50 new of 237 responses total.
The /a partition was full, preventing users whose home directories are located on it from responding in bbs, saving their mail, and doing anything else requiring writing data to the disk. I identified the major disk hogs and did some cleaning up, giving us a bit of breathing room.
[Loud cheer for the Grexasaurus from the /a users]
I've had no trouble ftp-ing with the client Fetch over TCP/IP.
re 177 polytarphs account got spalttered?
/a was full a few minutes ago. It's now got a little space, hopefully enough to let me enter this response without crashing something.
Like your brain?
A friend with an email account at mymailbox.com reports that every mail he gets from grex (but not my ISP), including my account and jdeigert, arrives in 4-7 copies. What might be causing this? Other people don't tell me they get multiple copies of mail from me.
myrealbox.com not mymailbox.com
He should look at the full headers of the copies, to compare the lines that begin "Received:" The ones at the bottom should be the same in every copy, but then there will be some that have different time-stamps. Those lines will show where the transfer is failing. Most likely, a machine passes it on, but then does not get the acknowledgement of receipt, so it re-queues the message, to try again later. The machine that received, but did not acknowledge, the message delivers it. Result: the message is duplicated when delivery is attempted later.
No wonder sendmail uses so much CPU all the time.
Very oddly, when ssh'ing to Grex I only *sometimes* get the message that Grex is lying about the size of its private key. Is there any mechanism I could use to confirm the key and rule out funny business?
I'm not sure what it is, but I had some problems with Backtalk... I had to put my password in several times at a few points to get in and through the bbs.
Yes, I'm getting the same problem. I just gave up on Backtalk after encountering it several times. If I exited from all of my IE windows, then started one up again and logged into Grex, I could read about 3 items before getting it again.
I've noticed that happens a lot when Grex's CPU load is very high. I suspect something is timing out.
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re 184: i would suggest using kermit or x/y/z-modem across your tcp connection, but that appears reserved for dial-up users (foolishly so imo).
A response when Jamie begs the Grexers for some loving: Would a kind Grexer with the rootkey please reset the password for jp2? To authenticate me, please call the number shown in !f jp2. Thank you, <hug>
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Try reading (or running, if you're telnetted in) /usr/local/bin/sz, & you'll see.
Send mail to staff@cyberspace.org, Jamie.
Aww, Jamie hugs are the best. Jamie, try emailing staff with the request.
Traditionally none of those protocols have worked well over telnet because telnet is not transparent, and often not 8-bit clean. ssh is, if you disable the escape character with "-e none".
What does it mean when only certain people who try to email me get "permanent fatal error" messages?
Are they getting error messages with bible quotes in them?
That you're a femme fatale? :)
When I have seen those bounces, it was usually due to a temporary connection problem, "temporary" being variable...
I emailed the staff on like, Aug 29.
(It looks like /var/spool/mail is a bit full.)
Filesystem kbytes used avail capacity Mounted on /dev/sd3h 1944365 1754424 0 100% /var/spool/mail
Filesystem kbytes used avail capacity Mounted on /dev/sd3h 1944365 1756006 0 100% /var/spool/mail /dev/sd7g 1971009 1773911 0 100% /d 2 partitions that are widely used are full :( 2 that i use :(
I thought you left?
I THOUGHT YOU WERE A WOMAN
I've never seen /var/spool/mail full before, so I had to improvise. I found some files I could safely delete or move to temporarily make some space. Valerie started a reap, which should end up deleteing half the accounts on Grex (it's been a long time since we ran a reap) and making plenty of space everywhere. The shortage of space on /d was pretty much just one user.
resp:218 That's another problem i have.
re 220 You should run reaps more often. Or buy more hard drives.
Grex should consider upgrading its ancient version of Pine. Versions earlier than 4.57 have a remotely exploitable security hole.
and use nano instead of pico.
Haven't struggled with it myself, but my impression is that updating Pine is non-trivial on our ancient OS. Installing "nano" shouldn't be a big deal. I'll look at it when I get time, unless some other staffer beats me to it.
Use elm. It's the best.
Why not use !mail ?
Yeah, why not?
I have been a supporter of Grex in the past by having several small non-profit organizations with which I have been associated join Grex and use it at least as their website and board mail reflector. The latter, however, has become untenable because of spam. There is nearly ten times more spam being distributed to the boards than board correspondence. Is there any hope of soon having access to a filter here for spam? I will probably move an organization off Grex (and thereby cancel membership) unless there is some recourse against this avalanche of junk e-mail.
It may not get better elsewhere. My Grex account is actually on the low end as far as the amount of spam I get. My ameritech.net account gets over 50 spams a day, and has since before I started using it! My work account gets about 100 a day, about 90% of which is caught by a statistical filter. I agree that Grex needs better spam filtering, but I want the ability to turn it off if I choose to. I've had too many bad experiences with mail disappearing because of spam filters -- no bounce message or anything, just disappearing into the ether with no warning.
(NB: This is the System Problems item from Summer, 2003, not Fall, 2004, so it doesn't have quite the audience the item in the current agora would get.)
(I don't think Fall 2004 will have much audience - yet - either.......but thanks for the poke in the ribs 8^})
Could Grex use the Spamhaus Block List (SBL) to block spam? See http://www.spamhaus.org/sbl/howtouse.html
We will have to put a kludge in it as cyberspace.org sometimes ends up on various spamblock lists. Might be worth considering though.
I'm telnetting in from Madeira Beach FL. I cannot connect to Grex directly as I get a "not responding" response, but I have telnetted into CAEN, and then telnetted over from there. Why won't Grex respond directly?
Grex is responding very slowly. I'm not surprised you are having trouble.
In fact the problems are so bad that this report got stored in *old* agora! ;-)
You have several choices: