40 new of 286 responses total.
While using party tonight, I kept getting disconnected; eventually the network connection appeared to go down solidly. I dialed in direct to enter this. (It takes about 79 (?) seconds to log in on a direct dial, too.)
My telnet connections continue to be unstable, though I was able to connect long enough to enter this...
My telnet is repeatedly being disconnected also.
I was disconnected last night and unable to log in this morning.
I get a connection attempt to (TCP Port 6346) from 142.163.11.15 whenever I try to log on.It also takes around 70-80 seconds for a prompt.
got the same connection attempt just as i hit the submit button on my previous post.
Connectivity has been exceptionally unstable for the last couple of hours. Type five lines in party at mosst, and then log in again....
re #252, 253: That's very odd, but probably a coincidence.. TCP port 6346 is used for the P2P file-sharing program gnutella and "!dig ptr 15.11.163.142.in-addr.arpa" shows the host that's trying to connect belongs to a Canadian ISP, sympatico.ca, probably a user in Newfoundland. > 15.11.163.142.in-addr.arpa. 86354 PTR stj515.nf.sympatico.ca. I'll check my firewall logs tomorrow to see whether I'm getting the same behavior but I suspect I won't be.
These sporadic lag sessions that last more than a minute every 4 minutes SUCK. People keep getting booted off.
I got 2 minute lags three times while telnetted to another shell account and writing a single mail, not a terribly long one. More time down than up. Telnetted from grex, I mean. I can't telnet there directly from DOS, it does not like my DOS telnet program.
I got a lot of long pauses today too.
I got lagged completely off three times today, while dialed in, and was unable to complete a short email. Then, just now, it took more than 3 minutes to get from the welcome screen to the login while dialing in.
Grex has gotten so unreliable in the last few months that, for the first time since I created my account nine years ago, I've given up on using it for email.
I'll give things the 4Q to clear up...
I've nearly done the same thing myself. It is not only the spam and the downtime, but also that there have been no upgrades on handling file sizes and types, while the rest of the online world is bloating.
I just power cycled the DSL modem. Hopefully that'll cure it for a while.
What Rane said.
I tried dialing in today and got an error.
Someone that I send an email to complained they never got it. I sent it again today directly, and also forwarded via another shell account. They just wrote back that they got the SECOND mail. Is grex on Spamcop's blacklist again? I got connected dialin after the usual wait. I tend to go wash dishes. I hope that the new Grex has a version of Pine that can handle HTML (with lynx). A friend of mine using grex for email has an ISP account specifically to forward her html emails to because she cannot figure out how to deal with them here. It expires in November.
Thanks, Walter, for cycling the modem.
I'm not sure if this was announced somewhere or not, but folks should be aware that if they have any files in their directories they'd mind losing, they should get them off Grex or at least have a safe backup stored elsewhere. The partition with user directories hasn't been successfully backed up since sometime in 2003. And STeve thinks this might be our next disk to fail. If I got that wrong, someone with more information please set the record straight.
Thanks for the reminder, Mary
Would someone on staff please respond to item 196 in the coop cf? Thanks!
Are there any prospects for user partition backups any time soon?
I think Grex's policy has always been that the user partition is not backed up on any regular basis. As long as I've been here there have been warnings not to store anything too important there. It doesn't take too long to tar up all your files and then use FTP or SCP to copy them to your home machine.
I'd like some help in doing that. I can do it file by file, but can I just compress and download my whole directory, and open it as needed on my home Mac (OS X)? If so, how (e-mail me, if it convenient).
I'll post it here, so that other people can benefit, too. To get all your files into one tarball: Change to your home directory and type tar cvf mystuff.tar . If you then want to compress it, type gzip mystuff.tar and you'll end up with a file called mystuff.tar.gz. I'm not sure what the best utility to open this on OS X would be, though I bet you can extract it in a terminal with tar xvzf mystuff.tar.gz but if you want a GUI solution, something like StuffIt may work.
(Incidentally, I should probably point out that there's a period on the end of that first command line. Don't forget it; it's there to indicate you want everything in the current directory.)
How about tar zcvf to produce .tar.gz ? When I telnet here with Kermit it gives me some helpful hints about what is taking so long: The Telnet server is not sending required responses: WILL TERMINAL-TYPE WILL NAWS WILL NEW-ENVIRONMENT WILL COM-PORT-CONTROL Does this mean there is a software problem at grex?
re #274:
> Change to your home directory and type
> tar cvf mystuff.tar .
What happens when the tar command tries to add ./mystuff.tar to
the archive it's building in ./mystuff.tar?
Another problem (well, not really a *problem*, but potential
complication is that when files are extracted from the mystuff.tar
file they'll be dumped unceremoniously into the directory where
the tar extract command is run. You ought to either tell the
user to extract in a fresh directory or else back up a level before
building the tar file, e.g.
cd ~/..; tar cvzf /tmp/grex_homedir_$USER.tar.gz $USER
(in most shells, anyway..)
Also, while tar is the most convenient archive utility for most Unix users, PC and Mac afficionados may find zip to be more useful for them (Mac users can unpack zip archives using UnStuffIt; I'm not sure how well it handles gzipped or bzipped tar files.)
tar is nicer because it retains the perms info
I agree that tar is the way to go if you're going to be extracting under Unix or a Unix-like system..
re #276: > When I telnet here with Kermit it gives me some helpful hints about what is > taking so long: The Telnet server is not sending required responses: > > WILL TERMINAL-TYPE > WILL NAWS > WILL NEW-ENVIRONMENT > WILL COM-PORT-CONTROL Based on other investigation I doubt it's a telnet- or telnet-and-ssh- specific problem. The same 79 second delay seems to affect outgoing SMTP connections, too, for example. > Does this mean there is a software problem at grex? It's definitely a configuration problem or software error of some sort.
Something in inetd perhaps?
No promises, but it looks like I'll have some time on Friday to attempt a back-up of grex. I hope folks can stand losing it for a day during the week. ;/
From my reading of recent responses, there seems to be some questions, or suggestions, inre what gull said in #274. What should I take as the current consensus inre my ? in #273?
Re resp:277: The version of tar that Grex has is smart enough not to add the archive it's creating to itself...as long as you *don't* use the z flag. That's why I didn't use it as was suggested in resp:276. I thought about telling people to create the tar file in the /tmp directory, but I didn't for two reasons: There's not much room in /tmp, and people would inevitably leave the file lying around there where anyone can read it. I agree with your other comments. Re resp:284: Any of the suggestions that have been given will work. There's More Than One Way To Do It(tm).
Fronttalk from m-net works well
You have several choices: