th in the telnet queue.
is grex a little slow tonight?
Some e-mail sent to me on Tuesday still has not arrived.
Occasionally I get this when logging in, but not always: Warning: Server lies about size of server public key: actual size is 767 bits vs. announced 768. Warning: This may be due to an old implementation of ssh. So is it my ssh that may be outdated?
Oh yeah, and why only on certain ports or at certain times (I'm not sure which it is)
I've thought it was the grex sshd. I don't worry about it, though.
Neither do I, but I'd been seeing it for a while and thought I'd finally bring it up. I did find it interesting though that it doesn't always happen.
Well, do you start counting at 0 or 1?
so, I was reading agora and I got kicked off for being idle. my conference activity wasn't saved which annoyed me highly. so, I put 'set save' in my .cfonce, and 'lo and behold, picospan segfaults when you do something as preposterous as that.
is it 'set autosave' ? that doesn't seem to segfault. I'm still trying to figure out why 'set save' segfaults but really no other set commands or random strings do.
(try "set autosave" instead.)
A grexer sent e-mail to me last Wednesday, however, I did not receive the "you have new mail" notice until today (Sunday, sometime between 9:40 am and 7:19 pm), and I have logged on five times since Wednesday. Does the "you have new mail" notice appear only when e-mail arrives from outside of the Grex system?
Nope. What is the timestamp in the "From" line at the start of this message in your mailbox? That time should be the time that the mail was actually delivered to your mailbox, which should be closely correlated to when you see "You have new mail", if you're logged in and not idle. That time should also be later than the timestamps in the "Received" headers, which should track where mail was received by intermediate points, which is typically where mail delivery delays happen.
Re #181: Even viewing Pine's "Display of full headers", I can see nothing in the "From:" line after "...@cyberspace.org>".
It's not "From:" it's "From ". However, pine may be showing it as "Return-Path:". In which case, look at the time in the next line, which should begin "Received:". Comparing that time with the time in each of the following "Received:" lines should show where the delay occurred.
(nothing at the VERY top of the message? just above the "Return-Path:" line? there's actually two "From:" lines in every e-mail, and the one to which Marcus refers should be at the very beginning of the message.)
(Joe slipped in, and is more correct than I in stating that it's a "From" line and not a "From:" line. confused yet?) :)
I think I've found the "from" line everyone is referring to, i.e. the line which begins "Received: (from". The following is the Pine "Display of full headers" for the e-mail in consideration with the sender's name and userid replaced by "[name]" and "[userid]" and the subject line erased: Received: (from [userid]@localhost) by grex.cyberspace.org (8.6.13/8.6.12) id LAA19150 for rksjr@grex.cyberspace.org; Wed, 14 Aug 2002 11:08:56 -0400 Date: Wed, 14 Aug 2002 11:08:56 -0400 From: [name] <[userid]@cyberspace.org> Message-Id: <200208141508.LAA19150@grex.cyberspace.org> To: rksjr@grex.cyberspace.org Subject: [subject line erased]
(wild. I just looked at some mail I have on Grex, and it *doesn't* have a "From" line either.)
No, that's not the line we were talking about, but if that is all there is, it's interesting. The "From " at the beginning of a line is part of th "mbox" format and is why a similarly placed "from" in the text of a message is preceded by an angle bracket: ">From this, we see . . ."
joot:x:0:1:John Remmers' root:/a/r/e/remmers/joot:/bin/csh That would appear to have a need-to-be-fixed-real-quick error.
Eh? Looks fine to me. (Unless you're being a grammatical purist & saying that it should be "Remmers's" instead of "Remmers'" - in which case I can only say that that's not a "need-to-be-fixed-real-quick error".)
Guess it depends on which grammar books you believe. Note that 'zoot' apparently subscribes to the opposite philosophy.
I'm just saying that you should fix it.
REAL QUICK
Thanks.
Nah.
Backtalk is running exceedingly slowly right now. It took a few minutes just to display this item, with it's 11 new responses.
Twice in the past week or so, e-mail to me from recycle.com has been bounced by Grex. My correspondent sent me hard- copy of the bounce message, which reads as follows: The original message was received at Tue, 20 Augs 2002 16:47:07 -0400 (EDT) from [192.168.254.13} ----- The following addresses had permanent fatal errors ----- <dpc@cyberspace.org> (reason: 553 <dpc@cyberspace.org>... One generation passeth away, and anothergeneration cometh: but the earth abideth for ever." ----- Transcript of session follows ----- ... while talking to grex.cyberspace.org.: >>>RCPT To:<dpc@cyberspace.org> <<< 553 <dpc@cyberspace.org>...One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever. 550 5.1.1 <dpc@cyberspace.org>... User unknown End of message. So what does *that* mean?
It means that the machine that tried to talk to grex is so badly configured it looks exactly like either a mail flooder or a spammer to grex. In fact, while these aren't things grex checked, the IP address from which the last such failure "dpc@cyberspace.org>...One" came has no reverse arpa ip-address to name DNS entry, and does not accept incoming mail connections. The particular check that was tripped here is an important one for grex; this was tripped more than 2100 times in the past 4 1/2 days, and at least at a quick glance at the logs, most of those failures probably are spammers. The kindest thing is probably to suggest that your correspondent find another mail system run by people who know what they're doing. Alternatively, you might ask your correspondent to ask his postmaster to familiarize himself with RFC 2821, and especially section 3.6, and to check his mail system with compliance to that section.
By the way, I finally figured out why replies I sent to a mailing list I'm on kept tripping off the spam filters. It turns out this mailing list's software likes to insert spaces into Subject lines to make them wrap prettily. Subject lines with lots of spaces seem to be one of the things Grex filters on.
(so does SpamAssassin, FWIW.)
What mailing list software was this?
LISTSERV 1.8d
Thanx for the help on both the "cornerhealth.org" problem and the "recycle.com" problem, folks. The answers make sense, even to someone technologically-challenged like me!
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(I see that error often. it only seems to be a problem when I try to ssh from here.)
Just a note here... I'd say that spouting a meaningless Bible verse instead of a descriptive message is very unfriendly to legitimate but mis-configured mail senders. A spammer isn't going to try to fix things (Grex isn't important enough), but the lack of information means that a legitimate sender *can't* fix things (especially if they have no alternative channel to get information about the real cause of the bounce, or no time to pursue it).
Re #180 through #188: (This posting is intended to be
posting #205.) Regarding my not seeing any "You have new
mail." notices when there was new mail in my inbox, I am
able to observe the "You have mail." notice in only three
locations:
(i.) the motd/log-in screen,
(ii.) the Lynx home page screen, and
(iii.) the bbs/PicoSpan introductory screen
(as well as an unread/no unread mail notice in my plan).
Within the last three days I have discovered (via sending
test e-mails to myself) that:
(i.) merely entering the Pine "Main Menu" (without
checking the inbox) turns-off the "You have new mail."
notice in both the motd/log-in screen and the Lynx home page
screen, i.e. it changes a "You have new mail." notice to a
"You have mail." notice. (I had incorrectedly assumed that
it would not.)
(ii.) receiving new mail in my inbox does not change the
"You have mail." notice in the bbs/PicoSpan introductory
screen into a "You have new mail." notice. (I had
incorrectedly assumed that it would.)
Therefore, my tentative hypothesis as to why I was not
seeing any "You have new mail." notices (and incorrectly
relying on their absence) when there was new mail in my
inbox is as follows.
I had entered the Pine "Main Menu" (to access the compose
option), which turned-off the "You have new mail." notice in
the motd/log-in screen and the Lynx home page screen, and I
had been relying on the bbs/PicoSpan introductory screen
notice as well, thus generating my incorrect assumption that
I did not have new mail.
On Sunday the 18th (when more mail arrived, this time from
outside the Grex system) a "You have new mail." notice
appeared in the motd/log-in screen, on which occasion I
discovered the mail that had probably been in my inbox since
Wednesday the 14th, through five loggings-in.
Having perused relevant portions of items 105 and 295 in
the Information conference regarding defining mailmsg in my
.cfonce files and establishing "a call to 'newmail' in my
.login file", I am making progress toward solving the
aforementioned noticing deficiency in my configuration.
Does anyone know why the default setting of the "You have
mail." notice in the bbs/PicoSpan introductory screen is
such that it is unaffected by the arrival of new mail in the
user's inbox?
I still noticed the same problem. I really wish someone would fix that. I might cry.
I suggest that the spam problem could be partially addressed by deleting every e-mail whose main part has a "Content-transfer-encoding" of base64. This appears to be used exclusively to get around filters.
It is also used for MS-Word documents, which some people send to me for quite legitimate reasons, even if I am not inclined to jump through the necessary hoops to actually read such documents. I might *want* to count such things "spam", but they are not.
Re #208: Sometimes you can tell the difference between "multipart/mixed" and a binary-encoded body just from the header. That wouldn't have worked on the spam I just got, but you could scan the body and see if there is a plain-text or HTML section, or not. If the main part of the mail is encoded as base64, rather than one or more of the *attachments*, you'd never know what the recipient was trying to send you anyway; all you'd have is the Subject: line.
Doesn't just about every MIME-encoded binary file get encoded as base64?
I think Russ's point was that those are included as attachments, with filenames, rather than as the body of the message in base64 with no filename. I don't know whether he's right that the latter are always spam, but that's certainly been my experience. But then again, I rarely am getting binary files in email other than spam.
(SpamAssassin apparently decodes base64, although it assigns a hefty point value for having to do so.)
Grex can decode base64 to look for "big5" spam. Apparently the chinese have caught on; grex found 3 "possible" matches in the past week, but nothing that it was willing to block.
If you REALLY want to find out exactly what the mail headers are, more $MAIL should do it.
The mail spool is full.
Hmm. It's still (or again) full: Filesystem kbytes used avail capacity Mounted on /dev/sd3h 1944365 1788367 0 102% /var/spool/mail
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It's still at 102%. Pine is unhappy with this.
Valerie started a reap.
<carson wonders if accumulating spam and out-of-date accounts might have something to do with it>
Well, the Grim Reaper's going to work as we speak, so I hear.
in this case, the Jolly Reaper...
Do you think she's actually enjoying it?
of course, silly <g>.
Is the full spool the reason why in the past few days, several times, I have typed in a to: address and then Pine froze and I had to hang up and redial?
I doubt it - that sounds like a line noise problem of some sort.
Why only when typing in the To: address?
Beats me - but sometimes line noise *is* data sensitive. If it's just a pine problem, then things like ^\ ^C ^Z might be useful. You might have to do a "stty sane^J" if this leaves you in raw mode.
I had to do an Alt-X to exit Kermit, hang up, and start over. It has not happened again recently.
I tried to use the "Preferences" in abalone to change my colors to the blue scheme, and got a backtalk crash.
Also: there are no fw settings available in abalone.
Current date and time: Fri Sep 13 10:19:30 EDT 2002 10:19am up 2 days, 21:27, 38 users, load average: 12.95, 12.31, 12.00 0 waiting, 38 remote + 2 local users; 72 max remote users
Mail bomber + something evil from Brazil.
> + something evil from Brazil. Hopefully not a Hitler clone..
Fixed the "preferences" crash in abalone. I get fairwitness settings in abalone. See the starred items on the pulldown menu.
Since I've received no response to my e-mail to "staff", I feel compelled
to post here...
Grex is currently blocking e-mail from a rather popular (and to some
of us, rather important) Michigan site. Perhaps this is due to the
fact that it changed IP addresses, which may have given it one which
was formerly used by a spammer. Nevertheless, this IP is no longer
associated with spammers.
This problem has been on-going since roughly Wednesday.
Will the Grex staff please:
1.) Unblock this site, and
2.) Inform the compilers of the spamblock list that their
information is out of date.
That's the problem with spamblock lists. They're maintained by private individuals with their own criteria and biases, and no accountability.
(random Michigan site?)
It isn't M-Net. I'm not sure why Russ is being secretive about the site name, but since he might have a reason, I won't say what it is. It isn't a spammer, though, and it's maintained by someone at least as technically skileld as Grex staff are.
Given that spam is a bit more than just an inconvenience for sites with
a limited amount of bandwidth, and that most spam-blocking efforts are run
on a volunteer basis with only the absence of complaints as a reward, I don't
think that looking for accountability is the right thing to be doing.
I disagree.
With which point?
That we should ignore accountability just because they're volunteers. One of these morons black-holed a mail server at UM for years just because it had once been hijacked by a spammer. This meant that it was a crapshoot whether your mail from umich would get through to certain sites or not -- it depended on which mail server happened to handle it. Repeated emails from UM staff didn't fix the problem.
That's a different sort of situation than what we're talking about
here, though I do wonder why the problem was unhandled for years - did the
maintainers of the blackhole refuse to correct the oversight, or ignore
requests? If so, then I'd say that alone makes it a different case.
My understanding is that they ignored requests, but I wasn't directly involved, I just heard about it from the people trying to take care of it. The point is that when you use someone else's blacklist, you're giving them a lot of power over who your users can exchange mail with. That's a problem, given that there are no guarantees about how the list is maintained. If this particula machine has been black-holed, someone's overzealous.
Any reason why the load average has been enormously high lately? 10:20am up 5 days, 21:28, 54 users, load average: 23.67, 23.22, 22.45
As a staffer I'm a bit insulted by Russ & Joe's attitude. We act in good faith, and when somebody manages to wade through the piles of email to 'staff' the block will likely be removed. However, if you're going to be a dick about this then so am I. What system, and why is Russ desirous of hiding it?
Whoa, hang on. I wasn't criticizing Grex's staff, I was criticizing the people who put together black hole lists. I had the impression that you guys were using one that someone else maintains. The rant was brought on by jazz's post suggesting that since those people are volunteers, they shouldn't be held accountable. They should be, because they cause a lot of damage and have been known to cop bad attitudes about it. In the case of Grex's staff, I assumed you guys would fix the problem as soon as someone got the chance. Unlike Russ, I'm aware that you guys are all volunteers and that Grex isn't the only thing you do. I've been there. I've never seen Grex's staff cop a bad attitude about a technical fix. About policy issues, yes, but I don't hold that against you in this context. Russ may be hiding the name out of fear that someone like polycrap will spoof tons of mail from it just to be funny. I'll email you.
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I'm saying I don't think they should be trusted without accountability. I wouldn't personally use those lists because of the lack of it. They should also be accountable in the courts if they black hole someone who shouldn't be and refuse to remove them (they probably are already). (DISCLAIMER: I am not talking about the Grex staff.)
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Look at what I said, and tell me where I said you shouldn't be allowed to use a black hole list. I'm saying that I wouldn't trust them, and that I think the people who put them together should be civilly liable if they black-hole someone who shouldn't be, and refuse to correct the problem quickly.
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I thought Grex maintained its own blacklist, instead of using someone else's? Personally, I use a blacklist service for one of my email accounts. I do take a cursory look at the subject headers before deleting the mail it flags, though. I don't see this as an infringement of anyone's rights. I also throw out mail that looks like credit card offers without opening it. Same thing.
Grex maintains its own list. We've recently discussed using an outside list to reduce the amount of work spent on our own list. But we also need to be able to react quickly - just like yesterday.
No, I didn't say that volunteers shouldn't be accountable for what they
do because they're volunteers, I said:
Given that spam is a bit more than just an inconvenience for sites
with
a limited amount of bandwidth, and that most spam-blocking efforts are run
on a volunteer basis with only the absence of complaints as a reward, I don't
think that looking for accountability is the right thing to be doing.
Translated as much for public benefit as I can, "there are more useful
things to do than blame people".
Re #253: They should be. Listing someone as a spammer is defamatory, and
in the case of a blacklist provided to the public causes actual
damage.
?Grex is banning mail from a Founder's machine?
Based on Scott's response, not since it was brought to their attention.
Grex may have its own version of the polytarp spam warming up: Date: Mon, 16 Sep 2002 18:24:03 -0400 From: Tomoko Reborn <tomoko2@cyberspace.org> To: jmsaul@cyberspace.org Hello Nice day see you To be continued Tomoko Zombie Got two copies of that.
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Already been squished. It was just going to people as they logged in.
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Cool.
Load average is now over 17.
Mail from site that I was pretty sure was being blocked
has now started flowing again.
Thank you for any attention given this.
Just FYI, I named the site in my e-mail to staff. I didn't feel that it was necessary to mention it publicly (why should I tell a vandal what site is used by a bunch of Grexers?). And Scott's attitude to what was a very reasonable and reasonably-phrased request is out of line. The problem is fixed now, but it took almost 6 days.
(FWIW, I like Russ in person but his responses here always strike me as pompous and insulting.)
First it was spam from tomoko2, then it's deviltom. Both are from 61.205.218.237 (z237.61-205-218.ppp.wakwak.ne.jp) - Can we wax this site for awhile or something?
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and, now..
newuser | 61.205.218.237| ttyt6|Wed Sep 18 12:58:43 2002
*sigh*
As a refresher, here's the request I made in response 236: >Will the Grex staff please: > >1.) Unblock this site, and >2.) Inform the compilers of the spamblock list that their > information is out of date. Somehow, Scott found this "attitude" insulting in #247: >As a staffer I'm a bit insulted by Russ & Joe's attitude. We act in good >faith, and when somebody manages to wade through the piles of email to 'staff' >the block will likely be removed. (I tried to expedite matters because I knew that a bunch of Grexers were being affected, and that traffic that people might find important was being irretrievably lost. Not knowing that Grex did not use an outside blocklist, I thought that spreading this information to the maintainer could help list members on other sites too.) Then he added: >However, if you're going to be a dick about this then so am I. What system, >and why is Russ desirous of hiding it? This was a full day after I'd emailed staff (including Scott, I assume) to tell them what site was being mis-blocked; my e-mail was almost a verbatim repeat of response 236, with the site name included. I hadn't "hidden" a thing from anyone who mattered, he just hadn't looked. Then he winds up with this: >(FWIW, I like Russ in person but his responses here always strike me as >pompous and insulting.) To which I can only reply: Scott, if you look for something hard enough on the insistence that it HAS to exist, you're going to find it even if it doesn't. I'm not going to walk on eggshells because of it.
Wow. Well, I have no intentions of being abrasive, but it does happen in text-only communications (and sometimes I lose my temper). My apologies. I'd like to make a point about the staff list, though. It gets deluged with mail every day. I'm not even on it anymore; I wouldn't have stayed a staff member if I'd been required to get it. In return, I do a lot more vandal-squashing and hardware visits.
Frankly, I was puzzled at scott's ire in this thread, but I figured it would pass...
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I understand entirely. Given how hard staff works to keep things running, why should anyone be surprised when a staff person feels a little annoyed and on the defensive when users seem to insinuate that they aren't working fast enough, hard enough, or at all?
It's kind of ironic coming from Scott, though. (Just like this is kind of ironic coming from me.)
Yeah, the staffers bust hump.. I agree On the flipside: folks have a clue who might be staff; can see some via !w; and sorta' expect someone might be alive. Thus, while even the ones "in-the-know" *KNOW* the staff maillist is prolly out of hand, subconciously they are still going to expect some "signs of life" ;-) (in fact, results seem to often magically occur when a bbs post is made - but other days, an email is even faster - go figure).
Dialing in (to 5041), repeatedly we get:
Welcome to Grex! It may take a few seconds to connect.
followed by an immediate disconnect.
Power problem. Grex is now back up.
the dufus was back and hammered sendmail shortly after grex powered up, too..
Staff DOES bust their butts to keep this thing running. I appreciate that. But nobody appreciates being put down for something they did not say, or failing to know something which requires insider status. (Knowing who reads staff mail is one of those insider things.) One thing that everyone knows is that Agora is read by more people than the staff mailing list, so a posting here has the dual effect of joggling elbows and notifying Grex users (who may also be affected, but not know why or by what) that something is up.
therefore, teh coop.cf .
If the staff mailbox is so congested that it's difficult for
responsible staffers to be able to read and address issues, then that's a
system problem in and of itself, as well.
I just wanted to say: "Thank you, Staff..". The loads are the lowest I've seen in a looong time - between 2 and 5 today, and under 12 yesterday. Whatever you folks did, it sure makes grex feel "crisp".
Grex is mighty speedy this morning :)
44 users, load average: 14.17, 15.58, 15.85 i've been seeing loads like this - and much higher - a whoe lot more frequenstly. once a month doesn't seem too far out of line , but 5 times a day certainnly does. i email staff with the load average int he subject line as an fyi-of-the-moment in case someone is semi-watching and/or do document the time/date. is grex flodded with serious cpu users doing nifty things, or hordes of mongols trying crash-tricks, or ... other?
Rest assured that staff is aware of the load averages.
(there also have been a number of excessive mailings, both on- and offsite, of which TS may not be aware.)
Eric Bassey (other) requested more info on the load averages, and since it's all basically a stupid situation there's no reason not to explain what's going on: The CPU stuff is pretty much unavoidable; basically somebody was using Grex either to serve some p2p files or something else which caused a lot of random people to try to connect. We're still getting a lot of failed connections to an account which has been locked for several days as a result, and it takes a bit of CPU to deal with each attempted to connection. Basically we just have to wait this one out, and it has been gradually dying off as expected.
kewl - thankxx staff and carson too - i had been unaware.
I've been able to send mail back and forth between Grex and M-Net. Is there really a block in place? I have all my mail forwarded to M-Net and have exchanged e-mails with keesan over the last couple of days. I would hope the mail capability would be restored soon, if it hasn't been already. I understand how annoying the trash in the e-mail has been, but the mail connection is important to some of us.
i don't know how to use this yet.
You have several choices: