49 new of 276 responses total.
Now, as to whether staff would ever elect to dial-in to fix a problem if Grex was off the net? Don't know. I suspect it would be easier to simply go to Provide than deal with such slow and painful access, but someone on staff should probably answer that one.
Beuller? Beuller...
Re #220:
Long distance can be had cheap enough
now, and modems are fast enough, that
this is much less of a problem.
I think I may have found the problem and have rolled out a fix. Can someone more local than myself here in Tokyo please give the line a ring and let me know whether it is working now?
Silly me, I forgot my powerbook has a modem. For the first and problem last time, I put it to use, and have been successfully able to dial in. Emjoy!
I think the dialin lines are a valuable service for some people, and I'd hate to see them go away entirely just yet. It will be the end of an era, when they do.
Re#232 s/problem/probably/ s/Emjoy/Enjoy/
what;s with the spam-spew lately?
Thanks, Bruce. Very nice.
Worked perfectly, and nearly instantly.
Bruce, you rock
Excellent. Thanks, Bruce!
> If Grex is "NOT AN INTERNET PROVIDER" it seems that there is not much of a > reason to keep dialup lines. Your logic is backwards - *because* grex is not an ISP its primary purpose of being a BBS must be supported via the ability to connect via direct dial. It just so happens that because grex is good enough to support e-mail to/from the internet that connection into grex from the internet is also supported (as well as access to the internet from grex in the limited fashion of lynx).
What happens when modems and Internet get replaced with some form of wifi? Will Grex oldskoolers still demand their 9600 baud in the name of charter semantics for "BBS"?
I highly doubt that will ever happen unless Congress decides to get into the ISP business and provide every citizen with whatever passes for Internet then. An Internet connection costs money, while Grex doesn't.
While direct dial access to a remote computer system remains viable, and many people still use it / depend on it, then yes, for such people in the Ann Arbor area, grex should still support it. A large percentage of people with internet access connect to it via dial-up anyway, I'll warrant.
Roughly 65% of Internet users (in the US) have broadband, so yes, people without it comprise a significant fraction.
I heard 50%. Maybe you are counting people who use it at work.
Nope, just home users. Your 50% figure was accurate in August of 2004 but it's grown considerably since then, and is projected to break 70% by February.
We know two people living in subsidized housing with broadband. One also pays for cable TV. No wonder there are so many enormous web pages around. Ebay is not the worst of them.
I really appreciate dialup access. No more frequent 1-2 min stalls, or having what I type appear at random intervals, or unpredictable disconnects. My 'ISP' (WCC) is not much better than grex as it used to be, this month.
Telnet daemon may be down. Telnet in is broken, SSH works.
Inetd got into a funny state where it was only listening to telnet connections on the loopback interface and not on the network card. This effectively shutdown telnet access to grex for the last several hours. SIGHUP-ing the inetd process was not sufficient. Had to actually turn off telnet in /etc/inetd.conf, hup inetd, then restore telnet in /etc/inetd.conf. This forced inetd to cleanup and reset all its state relating to inbound telnet connections. telnet came back to life immediately.
I think talk is broken. Can two staff members check it out? Or I can test it soon with a staff member but some other grexer and I have not been able to make it work. He types 'talk keesan' and I see at my prompt 'talk keesan'. If I go into talk I get (on my half of the screen) talk keesan@localhost.cyberspace.org . We are sending tels instead, in which I am trying to teach him to use mail here.
Talk is fine. I think he is in the "menu" command environment and needs to type !talk keesan instead of talk keesan.
(have attempted to communicate same to rpreston via tel)
Me too, but he is not accepting tels. I think he is trying to learn pine. So I wrote suggesting we try again some other day. Thanks. He read my plan and thought we had some shared interests (such as stainless steel and Latin).
I use "talk" frequently. Unless it broke in the past 24 hours it's not broken.
Re #248: How is WCC your ISP? As far as I know, you are not student, staff, or faculty there.
Jim is a WCC student and we share his account. I read/write his emails. A friend just offered to let me use an account that he is only keeping in order to get emails at it. He has DSL too. I won't need it now just to do emails, with grex working.
I would strongly caution anyone - don't depend on Grex as your only email address. Have a backup. The same should be said of any files archived here. Back 'em up elsewhere. We aren't stable enough to be thought of as a dependable service provider.
That is unfortunately only too true, as recent events will attest. And it's a pity.
I have told everyone to send me important mail at sdf. But I can still use grex to access sdf, when grex is working.
Please put a date on the motd. 'Grex was down much of today' is outdated. Can motd messages be written to automatically expire?
Sindi, there was a current date at the top of the message when I logged the down message and the date was further updated when I logged the "the back up" message a few hours later. It should be fairly easy to write up a script that can be run by grex itself at boot time or out of cron every so often which would update the status and update the time stamp. The script could also log a warning to the effect that any status who's last update date was more than X hours may imply that grex is down. If the system was up but /etc/nologin existed, the status message would include the text of /etc/nologin. Status could otherwise be manually updated as now by staff working on the problem, and the system would automatically overridden that when it rebooted.
I did not see any date when I ssh'ed to grex and read the motd, or when I just typed !motd now and read it again. Or did you not mean the motd displays a date? I suggested that instead of writing 'today' you write 'today, Dec. 20' Or 'Tuesday, Dec. 20'.
I knew I should have finished my morning coffee before conferencing this morning (today, December 19 JST) My brain substituted hvcn status page where you mentioned motd in #260. Sorry.
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Re resp:258: How things have changed. Once upon a time my Grex email was more reliable than any of my college or ISP accounts. That was back before we switched to OpenBSD, though, which has proved to be considerably less stable than SunOS. That kind of surprises me, since I've run FreeBSD servers for a long time without many problems.
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Quite possibly. It's still surprising, because they share a lot of code (in both directions.) I haven't used OpenBSD for much except stand-alone firewalls, though, so I have little personal experience with it.
Maybe that's why OpenBSD is ranked so secure. I defy anyone to break into a system that's off.
I have a USB to IDE controller I use to break into systems that are "off".
Gull, unless you are referring to something else, the only email unreliability problem I recall since the upgrade was caused by human error, not any kind of system problem. If you are talking about other instabilities, most of those are our own fault, having procrastinated on upgrading from 3.5 to 3.8, excepting the possible memory or motherboard problem staff are still tracking down.
Mail sent to grex via an earthlink account is bouncing because they got tired of retrying. Mail sent via this same account is being 'DENIED' by some other place to which I can send mail from grex. SMTP error. Freeshell was blacklisted for a while last week. I am really grateful that I can send mail from grex to anywhere, but why is incoming mail timing out?
How long have you noticed this happening?
hi bruce !
Just today, when I first used this account. Just now I tried sending to grex from earthlink/mindspring, wcc, and one other account. The first two mails arrived immediately and the last one is not here yet. I first looked up the popmail server name. It is not returned yet either. What bothers me is that mail sent via earthlink was 'denied' by someone else I was sending to. Grex mail gets through all the time unless we are on the RBL blacklist, which has not happened recently.
I probably sent the third mail wrong. Another attempt came immediately. Grex must have been busy with a lot of ingoing or outgoing spam at around 3:29 this afternoon.
You have several choices: