109 new of 457 responses total.
The old argument of "anyone who wants to be {root,ircop,sysop,admin} just
wants it for the power, or to further their agenda, otherwise, they wouldn't
want to be {root,ircop,sysop,admin}" has been used for decades to discourage
people from volunteering their time to improve a system.
I mean, am I the only one who was somewhat offended that when people started
suggesting that we need more volunteers that the response was that the user's
were to blame because of how staff is treated in BBS.
Which, by the way, I don't buy for a second. After system crashes, there is
usually an outpouring of gratitude and support from the users. Save for a few
trolls here and there, people generally support the staff.
re #344 Thanks for the status update. I can certainly sympathize. Best of luck to STeve.
Would STeve be willing to have some staff apprentices work with him?
How about Grex call out for people who are willing to volunteer to help out with the system. These volunteers can list their abilities, things they are good at. Then you take that, create a skills matrix, and assign projects; problems; etc. to teams of people with the skills applicable to that project; problem; etc. Then all Steve would really need to do is make sure things get down, and are routed to the appropriate teams.
re #352 But that sounds like WORK! :(
Glenda, could STeve show you how to help with this during the period when you are not working?
Re: #349. Nate, you're right. To be fair, not all the sysadmins on Grex blame the users. For various reasons, some of them unrelated to their capacities as sysadmin, I've suspected for quite a while that some of those who do have a generalized attitude problem.
re resp:351: In fairness to the staff members such as STeve, training someone else to do a job is hard. If he doesn't have time to fix newuser, he probably doesn't have time to teach someone else how to fix it.
Grex needs to bulk up it's core, but the "in" group here has as one of it's very highest principles than no one else "gets it". The silent majority of us peripheral users support their belief, too. Grex needs to bulk up it's core, but the "in" group here has as one of it's very highest principles than no one else "gets it". The silent majority of us peripheral users support their belief, too. If that's true, which it very well may be, then it's the "in group" that need to "get it". Many of our most regular users (myself included) have some level of UN*X expertise. Many more of them, perhaps excluding only the trolls, subscribe to some version of our "philosophy". Indeed, iirc, complaints about the (perceived or real) abuse of the system or its principles have, when specific, usually come from the users and been directed at staff, not the other way around; other staff have also either kept silent on the issue or defended the target(s) of the complaints. It's easier to inculcate technical expertise than philosophy. Perhaps none of those outside the "in group" have the expertise to hack on a binary-only copy of newuser, but given that those who do won't last forever (for whatever reason), who cares? It may be time to start replacing our proprietary sw with open-source versions, or at least with versions which have source code open, but only to staff. The more sysadmins we have, the more time they will collectively be able to spend on projects like this. If staff want more colleagues, and they don't accept that people who might have the ability to join them might not know Grex inside out but can be shown the ropes, and that their expertise can grow over time (they can learn by doing), they are going to *have* to accept it. If not, I can only hope, that those users who care revolt, and set up their own system, a la Grex, just like what happened in the early nineties to M-Net. I don't know if there's enough momentum for that to happen, though.
re #357 revolt, and set up their own system, a la Grex, just like what happened in the early nineties to M-Net. I think you got it backwards. There is too much apathy and ego invested here for skilled volunteers to "step on toes" I mean..."get trained" by existing staff.
Re #356: that's a recipe for nothing ever getting fixed when current staff fades away. But I don't believe it. I suspect there are quite a few members that need only know what the fault is, and could look at the code and fix it. OK - ask them to do a "beta" fix, and STeve can check it out and test it, before installation. But things would move forward - and some new people would learn how Grex software works.
I bet Mike McNally could fix newuser without too much tutorial on where it is and operates but you don't see anyone welcoming him with open arms. It's a shame more folks aren't invited to volunteer because the qualifications aren't THAT specialized.
mike doesnt have the proper level of aspberger's syndrome to fit into that role.
If you don't show up for the Grex Trundle and Trough-off then you're not trustworthy.
Is this the part where we're being nice to staff?
re resp:363: I see offers of help, and tod and happyboy being irrelevantly trivial which is normal for them. What do you think would help?
you just responded to yourself, nerse ratchet
would you trust a gay man with your children ? would you trust TWENEX with your COMPUTER ?!
re #363 WHAT staff? Why is it staff that has the authority to decide who can volunteer and who can't? Why doesn't the BoD step up to the plate and make some management decisions instead of letting things drag on over and over?
The board has always been of the opinion that we're not going to micro- manage staff. That has worked pretty well in the past. We've encouraged, asked what we could do to help, and facilitated as we could. Staff, on the other hand, has, for the most part, never trucked off on their own without consulting with the board and the membership on important issues. It's been teamwork. Every once of people skills I own is telling me now is not the time to change that policy. You may disagree. You may want to run for the board next time around, stating that's how you'd do business, and see how it goes.
s/ounce/once
I understand not wanting a barn full of admins running amok and fscking up the system but what if the opposite is happening and the barn is empty? Right now, newuser is defunct. There is "one" staff person that everyone is aware of that can fix it. That "one" staff person is tight on time and has had health concerns. Is that how you want to do business with Grex?
> You may want to run for the board next time around, stating that's how > you'd do business, and see how it goes. Ancient chinese proverb speaks of being carefull of what one wishes for.
STeve is working on the problem, he just called to ask me if I needed the car tomorrow so that he can work on it tonight for as long as it takes to get it done. Even if it means he misses his ride to get enough sleep to be useful at work and has to drive himself in tomorrow. He is sorry for not getting it done sooner. He will also be showing me how to do such things so that I can help more in the future. (Mary missed me on the staff list.)
This is a good beginning for the immediate problem, but it seems there is still need for a longer range solution, which is the development of additional volunteer staff members.
Indeed, more are needed. I am getting the data right now to finish the fixing of master.passwd.
When exactly did newuser go fubar? Was it coincident with going to the new system? Was it coincident with moving into the co-lo?
I believe it had something to do with a drive going bad, and the password file being messed up.
This response has been erased.
I have a feeling that both glenda and steve would agree that it isnt fair to dump everything in their lap. I am sure they will correct me if I am wrong. I agree that the lack of staff is a board issue. I am not sure exactly what the solution is here. I want to make people feel welcomed enough to feel that they can volunteer to be on staff without being in some sort of in-crowd. I want the staff to let those people who volunteer do things. Part of the problem, as I see it, is security. The staff tend to allow people they know onto staff because those are the people they know they can trust. It is true that the best way to become staff on grex is to be invited. It is an "in crowd" on staff. On the board too I suppose although it is probably easier to get on the board than it is to get onto staff. I really dont know what the best solution is though. We could always double the staff's pay ;)
Re #375: Drew - the problems with newuser are more recent than either the move or the change to NewGrex. jep's assessment of the staff situation in #342 (I think) was pretty accurate a couple of years ago. But we definitely passed the point where the board felt it was a good idea to depend on STeve and Marcus to fix things. A few years ago we acquired 3 or 4 new staff members, and we really hoped that would solve the problem. Unfortunately, for various reasons, we're largely back where we were. When this latest crisis came up, for instance, no one but STeve stepped up to work on it, and then he got it half fixed and moved on to other crises, leaving Grex in limbo. We certainly need more staff, and it's certainly true that there have been many barriers to getting onto the staff. We need a procedure for giving potential staff members some responsibility to see how they do, then "promoting" them if they do well. But the board/staff also needs the discretion to ignore applications from people who are clearly just trying to cause trouble. There's a needle to be thread there.
(Lynne slipped in.)
Re #354: Because Glenda is burned out from almost 6 years of intensive computer classes and needs a break, that is one of the reasons she is not working regular classes, just the 4 one week long special sessions this summer. She is going to spend most of her time working on the organizing the house, get her spinning wheels and looms up and working, stitching, beading, and other general crafting, and reading fiction and crafting books. The most technical reading will be SciFi (my favorite genre). The only real computer work I am planning on doing is building the computer that I have had components for since just before the emergency surgery in December 2004. It is a 64 bit processor machine with a minimum of 250G hard drive (maybe more), a gig of memory and will run OpenBsd as main OS, Net and Free BSDs and SuSe to play with, haven't decided whether it will have a small windows area or not. Some of my needlework, weaving, and beading software only runs on windows since most of the people using it aren't really computer literate and only use windows.
Right, because computer literacy is defined by Unix.
In regards Cross's comment in #377- it does seem that more information needs to be shared between current staff members. It's hard for other staffers to help when the only one that knows isn't sharing info. I've seen Cross ask several times, in this item, for more information on what's wrong so he (or someone else can help) but haven't seen ANY indication that STeve (or glenda) is sharing any of that. Maybe this is happening in staff e-mail, but I would think that if it was Cross wouldn't be here repeatedly asking for more info. Right now I'm one of those people that can telnet in to my account but can't access the mooncat account via Backtalk (which makes me glad I created this account on a whim a few months ago).
It was a lot easier for me to write my perspective about how Grex is limited by lack of trust than it is to overcome that limitation. I think resp:379 is part of the right approach for bringing in additional volunteers to the staff. There's also a need for some sort of training procedure to bring new staffers up to speed with the philosophy and practices of the staff. That will require time and effort from someone on the staff. It's also going to require patience and flexibility from the staff and all of Grex, because new people coming in are going to have their own ways of doing things. It's not fair to expect them to suppress their personalities and the techniques they have used in the past in other contexts to volunteer for the staff of Grex. They do have to fit into the team which exists, but the team has to adjust, too. In the short term, it's easier for the existing staff to just do things themselves to get by, but right now it seems apparent the short term doesn't last forever.
Hear, hear.
has steVE still not told cross what is wrong ?! i believe cross is available to fix.
Cross is not in the Burns Family "circle of trust" I've got my EYES on you, Focker. ;)
that movie was OK, but got kind of tiresome, i think
Sorry I missed you on staff, Glenda, and thanks for the correction. Did I miss anyone else? And a huge thanks to STeve for looking at the newuser problem last night. Is there an update? Is newuser back on?
thanks, huge mary !
Don't call her huge, looni Jim
whoops, big slip :( sorry, mary !
Re 389: Not yet, still working on it. Putting an item in Agora asking STeve for information doesn't work. He hasn't read Agora in years unless I tell him of an item he should look at. I forget more items in Agora than I read, so I don't always see them either. I also heavily filter what/who I read just so that I can keep up. About the only CF that STeve reads is staff, and I am not sure how often he gets there.
That's good to hear! Right, Mary?
I sure hope steVE reads the system problems' item. oh wait; that's THIS item.
... ???? mdw is gone? huh?!
May I have permission to just *look*
at the source code for newuser?
I can take "no" for an answer.
Where is it?
/grex/grexdoc/newuser
Newuser was working just before the disk went bad, was it not? My guess is that it isn't the code itself that's broken, but one or more data files that newuser depends on. What exactly happens if you put newuser online and have someone run it?
I've updated the staff list at http://www.grex.org/staffnote/
thanks, joe!
thanks, scholar !
grex% ls -las /grex/grexdoc/newuser total 36 2 drwxrwxr-x 7 root staff 1024 Jan 18 2004 . 2 drwxr-xr-x 31 root staff 1024 Jan 3 13:13 .. 4 -rw-r--r-- 1 root staff 1396 Jan 18 2004 00-account 2 -rw-rw-r-- 1 root staff 164 Dec 27 2003 01-newuser 2 -rw-rw-r-- 1 root staff 160 Dec 30 2003 02-wnu 2 drwxrwxr-x 2 root staff 512 Oct 14 2004 CVS 2 -rwxr-xr-x 1 root staff 45 Dec 28 2003 build_newuser 2 -rwxr-xr-x 1 root staff 65 Dec 29 2003 build_wnu 2 drwxr-xr-x 3 root staff 512 Jan 3 17:29 datafiles 2 -rwxr-xr-x 1 root staff 684 Oct 14 2004 install_newuser 2 -rwxr-xr-x 1 root staff 367 Dec 30 2003 install_wnu 4 drwxr-xr-x 3 root staff 1536 Oct 16 2004 nu 4 drwxr-xr-x 3 root staff 1536 Dec 28 2003 src 4 drwxr-xr-x 3 root staff 1536 Oct 17 2004 wnu
BTW, if newuser doesn't run properly due to munged data, then it is deficient. (yes, yes, there are limits on what one can expect any program to do when it is asked to work with bad data)
/a: write failed, file system is full Got error 28 (No space left on device) in buffer write
por jor
Is it time to remove the 'grex was down from April 26 to April 29' message or is this meant to show how long we have been up since then?
I took it upon myself to do so.
thanks, russ !
Looks like /a is full.
/a is full again.
Jesus H christ, can someone make more room on /a, what ever happened to the 3 month reaper?
/a whatchit
get a home directory on /c, dipshits
Shaddup shuttin' up, or I'll give ya a fat lip!
re #414 hey assclown, I would if it weren't for the fact that newuser is also in a state of disrepair.
"is this the humor item?"
Simple suggestion for clearing some space on /a:
find /a -mtime +3 -name .pine_debug\? -exec rm \{\} \;
(for the non-Unixy people, that command will find all of
the files named .pine-debug? (where ? is a wildcard that
matches a single character) that have been more than three
days since they were last modified, and remove them.)
My search to find out how much space they're taking
shows they're still taking rather a lot of space.
grex% find . -name .pine-debug\* -ls | ~/pdb_total.pl
7521 files
87279280 bytes
That's 87,000,000 bytes of space that's being wasted by
stuff that nobody will ever look at or ever miss.. In terms
of modern disks that's not huge but hey, 87MB here, 100MB
there, pretty soon it adds up..
cat | butter | toast > feet
re 416 i forgot about newuser being broken. oops ! get the GreX stafferz to give you a home directory on /c
login banner mentions item 28
load averages: 2.40, 2.06, 1.89 16:29:02 94 processes: 2 running, 88 idle, 4 stopped CPU states: 71.5% user, 0.0% nice, 28.5% system, 0.0% interrupt, 0.0% idle Memory: Real: 198M/340M act/tot Free: 1170M Swap: 0K/3072M used/tot PID USERNAME PRI NICE SIZE RES STATE WAIT TIME CPU COMMAND 25988 leemak 64 0 280K 912K run - 21:08 92.97% warcaby 5250 _mysql 2 0 34M 16M sleep poll 16:06 0.00% mysqld
The reaper was to be replaced by an automated process. I should check to see if the one we were using got moved over.
/a out of disk space again. I removed some files to clear enough disk space to enter this response but it'll be out again in no time flat.
/c :)
!last -2 keesan keesan tty01 Wed Jun 15 22:24 still logged in keesan ttyp9 pm918-21.dialip.mich.net Wed Jun 15 19:18 - 19:27 (00:09) !!!!
????
I REALLY HATE IT when my agora conf. participation file gets stomped when the idle zapper gets me when I'm sitting in bbs at agora!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Maybe you shouldn't idle?
Han Solo: "Even I get boarded sometimes."
re #428: I lost a near-finished nethack game to the idle zapper earlier. D'oh!
the GreX idle zapper should take jor's model and knock you off after an hour, not twenty minutes
And hey. Mine is configurable during run time,
you don't even have to stop it and start it
to alter the settings.
Plus it's one tenth the souce code of idled.c,
ready for efficient customization.
www.arbornet.org/~jor/id2002.htm
This response has been erased.
jor is the ID man
paedophile
Telegram from nharmon on ttyp2 at 22:56 EDT ... What if I was to kick the ever loving shit out of you? EOF (nharmon) "if I were to"
"is this the humor item?"
i'm not klg :(
I get an "Abort Trap" message from Picospan when I try to read agora item 174.
Looks like response 4 of that item has a long line, and either less or my twitfilter is having a hard time dealing with it. Does anyone else have a problem seeing response 4 of item 174?
I have no trouble seeing it using Picospan with "more -d" as my pager.
Looks like it's my twit filter. The response has a line of length 316 characters. I bet OldGrex enforced a 256 character limit on line length, and that's why I've never seen the error before.
Drift: How did you determine that line length?
He counted using fubgrs *and* toes.
Or by using a text editor, writing to
a file, and ls -l.
High tech.
stuff you'd expect from a treasure.r.
fingers
Re #444: I downloaded the file /bbs/agora53/_174 and looked at it in a text editor.
fubgrs, ur smart, aruba.,
It's been summer for 8 hours and 41 minutes
Correction. It has now been summer for 8 hours and 49 minutes.
http://www.archaeoastronomy.com/2005.shtml
Wikipedia says the summer solstice marks MIDsummer.
Isn't the Wikipedia that online font of misinformation?
what ! what's wrong with wikipedia ?
midsummer is six weeks away.
Right - for some reason, the first day of summer is sometimes called "midsummer's day".
Summer used to be defined differently, as the 1/4 of the year surrounding the solstice, when the days were longest. Similarly for winter.
You have several choices: