206 new of 224 responses total.
I'm having a mysterious problem with e-mail. I type "!mail"
to send mail. I use Mail version 5.5 6/1/90, or so the system
tells me.
Over the past month or so, I occasionally get a
block of random characters instead of the body of a message.
These e-mails are *not* failed attachments. Instead, I
am receiving a screen or two of junk. This happens with
respected e-mail senders like aol and umich.edu. And
it only happens occasionally.
Is this a Grex problem?
Hard to tell without further info. Have you saved any of these messages?
Possibly they contain 8-bit characters which set your screen to an alternate-character-set mode? I've seen this happen with vt100 emulation in Procomm. But I don't know that they would set it back, so that probably isn't it.
Is the behavior reproducable? (sp?) That is, does it happen consistently every time you display a certain message or is unpredictable?
There are a lot of viruses currently going around that look like garbage because they use incorrectly formatted attachments that are meant to automatically open in buggy versions of Outlook. Some of them forge 'from' addresses from address books, so they might appear to come from a legitimate source. I get a couple of these a day.
I thought those were all Klez variations.
Maybe they are. I haven't been keeping track.
Can anyone give us an 'official' explaination as to why Grex was down for so long the other day?
read coop
UPS again. STeve is looking into getting fresh batteries.
BTW, "watch" has been reporting that "woot" is logged onto console for a couple of days now. Perhaps it's just a ghost in wtmp (or wherever watch gets its info) but if not, even on console leaving a root user logged in isn't a particularly good idea..
RE#27 -- I don't want to. Plus this is the Grex system problem item....;-)
Hi every one! Im new to grex so i have no idea what you are talking about.... im new to shells too so maybe some people can help me out? thanks.
With a name like that, we expect you to be omniscient..
When I logged in: mesg: Unable to find your tty (ttyt0) in utmp file. Might I have done something stupid to .cshrc or .login? It all seems to work anyway. I think I set things to force vt100.
I don't believe it's your startup file(s),
and I'm glad it's here not . .
that other Unix system.
Maybe ttyt0 escaped to M-Net.
The system periodically "loses" a tty or two somehow. When one gets the message described by Sindi, it means you've connected to one of those "lost" ttys. I had a similar tty tonight. Tels won't work on a "lost" tty; if this is a problem, just log out and log in again, and hope you get a different tty. I don't know of anything else which fails on a "lost" tty.
i don not now way telnet can not fonction clarly..
I'm on the lost tty now. I've had this problem before.
I got the same message when I logged out and logged in again to a different account, but today it is okay.
Today grex lost my tty again, but to compensate yesterday it started letting me save mail messages and things I print (P) with lynx again.
I just figured out why I can telnet from a Linux computer and use Lynx with arrow keys from my new (keesan2) account, whichhad no .cshrc, but it was not recognizing the terminal type when telnetting with myold account: tcsh: No entry for terminal type "linux" tcsh: Using dumb terminal type I had to set terminal type to VT100 every time before using Lynx (or the arrow keys would not work). My first account had some lines in .cshrc which I did not put there and when I removed them things worked properly. Now it forces vt100 instead of using dumb terminal. Anyway, there is some problem with what used to be the settings in .cshrc (from about five years ago). THere was a tset line that might have been interfering with the tset vt100 line in .login. I removed that and everything else but the personal aliases.
UUH OKAY 22878 naftee 38 0 3380K 3688K run/3 0:07 8.67% 7.03% top 21955 root -5 0 940K 536K sleep 0:03 15.79% 1.56% sendmail 665 root 15 0 12K 8K sleep 546:32 2.29% 1.56% update 22918 root 41 0 896K 452K run/0 0:00 7.69% 0.39% sendmail
I would love to have someone interpret #41.
Sindi, I would be curious if, based on what you have learned in your years of tinkering with computers, you would take a stab at interpreting it yourself, and sharing that with the rest of us.
Sindi take a glance at the manpage for top
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Not enough information to respond. Any one given process can look
like that if the system is heavily loaded enough, if it's responsible for
any of the load at all. I'd imagine the real problem at the time is too
many users with too many processes.
Isn't update the process that sync's disks every 90 seconds or so? If so, than this symptom is simply of an overloaded machine.
Update naturally accumulates time in operation. This is a function of the amount of disk disk writes, size of the buffer pool, and other factors. On grex which is usually busy doing something that involves disk writes, update manages to consume about 1.72 seconds every minute. That works out to 103 seconds per hour. An accumulated runtime of 546:32 should correspond to an uptime of approximately 13 days 5 hours. The time update spends is basically part of "sytem overhead". Newer systems may be more efficient at this, perhaps. OpenBSD does not have /usr/sbin/update, but it does have a kernel process that does effectively the same thing. On an ultrasparc1 running openbsd, update seems to be accumulating only .06 seconds per minute, but this machine is *much* less busy than grex. On an AIX machines, I got only .03 seconds/minute, but since that machine isn't running ffs but instead jfs, I don't know that this number is at all comparable.
FTP appears to not be working. I get a connect and then I never get prompted for my Grex login information. This has failed from two different hosts on two different networks.
I used it yesterday, so if it's broken it broke recently..
I had the same problem - I assumed grex was just slow and I gave up. About an hour ago today. I was able to ftp out of grex earlier. Is this related to the discussion in coop about banning inbound ftp until we get the new computer? So as to not allow people to import large annoying programs? I was trying to ftp a 2K text file.
ftp won't be banned without there being a vote on it. Just because it is being discussed doesn't mean it will be implimented without due process according to the bylaws.
Pine and mail both recently refused to send anything at all (could not find sendmail), mail sending is taking a minute or so, and now someone phoned to tell me that the attachment that I sent did not get there, but the message body did. Twice. Small file.
resp:49 :: ftp is working today, thanks.
Everything is working beautifully today, thanks to whoever fixed it.
I think Grex was having Internet connection problems yesterday. That may explain some of it.
Earlier, when I tried to get on (via dialin), it was very slow, and then Grex kept disconnecting me. Eventually I telnetted in; it was only fairly slow. But then I started getting errors writing to /tmp - filesystem was full. It's still pretty full.
A culprit was collared.
A big THANKS to all those hardworking, underappreciated folks on staff who have to deal with this stuff!
Woohoo Staff! <cheers and waves an organic carrot in a competely non-threatening manner>
Somebody with root access please empty out /tmp. It's at 100%.
Hey, Drew! First time I've seen you since I re-joined. How'd you like PenguiCon?
I liked it a lot.
Why does Grex answer the phone, then hang up on me. in my world, that is RUDE!
ssh: password denied. telnet: new/old password tripe. Can we get ssh to understand this shit, or stop screwing with the password mandatorily? This is really irritating. thanks.
Hmm..other than complaining that it's SSH1, SSH Secure Shell has always worked for me, PuTTY too (without the SSH1 complaints) Win2k environment of course.
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The problem is that ssh doesn't understand the password expiration system (the thing that requires you to change your password every so often). If you log in with telnet and your password has expired, telnet gives you an opportunity to change it, but ssh just fails to log you in. When this happens, you have to connect via telnet and change your password. Then ssh will work again. Not a very satisfactory situation. I think that Pete is suggesting that we turn off password expiration until we can make ssh deal with it properly. This probably won't happen before we get onto the new hardware and OS. Offhand, turning off password expiration seems reasonable to me.
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Will the new grex recognize 'linux' terminal type instead of unknown? My arrow keys won't work when I telnet to grex with linux and use Lynx. I have set it to force vt102.
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How would that work when I am not using xterm? Someone else for whom I set up a user account here says he is unable to telnet to grex with Linux, but can do so with grex, and he asked a friend to try and the friend could telnet with Windows but not Linux. I am using the identical linux telnet program (on different computers, of course). He also tried with ssh. He says he tried many times with Linux telnet and it never worked. --------------------------------------- > . What happens exactly when you try to telnet? me@computer:~$ telnet www.grex.org Trying 216.93.104.34... Connected to grex.cyberspace.org. Escape character is '^]'. Connection closed by foreign host. me@computer:~$ I never get as far as bash. As you can see, the connection gets closed by the foreign host almost immediately. > You can also try telnetting to www.grex.org and signing in as newuser and > choosing your own login and password and shell and having it identify your > terminal - perhaps that will work better. I never have gotten that far on any Linux machine. The connection always gets closed before any login prompt. I use telnet and ssh for other connections from the Linux machines in question, and have never encountered any problem. Only your shell svc does this. I've logged in at www.grex.org and run Pine using a Win machine or two, but I can't get it to work from any Linux machine (including the one I have BL2 on). James (I don't know what he means by a shell svc. I think I set him up with bash). ----------------------------------------- Never, at any time that I've tried logging in from a Linux machine, has it worked. I've tried probably 20 - 25 times, at various times of night and day. Every time I have tried from a Win machine, it has worked. I've never gotten the "connection closed by freign host" message using a Win machine (tried this 3 or 4 times probably). One of the individuals from the IRC channel tried it from a Linux machine, then a Win machine, apparently in immediate succession. It would fail (with the same error I'm getting, I presume) from the Linux machine, but got a login prompt from the Win machine. I just tried logging in using ssh. I got an ominous warning, as follows: me@mycomputer:$ ssh www.grex.org The authenticity of host 'www.grex.org (216.93.104.34)' can't be established. RSA1 key fingerprint is 74:4c:1e:86:04:2a:ac:ab:c2:cd:32:ff:19:76:80:fc. Are you sure you want to continue connecting (yes/no)? no Host key verification failed. me@mycomputer:$ Afterward, I answered "yes" and was able, finally, to login using ssh. But telnet is failing under Linux. Maybe it has to do with the authenticity problem? James ------- ------- It has worked for me and the author of the Linux setup, using the same software, nary a problem. We both have 33K modems. I don't know what James has, maybe something faster? I just confirmed it worked a couple hours ago. What might be happening on James's end that is causing problems? This has been a few weeks, it is not that grex is down when he tries.
Re 73 (which slipped in) I ran the change program to 'force vt102'. Maybe the new grex will, like OpenBSD, recognize linux. Not a big problem, there are other ways of using lynx without arrow keys. (And perhaps the second set of arrows keys would work, the ones on the 102-key keyboard. ) I may try vt300 and see if that works better.
Hmm. The office computer which I'm using is now using Linux. And it seems completely transparent to telnet, in terms of any difference from the Unix we were using before. (Both machines I'm using as terminals are Windows machines, but the mainframe/window I work in is a Linux-base.)
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I *think* password-expiration was set up a *long* time ago, as one of those general-security things. Since SSH doesn't work with the current expiration method, I'd recommend anyone using it resetting their password *again*, after using telnet to reset it. (This recommendation is probaby unnecessary, since those using SSH know why they are using it.)
R 77 - I realized after I responded that grex will be OpenBSD ;) Why would the queuing telnet demon mess up two people consistently while the other two of us never have problems, with identical linuxes? Could it be something to do with different ISPs? One of the working ISPs is in New Zealand, mine is in Michigan.
I've never really understood password expiration. It seems to me it doesn't help anything unless your password's been discovered, but if your password's been discovered then the person who knows it can keep it from expiring.
"Passwords are like underwear: Change them often." In general, it is a very good idea to change your password every now and again. Password expiration is how sysadmins enforce a maximum duration for a password.
That doesn't answer my question, though. What does changing them often solve? The only point I can see is if you're attempting to change it often enough that no password is in effect long enough that it can be brute-forced successfully.
At work, I presume they want people to change their passwords often so the passwords are written to post-it notes attached to their computer monitors. After a few months, the post-it notes fall off, see. On Grex, when I'm forced to change my password, I do so and then I run "passwd" again and change it back. On M-Net, I've had the same password for 12 years. If someone can e- mail me my M-Net password, I will Paypal to Grex or M-Net (their choice) a $100 donation.
Re #80: Not without alerting you, they can't. Re #81: Hey, that sounds familiar...
It should, Joe. ;) How are passwords vulnverable? Brute-force guessing and sniffing are two vulnerabilities that come immediately to mind. Sniffing is seldom a real-time attack: collect them for a while and then try to use them. Changing your password at irregular but (relatively) short intervals makes sniffing less useful. Sure, a year is plenty of time for a sniffing attack, but it's better than never. As always, sysadmins are trying to balance security and utility. Different folks are going to come down at different places on the continuum.
I favor dropping the required password changes.
Required password changes, if too frequent, and too unfamilliar to
users, lead to more people writing down their passwords, or reusing them, and
that creates a different kind of vulnerability.
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I don't think I'd agree that passwords are useless. I just think you have to consider the application for which it's applied. This is Grex. If someone posts a message under my name, the world will survive the experience. If they log in as me, and change my password, and begin posting as me, I'll go through the inconvenience of looking up a Grex staffer when I have time, prove I'm me if necessary, and ask them to change my password for me. It'll be okay. At work, I go through a cycle of however many different passwords are required. I think you can repeat using them every 5 forced changes, so that's what I use. At work, we do a lot on-line, and there are different passwords for a dozen different things. Naturally, I know about two of mine, and if I need a password for anything else, I contact someone to reset it. I guess Microsoft's Passport system is intended as a universal password system. Log in once, have access to everything. It sounds flaky but when I think of all the different loginids and passwords I have, it sounds like a nice idea.
I agree that Grex should do away with password expiration, by the way.
Hehe. I have only two passwords that I use. Whenever a program (like grex) makes me change my password, I change it to the secondary password. If it ever asks me to change it back, I change it to the primary password. I am not too concerned about what might happen if someone breaks into either my Mnet or Grex account. Sure I might have some explaining to do if they logged on and started being a jerk. I like to think that folks would realize it wasnt me but I guess I am jerk often enough that I couldnt count on that ;)
can members use gpg, pinepgp?
Has anyone *ever* had their account here compromised by someone unknown to them guessing their password?
Probably not, and while there's no way to measure replacing a known
quantity (SunOS's salt) with an unknwon one (Marcus'), I'd assume that it
would stop the majority of people who are interested in cracking GREX
passwords, that is to say armchair hackers and script kids. If someone is
dedicated enough, the easiest way would certainly be to compromise a user,
not the password list.
For password expiration to be of any real value at all, it has to be combined with "can't reuse the same last N passwords" *and* "can't change your password again for N days". Many systems in the workplace implement that policy (along with minimum password length, content rules (must contain at least 1 non-letter), and must be different from old password by N characters). All of that is "inconvenient" to the user, but without it, password expiration is indeed almost useless.
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The only acceptable solution for this is to allow - and strongly
encourage - users to inject a *lot* more entropy into the one password
that they settle upon using. Eight characters??? How about an *eighty*
character password? Or better yet whole paragraphs of indeterminate length.
Let the user make up his own rules about punctuation, spelling, swapping
of characters, use of spaces, forwards, backwards, and anything else so
as to have something he can remember without reducing the entropy.
For myself, I'm now contemplating the use of a multi-kilobyte file of
randomly generated numbers as a password (once I get around to getting
PuTTY set up so that enhanced password security might actually have a
point to it). Just have to provide physical security for the password
file...
Actually, the trick is to have something that the user can commit to
memory completely, but still has lots and lots of entropy *as far as the
outside world is concerned*. This indicates a strong preference for letting
the user decide for himself what his password will be and when (and whether!)
to change it, though strongly encouraging him to be creative with it.
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We have set up three perpetual beginners with grex email and every year or so we get a frantic phone call from them telling us that grex does not work any more so then we change the password and change it back again. They don't even know their passwords. We have automated the dialin. One time someone went about 6 months without email until I bumped into his wife and she said his email broke. So please allow people to reuse old passwords.
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CAEN (at UM) does not require that one change one's password. If asked, they will recommend it, but the system does not create an automatic recommender.
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I'd like to suggest that each new user type up a few pages of
completely random characters, and send them to GREX staff, which would then
use the first eight for the password, then erase them, and work with the next
eight upon the next login.
What's a "completely random character"? Well, OK: here is my completely random "5".
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Biometrics now!
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Dan, nothing you've said has supported doing away with passwords entirely, unless I've missed something. I think that's going too far.
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Good. Plenty of ultimately futile things are worth doing, and authentication is one of them. :)
Other than for the purpose of deleting users who are no longer around the password expire thingy is probably a little silly. Back in the old days when there was a password file that any user could read and see the crypted password there was a big debate about this being a security problem. Crack put the end to that and since then the actual crypted password is not world readable - shadowed. Thus dictionary attacks are not useful unless one has already cracked root and stolen the shadowed password file. And if one already had root then why fuck around with mere user passwords. The problem of sniffing plaintext transmission of passwords still remains but that is easily addressed by using ssh/htttps if you are really concerned about it. These days requirement of frequent password changes and that they be non-dictionary words results in less security as others noted prior in that the cleaning crew at the office know everybodys passwords should they have the skillset to do something with them. (If I steal your laptop chances are very good that there is at least a file if not pieces of diskette lable with passwords in plaintext.) (Personally, I keep a PDA with a passworded application that has otherwise crypted all my passwords but that is just me.) (I used to use Uzbek swear words but that went away in the early '90s when the first Uzbek dictionary was posted.)
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I heard about one office that implemented passwords that expired once a month, and prohibited repeating the same password twice in a row. They found most of their users started setting their password to the name of the current month.
No surprise. That's exactly what they should have expected with a policy like that. That or alternating passwords. Users dislike having to reset passwords often, and find ways to defeat the alleged benefits if they're forced to. (And if you don't let them alternate passwords, they write them down on post- it notes under their mouse pad or on the side of their monitor.)
Yeah. Or they just never log out, which is even worse.
That's more controllable.
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"someting more standard" is non-grexian, by defintion ...... /
But probably still a good idea. :)
not a problem except that i don;t know 'how to do it' : all too often i receive attachments at this address. i use good ol' mail what part of the content do i save and then 'translate' (and by what means) so that i can d/l the attachment and use it? usually these are ms word docs.
Re #118: I think we should change that definition, in most cases.
My passwords are proper nouns from a private fantacy world. Despite the fact that I rotate only a few, nobody is going to get a good handle on them.
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any thoughts on #120 . and the mail attachment problem? please don't suggest pine though, i want to know the steps from mail to a usable file.
re: 120 You should be able to save the message and then use munpack or uudecode, depending on how it was encoded. From within mail: s ### filename q Then, determine whether MIME-encoded (likely) or UUEncoded (not as likely). If MIME, you will need to download the file from Grex (or wherever) and download the munpack program (Should be able to Google it pretty easily). UUEncoded is easy. From the command line: uudecode filename
RE#124 -- Use Elm.
For MIME, you should be able to do attachment processing on Grex, using the mimencode program (!man mimencode for details).
Heck, how does one forward a message in plain old mail? Forward with attachement(s)?
another *great* question!
7615041 just dumped me and I could not dial back three times to that number, then I dialed 7613000 three times and got through. Any progress in getting replacement modems for the new grex?
Something appears to be wrong, either with the tty configuration on ttyqe, on the modem, or in sz. All of a sudden I cannot get more than 1K through a download of a file of mail before the protocol hangs and aborts. sz hasn't been changed in years, and neither has my computer's configuration; it must be the port, the modem or tty configuration.
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Flow control issue?
One particular modem, probably.
In the past couple of weeks I frequently have the problem of the line feed suddenly disappearing - grex sends me text all on one line, with carriage return. If I hang up and dial again usually it fixes the problem. Is this a particular modem? I have had the problem dialing from several computers so it is not my modem.
The modem worked 10 minutes later. Very strange problem.
Rumor has it that at least one of Grex's modems has the flow control settings configured wrong. No one seems to be able to track down which one it is.
Is that why Grex rudely hangs up on me when I dial in?
That's probably a different issue.
Dan Cross may be confused about my rational for the grex string to key function (and HMACs) but that doesn't mean I was, or that it's a good topic for the "system problems" item.
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How do you think your confusion over my putative confusion is a system problem?
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Wouldn't it only be a system problem if the administrators in question
were unfamilliar with it?
Someone needs to sit down and formally define what the "System Problem" item should address :P
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all 14 at the saem time ????
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Yes, GREX needs a horde of interchangeable administrators who can make
any possible change at any moment to stay competitive with Microsoft.
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Grex admins are Grex admins BECAUSE they can't afford to go on vacation for a month. Or is it that they can't afford the vacations because they're Grex admins...?
Geez, Dan, mellow out. We're well aware you'd like stuff done your way, not the STeve or Marcus way. Your input is valuable and appreciated, but you don't have to act like we've never heard it before.
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Your comments are not unreasonable, but they keep showing up in different areas and it starts to sound a bit over the top in trying to make your case.
It's starting to occur to me that you know Marcus won't like something if Dan advocates for it, and you know Dan will oppose something if Marcus wants to implement it. ;)
It took you this long?
apparently the partition where i exist is full. i can't post or pine, i hadda backtalk this. can someone fix this for me? thanks!
You are not alone but it seems to be fixed now. /tmp was full.
re #155, 156: (a casual browse of the garage conference shows that
assessment to not always be true, and it's a disservice to
both Marcus and Dan to reduce their comments to such simplicity.)
I was being partly facetious. Marcus and Dan are both highly intelligent people, and I have a lot of respect for their knowledge. They're both a heck of a lot smarter than I am. But they seem to butt heads a lot, and it often seems like the arguments turn into contests about who has more geek credibility more than about the actual merits of their ideas.
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Heh. I once left the dome light on for a week straight in the van I had in college. That was one seriously dead battery. That's also when I found out you just can't jump-start a Ford V-8 with a totally flat battery off one of those little "portable jump-start" battery packs. You just end up with two dead batteries.
Backtalk was giving me a "500 Internal Server Error" message a few minutes ago, but it seems to be working again now.
I've locked the car with the engine running... I've left the lights on multiple times resulting in dead batteries... There's no end to it
I locked the car with the engine running once. It's one of those things that makes you feel so amazingly stupid that, for the first 20 seconds or so, you stand there tugging the doorhandle unable to believe you've just done it.
I keep a spare key accessible on the vehicle just in case I have such an attack of massive stupi... uh, brain fart. ;)
That's nothing, I locked my car with the engine running, *during a Grex board meeting*. I believe it made the minutes.
Re #166: Me too.
I locked my keys in my car (engine off, fortunately) once and the
towing company's driver spend the better part of an hour trying to get in ...
until someone off the street walked over, jimmied the lock in fifteen seconds,
and walked off into the sunset.
Kind of makes you wonder what that person's occupation is, doesn't it? ;)
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Re #170:
I asked. He used to work for Brewer's towing. Or so he said.
Why the hell is bbs the default shell for newuser? Methinks bash, or even party, may be more appropriate. Then again, unless it's a Grex thing to push the bbs more than the system, like the web page, I kinda understand the reasoning, but still ANyways.
sendmail is eating grex's resources!
I hadn't realised that bbs was the default shell. I've recommended that people answer 'csh' to the question about the preferred shell. I can see folks who know it choosing bash, though.
*shrug* Never bothered me-- I just read the descrips and chose. I think I chose tcsh.
So is it better or worse to have left the engine running with the doors unlocked? I did that once for about four hours, in a busy parking lot at a folk dance event. Fortunately, folk dancers seem to be honest people, and I had a full tank of gas when I started, so I didn't get my car stolen or run the battery down, but jeeeez did I feel dumb.
(I thought "menu" was the default, although it pribly runs over "bbs" [which isn't actually a shell either].)
In web newuser the default shell is 'menu'. At least that's the checkbox that is prechecked for you. The default editor is 'pico'. The non-web newuser probably has different defaults. It certainly used to be 'bbs' and I suppose it might still be.
A quick shell shows this to be true. Shouldn't that be changed?
Why? People coming in via telnet are much less likely to be members of the point & click generation.
huh?
If they know enough to use a shell, they should know enough to choose one. If they don't know enough to choose something other than "bbs", it'll work until they learn how to change it.
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NextGrex?
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i think it should be bash, personally.
I personally agree.
I think it should be ed.
/d is 97% full; there is a complaint from party that there are lots of psybnc and eggdrops in it. I'm just passing along the party report.
I think menu is the most self explanatory. BBS tends not to be very intuitive. And you do need basic UNIX knowledge for the other shells
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find "string" <item range> the 'string' has to be in quotes. For example: find "tod" all
d drive full again! this is getting really irritating, it also resets my bbs shit so that it thinks i'm getting on the conf for the first time. /sob
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Hmmm...when I type 'help find' it says:
==============================================================================
Fronttalk Command: FIND
Usage: FIND "pattern" (login) <item range>
Search items in the current conference. The item range is used to select
a subset of the conferences to search. The default is ALL at the Ok
prompt, or just the current item at the "Respond or pass" prompt. For a
full description of item ranges, do "HELP RANGE".
Quoted and parenthesized strings have a different meaning for FIND than
the do for other commmands. Quoted strings are a pattern to search the
items for. Parenthesized strings restrict the search to items and responses
by that author.
Here are some common examples:
FIND "potatos" - Find all mentions of the word "potatos"
FIND "cats" 1-3 - Find all mentions of cats in items 1 through 3
FIND "peas" (joe,mike) - Find all places where joe or mike mentioned "peas"
FIND (harry) - Find all items and responses posted by harry
The formatting of the Find output is controlled by the FSEP and FTSEP defines.
See "HELP DEFINE FSEP" for more information.
==============================================================================
which is a little more helpful than the Picospan version:
========================================================
**** FIND ****
find <items> "string"
Find will look through all the matching items and
print out the lines that match string. Note that
find currently only looks through response text, it
ignores headers, authors and anything else not text.
See "help separators" for details on "fsep" if you want
to change the format Find types things out in.
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However, Picospan is noticably less buggy and a lot faster than Fronttalk.
I hope not that sounds nutZ
Two things: Is anyone else having problems with SSH Secure Shell 3.2.3 and connecting to Grex? IS there some setting I'm missing? After I upgraded to 3.2.3 it exits with an error, so I'm using PuTTY now. It would be really nice to be able to type "r 4.197" and the item would start reading from response 197...
Make sure you've set it to allow SSH version 1 connections. Some software may be defaulting to 2 only because of some security issues with 1. I've never used Secure Shell, so I'm just guessing here. You can get pretty much the effect you're looking for by typing "r 4" and then hitting "/#197" in your pager. That is, assuming you're using more or less as your pager.
Thanks David, I thought I had set it to accept v1 connections but I'll double check. I know about /#197, but r 4.197 is more efficient and shoudl be trivial to implement.
Even if you're not using a pager, you can do r 4 nor ... and then 197
I've put "r 4.197" on my TODO list for Fronttalk ... which doesn't mean that it will get implemented soon. The main problem with it is that that syntax is kind of tricky to merge into the general item selector syntax. Do we also allow: r 4.197,7.10,15.0 (that's clear enough) r 1-3.197 (what does that mean?) r 4.197-11.18 (uh) r 4.197-198 (is that a response range or a bad dream?) r 4.197 new (does that show new responses after 197?) r 4.197 nor (could differ from 'r 4 nor' in setting current resp) Does this make any sense on any of the other commands that take item ranges? Browse, forget? Probably not. Fix? Perhaps.
There's also the issue of whether "r 4.197" means to read only that response, or to read starting with that response. (Personally, I'd argue for "only", with the syntax "r 4.197-" to mean "starting with". But this just expands the issues Jan raised. And note that in Picospan, at the respond-or-pass prompt, "197" means "starting with 197"; you must say "only 197" to read only that one.)
Nonsense. The proper syntax for "starting with 197" should be "197+". :)
Isn't it amazing how corrosive a simple little idea gets? Luckily (for me), the user interface portion of fronttalk is just a perl program. Anyone who wants a particular syntax, need only make a copy and modify it to fit their tastes.
So "197-" should cause responses to be displayed in reverse order, John?
8-{)]
you laugh, but it makes sense to me
Actually, I think that's a current front talk bug. 197- gets interpreted as 197-0 and show displays thinsg in reverse order.
Are you sure that's a bug and not a feature?
If your password expires, and you use SSH to log in to Grex, you don't get prompted to choose a new password -- you just get told that you've failed authentication. Not ideal. (Personally, I don't think Grex is important enough that it should be forcing regular password changes anyway. I'm aware that this is a minority opinion around here, though.)
(I agree - actually staff is exempt from the regular password changes thing, which is probably backwards.)
s/probably backwards/completely moronic/p Can you turn password changes off for the rest of us? Or do we need a referendum? ;-)
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If you like changing your password regularly, nobody's stopping you.
i thik int's been abot two years dicen there was a forced passwd change ... abut the right amount of time. s/dicen/since/ (zoundz!) as infrequent as that, it's just a good systme policy, imo.
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It took 3 minutes to get a login prompt this morning.
Re #215: If it's such a good policy, why isn't it applied to the staff? Re #216: What's the problem?
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Aren't we gonna be on NewGrex is less than a month?
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I've noticed that the "View Responses" box in Backtalk doesn't work like I'd expect. For example, if I enter something like "200-202" and click the arrow, I get a lot more than just those three responses.
Which interface, gull? I don't know which one I used (it had a light blue background), but its "View Responses" box worked for me. I tested one, two, three, and 20-plus responses at a time (the last used a closing number larger than the number of responses in the item).
I'm using the one with the light yellow background and the green buttons. Pistachio, I think?
You have several choices: