71 new of 281 responses total.
The thing about Clinton should surely say FORMER president.
I agree - that really looks bad. Or maybe grexers are in denial?
I thought former presidents were still addressed as "Mr. President"?
No, you would address Mr. Clinton as Mr. Clinton.
today is william jefferson clinton's birthday.
re #214 No, I wouldn't.
I got two of these in two days, the first with 'from' in upper ascii
and 'from' gmail, this one from cyberspace.
The last two lines of the message body were identical. Out of curiosity
as to what it might provoke, I actually answered the first one. Is anyone
else getting these?
From ling7334@grex.cyberspace.org Fri Aug 19 11:38:47 2005
Received: from ling7334 (helo=localhost)
by grex.cyberspace.org with local-esmtp (Exim 4.42)
id 1E63iW-0001x9-CP
for keesan@grex.cyberspace.org; Fri, 19 Aug 2005 06:03:16 -0400
Date: Fri, 19 Aug 2005 06:03:16 -0400 (EDT)
From: LingZhifeng <ling7334@grex.cyberspace.org>
To: keesan@grex.cyberspace.org
Subject: re:you are not accepting messages
Message-ID: <Pine.BSO.4.58.0508190548320.4084@grex.cyberspace.org>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII
Sender: LingZhifeng <ling7334@cyberspace.org>
X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.0.4 (2005-06-05) on
grex.cyberspace.org
X-Spam-Level:
X-Spam-Status: No, score=-2.3 required=3.0 tests=ALL_TRUSTED,
FROM_ENDS_IN_NUMS autolearn=ham version=3.0.4
I'm not accepting message because I'm not familiar with this system and
I've mail to you with gmail but it's encrypt.
I'm a student,I haven't many time.you can mail to me,I'll reply to you.
Have a good day!
ling was talking in party last night about having written a spam program. This was around 1:00 a.m. Apparently he tested it.
Thanks. Is it time to write some program to stop this from happening? For instance, by limiting the number of recipients of the same mail?
re #216 Mr. Former President ?
No, former presidents are addressed as any other civilian would be. "President" is not like a military rank where it is retained after retirement.
Mr. President From 1993 to 2001 ?
re #221 In the United States, it is still fine to address the Senator as Mr. John Smith, although the office title on the envelope may help direct the letter more quickly. For a salutation in a letter, we would generally write "Dear Senator Smith" or "Dear Mr. Senator." We would use the same manner of address in person, that is, "Senator Smith" or "Mr. Senator." While there is nothing "wrong" with calling him "Mr. Smith," it is usually seen as being a mite disrespectful, unless you know personally that the official prefers that means of address. This pattern applies to most ranking officials such as mayors, elected legislators, governors, ministers, presidents, secretaries, and titles formed from these names like lieutenant governor, vice-president, or undersecretary. When They are Voted Out... What happens when they no longer hold the office? Usually out of respect, we would still refer to them the same way. While we might refer to a retired Senator Smith as former Senator Smith or ex-Senator Smith, that would not be appropriate as an address - whether a direct personal address or address on a letter. It is perfectly acceptable and appropriate to continue to address him as "Senator Smith" or write him in care of "Senator John Smith." The term Honorable is usually reserved for those still in office. For the salutation in a letter, it would still be fine to write "Dear Senator Smith." "Dear Mr. Senator" tends to suggest that he is still in office. There is usually nothing wrong with addressing him as "Dear Mr. Smith," but it is probably better to avoid it unless you know for sure that he does not mind. This is especially true after an election loss. Calling him "Mr. Smith" rather than "Senator Smith" might be calling more attention to his loss - and gloating is never good manners. The Conclusion of the Matter Clearly, if you have a personal relationship with the person and know the person's preferences, you may use whatever would be appropriate in your situation. If the senator is a personal friend, you may always start your letters with "Dear John." Sometimes officials will insist on it. But in most such situations, you may use the same appellations that you used when the person was in office, though it is probably best to avoid Honorable or Mr./Mrs./Miss/Ms. plus the title once the person is out of office. http://englishplus.com/news/news1200.htm So, it comes down to a matter of respect for the office. In the case of President Clinton and President GW Bush, neither of them were voted "out" so it would behoove a stranger to address them with their known title.
Can someone explain why it is that I occasionally log on and I show all brand new items? Like I haven't logged on at all for the new agora?
If you lose your connection during bbs, then it is possible to lose your
history.
When that happens, I type "fix"
Then "read since {date time i'd last read items}"
It happens to me even when I don't lose connection while in BBS. I've quit BBS and logged out of grex, and the next time I get all brandnew items. It happened to me THREE times yesterday. Seems to be a problem here.
I had one instance of it, yesterday.
This response has been erased.
RE 225 Thanks!
Re 228> Reading mnet gives me a headache. Too much actuivity and very little relevance
It also can happen when somebody scribbles responses.
re #231 What do you mean?
The item in which a response has been scribbled can show up as unread, though there are no new responses to display. Annoying when somebody does that "scribble all my responses in this conf" thing.
Is this a systems problem, Scott?
This response has been erased.
I think it can also happen if /a fills up and you cannot write to your participation file and it gets messed up.
What's this? Is it a problem?
Date: Wed, 24 Aug 2005 12:58:36 -0700
From: Returned mail <MAILER-DAEMON@cyberspace.org>
To: rcurl@cyberspace.org
Subject: hi
Parts/Attachments:
1 Shown 3 lines Text (charset: ISO-8859-1)
2 81 KB Application
----------------------------------------
Once you have completed the form in the attached file
your account records will not be interrupted and will continue as normal.
[ Part 2, Application/X-COMPRESSED 108KB. ]
[ Cannot display this part. Press "V" then "S" to save in a file. ]
Looks like a forged From address and someone fishing for your social security number.
That's what I thought. I rarely open attachments to such, but rarely I take at look to see what the attachment is, expecting the fact that I'm running Mac OS-X to stop any viruses/worms/etc/.
/etc/.
User "XXX" on grex had the mail program (sending of mail from the command
prompt) hang/crash. Ever since then, on a daily basis or more frequently,
grex keeps sending the user the following notice, even though the recovery
file was deleted. What is doing this, and how can it be turned off.
(e-mailings of this to staff have not met with a response)
From root@cyberspace.org Thu Aug 25 15:45:55 2005
Envelope-to: XXX@cyberspace.org
Delivery-date: Thu, 25 Aug 2005 15:45:55 -0400
X-vi-recover-file: /tmp/mail.RenjUxL20914
X-vi-recover-path: /var/tmp/vi.recover/vi.UHFdq21332
Reply-To: root@cyberspace.org
From: root@cyberspace.org (Nvi recovery program)
To: XXX@cyberspace.org
Subject: Nvi saved the file mail.RenjUxL20914
Precedence: bulk
Date: Thu, 25 Aug 2005 15:45:55 -0400
On Wed Aug 17 14:08:22 2005, the user XXX was editing a file
named /tmp/mail.RenjUxL20914 on the machine
grex.cyberspace.org, when it was saved for recovery. You can
recover most, if not all, of the changes to this file using
the -r option to vi:
vi -r /tmp/mail.RenjUxL20914
When I'm dialed in direct, it is *still* impossible for me to make any responses or new items; I get some sort of core dump error from the editor. Is there a more "automatic" way to get a response entered from a pre-written file? Something like "respond < filename"?
It appears to be something about the gate editor. I am entering this direct-dialed with vi.
While bbs'ing: /log: write failed, file system is full
Re: resp:241 finally the nags are no longer being sent.
Re. #183. Regarding crashing, when I was disconnected shortly after
logging on (a little after 8 p.m.), I became curious as to how frequent
the crashes have been recently, which motivated my composing a log of
recent reboots.
Last login data is included to estimate system down time.
For the privacy of users who happened to be the last users logged-in
immediately prior to a reboot, I have replaced their userids with
"userid" in the data below.
reboot ~ Tue Aug 30 20:28 [8:28pm]
userid ttyq1 157.95.31.174 Tue Aug 30 20:13 - crash
(00:15) [approx. time following last login: 28 - 13 = 15 min.]
.... .... .... .... ....
reboot ~ Tue Aug 30 10:37
userid ttyq3 80.51.51.23 Tue Aug 30 10:18 - 10:21
(00:02) [approx. time following last login: 37 - 18 = 19 min.]
.... .... ....
reboot ~ Tue Aug 30 08:47
userid ttyq3 217.21.35.33 Tue Aug 30 06:50 - crash
(01:56)
[approx. time following last login: 8:47 - 6:50 = 1 hr. 57 min.]
.... .... ....
reboot ~ Mon Aug 29 10:02
userid ttyp2 dialup-4.159.214.153.dial1.chicago1.level3.net
Mon Aug 29 09:45 - crash
(00:16) [approx. time following last login: 10:02 - 9:45 = 17 min.]
.... .... .... .... .... .... ....
reboot ~ Mon Aug 29 00:43
userid ttyqe helix.kaist.ac.kr Mon Aug 29 00:27 - crash
(00:16) [approx. time following last login: 43 - 27 = 16 min.]
.... .... .... .... ....
reboot ~ Sun Aug 28 07:32
userid ttyp7 ACD6D4DE.ipt.aol.com Sun Aug 28 07:16 - 07:16
(00:00) [approx. time following last login: 32 - 16 = 16 min.]
.... .... ....
reboot ~ Sat Aug 27 10:34
userid ttypb ip68-13-188-36.om.om.cox.net
Sat Aug 27 02:09 - 02:11
(00:01)
[approx. time following last login: 10:34 - 02:09 = 8 hrs. 25 min.]
.... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... ....
reboot ~ Thu Aug 25 15:46 (3:46pm)
userid ttyp3 netsun.cl.msu.edu Thu Aug 25 15:30 - crash
(00:15) [approx. time following last login: 46 - 30 = 16 min.]
Mode of accessing the above data:
Step 1: Access the shell prompt.
Step 2: Type: "last [pipe symbol] more" (without the quotation marks and
without the square brackets). (The pipe is the uppercase symbol sharing
the same key with the backslash "\". Sometimes typing a pipe into an
editor screen will generate unpredictable results, but the field following
the shell prompt should accept it.)
Step 3: Type: "/" (without the quotation marks).
Step 4: Type "reboot" (without the quotation marks).
Step 5: To view prior reboots: repeat steps 3 and 4 for each prior reboot.
(You may be able to depress the up arrow key in lieu of retyping
"reboot".)
Re Step 5: Typing "n" instead of "/reboot" will also skip to the next
reboot entry.
Also, if you just want to see a list of recent reboots with other login
information filtered out, you can use the Unix 'grep' utility. Type
this at the shell prompt:
last|grep '^reboot '|more
Using 'awk', you can get a list of reboots, with each reboot followed by
a list of who was logged in at the time of the immediately preceding crash:
last|awk '{if (/^reboot /) print $0; else if (/- crash/) print " "$1}'
|more
(Backtalk wrapped the preceding command; it should be typed all on one
line.)
These reboots are not planned. For a few days now, Grex has been
crashing a couple of times a day, resulting in downtime of 20 minutes or
so while it reboots itself. At this point, cause unknown. Usually the
reboot is successful; when it's not, somebody (usually somebody at our
colo, and on some occasions me) has to push the reset button manually.
I realize the sporadic outages are annoying. Hopefully we'll get the
problem resolved soon.
I was logged on twice this week when it happened, I think. Lucky me. I have been emailing gelinas each time - is this appropriate? Should I email colo instead? Or phone them?
As a practical matter, I'm online often enough that most of the time I notice that Grex is down sooner than another staff member is likely to notice or to check their email. So for this particular problem, I don't think emailing someone speeds up the process of getting Grex back up when it doesn't successfully reboot itself. You shouldn't contact the colo directly. They are just hosting our server and don't maintain it. They are willing do something simple, like power-cycle it or hit the reset button, but for security reasons only on the direct request of a Grex staff member who is known to them.
Is it known yet whether the reboots are hardware-initiated, software-initiated, or both?
Not known to me. No reboots in two days. (cross fingers)
As opposed to "finger cross". ;-)
This response has been erased.
Think pretty highly of yourself, don't you?
This response has been erased.
Would you settle for an MRE?
This response has been erased.
/send dan a big bucket of popeye's wings and a soady-pop
Now it's refusing to let me enter stuff direct-dialed using vi. Just got a "nasty error message" or something when I tried to enter a response.
grex is back! thanks to staff for what sounds like a lot of work to repair the labor day attack. what exactly happened that caused this mess anyway?
Thanks to the staff member(s) who got Grex back up. Could we hear the story?
The response time was outragious! We need some accountability here. People need to be fired or demoted and a contigency plan should be drafted up just incase this happens again!
The staff member who got Grex back up was me, aided by Jan Wolter's life-saving mirroring software and some helpful advice in email from Marcus Watts. I'm only sorry that I wasn't able to devote much attention to it sooner, due to other commitments last week. What happened: Some files in the /etc disk partition (in particular, the password file) became corrupt, for reasons unknown to me but probably due to a software glitch (don't know if it was OS software or application software, either). I made a trip to our colo and was able to run some tests and verify that the disks and filesystems were healthy, but didn't have time to investigate further. On a subsequent trip, I booted into single user mode and took some time to look around the filesystem, eventually discovering that the password file (and possibly others) had been corrupted. Grex's important file systems (system directories, user directories, bbs) are backed up to a spare hard drive every few hours, thanks to some mirroring software that Jan Wolter wrote. Because of this, I was able to restore "good" versions of the files in /etc from the state they were in about 4 hours before the crash. Thankfully, that's all it took to get Grex to boot successfully. The most that was lost was whatever new accounts were created via newuser in that 4-hour period, I think. Diagnosis of the cause of the problem will have to be left to someone who knows more about OpenBSD than I do. Until the cause is addressed, the problem may well recur. If it does, at least we know where to look now, and Grex should be up a lot sooner. I'm sorry that it all took so long this time.
John, thank you for your assistance. It is appreciated.
I say thanks to all the staff for spending their PRECIOUS time to help restore grex. So, if you want to complain that it wasn't up faster, get the knowledge, skill and volunteer to do it.
Re: #264, #265. Hear, hear!
Har, har !
Re #265: while I agree that the staff are to be thanked heartily for their efforts in maintaining Grex, I think it is unreasonable to expect everyone to be come equally skilled before they can complain. After all, the members of Grex that do not have the skills to do what staff does are still donating the funds required for staff to do what they do. I think some thanks are due for even just that - and that members do gain some license to complain thereby. In addition, it would be a huge waste of time and money for *everyone* using Grex to become equally skilled as staff, as then how could all that talent possibly be used simultaneously? Isn't there a suitable maximum to the number of staff required to adequately service Grex?
As the number of talented staff increases, the better the chances that someone will be available to work on the system at all hours of the day and night.
How about grex spend a little cash on the machine, hire a tech to come in and FIX whatever is actually wrong and stop it from crashing.
Minor thing, but isn't it time to remove the MOTD item that some loginids are missing but the staff is working to recover them? It's been there for something like 6 months, if not longer. The staff is not working on recovering them at this point, or at lrast so I prefer to believe. That announcement is kind of painful to see, day after day.
Thanks to remmers for saving us! A few minutes ago, *both* dialin lines were ringing open. I thought the system had crashed again. I am pleasantly surprised to see that it's only the dialins that are hosed.
It apparently had crashed again. It wasn't available over the network, either. last shows entries with end times of "crash" and a reboot about 9:50.
In via Backtalk. Can't read anything in the current (Autumn) Agora--hangs when I try to do anything (both pre and post the repairs done yesterday and today). Summer Agora works fine.
Pine is giving problems. When the inbox is opened all new messages are not listed. If one just returns anyway, one can read each message in order, but they remain unlisted in the message index shown.
Pine is again giving problem. The Inbox does not show properly when selected.
Pine got OK again for a while, but now again the Inbox is not shown properly (it cuts off). What changes are being made that cause it to go bad for a while and then be OK again for a while? Are changes being made to the system that could cause these changes in pine? If so, would whoever is making the changes announce them so we can ALL attribute the changes we see to a cause?
(why are you using oldagora to report this?)
Because I have both agora and oldagora in my .cflist and I sometimes don't notice which I'm in.... my bad.
it's raining on rane's .cflist
You have several choices: