170 new of 333 responses total.
TROGG IS DAVID BLAINE
we should start suing david blane
Don't give Other more ideas! *snort*
this board is impossible to trlol
this board is impossible to trlol
I recently had a problem that I referred to staff, and received the following automated reply: "This is an automatic reply to tell you that your message to the Grex staff was received. Mail to the (all-volunteer) staff is usually answered only on the weekends, so it may be up to a week before you receive a reply to your message. But your message *is* in the queue and the staff does intend to answer it. If you sent a question about Grex, you may be able to find the answer faster by looking in the list of Frequently Asked Questions about Grex at http://www.cyberspace.org/faq.html "If you asked to have your password reset, please make sure you included the user ID of your Grex account. If you didn't send your user ID, please send another message to staff to tell us your user ID. Do not send your password. "Note that Grex will send out this message only once every 30 days, even if you send mail to staff more often than that. "-The Grex Staff" I certainly understand the problems of volunteer organizations, and appreciate efforts of the volunteer Grex staff. But I do feel it would benefit Grex if inquiries to staff can be addressed more rapidly. We all get frustrated with difficulties in obtaining (or not obtaining, or great delays in obtaining) responses from companies. It would be nice if Grex was more friendly toward users. Perhaps the responsibility for responding within 24 hours could be passed among staff members, say for a week each? Or perhaps mail to staff to go to a non-staff volunteer, who would assist if possible, or pass the inquiry or problems on to a staff member that is "on call" at that time?
this board is impossible to trlol
hi it's me i'm a camwhore
The latest trashing was 3:54 a. m.. I will be reading agora just before bedtime and doing a fixseen in the morning. Would it help to turn off newuser for a while? Or only allow new users to read most items and post in just one item until they prove that they can behave themselves? (And somehow limit new users to 3 postings a day).
Can the r n (read new) command somehow be expanded to read things since a certain time of day? I just tried r n since 4:00 and it did not work.
Re #169: the weekend has come and gone since I wrote to staff on 18 May, but I have had no response. The problem I am trying to solve is that I cannot ftp to the account of a non-profit Grex member whose account I manage, although I can ssh to it. I've also written to the Grex treasurer, who I presume manages accounts, but have not had a response. Any suggestions on how I can solve this problem?
re #174: do you get an error message of some sort? are you trying to connect from a browser or a command-line ftp program? Can you ftp to your own account using the same mechanism as you are trying to use for the mnac account?
No error message - just an immediate disconnect after entering the pw. I am using a command line ftp (via Mac Terminal). I can ftp to my own account with exactly the same procedure.
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i am a not for profit GreXer
Re #174: Have you tried sftp?
That's what I use. SFTP-2, in fact. Sorry I didn't make that clear. I *think* the problem might be because the membership isn't current, or there is a mistake in the membership records; or is a current membership not required to ftp TO an account?
membership isn't required to ftp to an account, AND I checked the groups that that account belongs to: it appears to belong to the member and internet groups..
Re #180: perhaps it's an SSH/SFTP version problem.
Thanks for checking that, Mike. I just went through connecting to both rcurl and mnac via SSH-2, using Terminal's (Mac OSX) Connect-to-Server directly, and both were fine. I then tried the same thing via SFTP-2, and could only connect to rcurl. The error message I got trying the connection to mnac was Connecting to cyberspace.org... mnac@cyberspace.org's password: Connection closed [Process exited - exit code 255] I even wrote out the mnac pw and copied it to paste in, to make sure I wasn't entering it incorrectly. Earlier I had changed the pw, and the new pw is OK to mnac for SSH while SFTP didn't work. Does the above error message provide any clue? Mike, are you staff, and able to change the pw and try it? (Just let me know what you change it to..... 8^}) If you aren't, could a staff member with root please check this out? (The Staff list at the Grex website is from Jan '04.)
I'll give it a try..
Here's what I tried:
1) su'ed to root, then stashed a copy of the mnac
account's password entry so I could restore it
to normal afterward, then changed the password
to a known string. sftp'ed to grex and tried
to log in but saw the same sort of behavior
Rane is reporting:
mcnally@radius:~$ sftp mnac@cyberspace.org
Connecting to cyberspace.org...
mnac@cyberspace.org's password:
Connection closed
To make sure it wasn't just an authentication
error I logged in using the wrong password
intentionally and got prompted to enter the
password again, so if Rane is not seeing such
a message he must be using the right password.
mcnally@radius:~$ sftp mnac@cyberspace.org
mnac@cyberspace.org's password:
Permission denied, please try again.
Finally, to verify that sftp is working properly
between the two machines, I sftp'ed in as myself
without any problem.
mcnally@radius:~$ sftp mcnally@cyberspace.org
mcnally@cyberspace.org's password:
sftp> quit
One thing that I thought was quite odd is that while
editing the account as root, the password field in the
/etc/passwd entry for mnac is a great deal longer than
for any of the other accounts around it in the password
file. E.g.:
iggy:xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx:8442:1002::0:0:igor von
heiniken:/a/i/g/iggy:/usr/local/bin/bbssh
marcvh:xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx:8451:1002::0:0:Marc
VanHeyningen:/c/m/a/marcvh:/bin/bash
fitz:xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx:8880:1002::0:0:Scotch! Cigars!
Coffee!:/c/f/i/fitz:/bin/csh
gull:xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx:9062:1002::0:0:David
Brodbeck,Ann Arbor MI:/a/g/u/gull:/bin/bash
mnac:yyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy:92
80:1002::0:0:MNAC:/a/m/n/mnac:/bin/tcsh
The other nearby entries in the password file have
encrypted password hashes that are 28 characters long.
The mnac account has a 60-character long password hash.
Can anyone familiar with the password scheme we're using
tell me why that should be the case and/or whether it has
any bearing on the matter at hand?
"if Rane is not seeing such a message he must be using the right password" Yes, I was using the right pw, by this test.
GNAA GNAA GNAAGNAA GNAA GNAAGNAA GNAA GNAAGNAA GNAA GNAAGNAA GNAA GNAAGNAA GNAA GNAA
Why can't these jerks be stopped?
They can, but the methods of doing so are not very comfortable.
re. 188: why don't you respond to every post they make with 'jerk'? it's always worked in the past, hasn't it?
Yes, it has. However I don't think these new jerks read the conferences.
you'll never know until you try.
Re #185: that is *really* weird: the wrong pw gets a message to try again, but the right pw disconnects! Can what happens when using the right pw be logged?
There really dont seem to be any good methods for dealing with this type of vandal. We discussed some ideas at the board meeting but none are likely to be effective. It kind of sucks.
you guys are like the government :(
On the bright side, the GNAA posts make trap look a lot less offensive (unless he's behind the latest them).
Can we discontinue newuser telnet/ssh access for a while, or is it also possible to post 149 copies of trash via the web? Can someone pick up the droppings in such a manner that they don't leave blank spots that appear in all the items for the rest of us (which is the problem with the twit filter).
Is it possible to 'browse new since 17:00' and if so how?
The conspiracy theorist inside of me tells me that the person behind these postings was an advocate for closing newuser on Grex and making it member-only.
rotfl.
re #195 Don't insult the gov't like that! ;)
oups !
I am still cooling my heals while waiting for some action on my problem of not being able to SFTP to mnac. mcnally certainly took some steps on this in #185, but there has been no answer to his question "Can anyone familiar with the password scheme we're using tell me why that should be the case and/or whether it has any bearing on the matter at hand?" It has also been just more than a week since I first sent e-mail to staff about this problem, and received the "form letter" response given in #169. I realize it is very "touchy" to complain about things like this, staff being 100% volunteer, and busy with their own live, etc. But it does seem reasonable to me for a user to get just a little out of sorts over being ignored after going through channels. MNAC, a non-profit charitable environmental organization, has maintained its website on Grex and a membership in Grex in part to help support a fellow charitable non-profit. However they would have to move their website elsewhere if they are unable to manage it here. Is this matter of any importance to Grex? I will repeat my suggestions from #169: "Perhaps the responsibility for responding within 24 hours could be passed among staff members, say for a week each? Or perhaps mail to staff to go to a non-staff volunteer, who would assist if possible, or pass the inquiry or problems on to a staff member that is "on call" at that time?" Does anyone else think this is reasonable?
I dont know Rane. I know I would sure hate for MNAC to move but I could certainly understand it if that were what happens. I would try sending email to the staff again and maybe address it to the board as well. If I knew how to fix your problem I would.
cool your heals ?! huh ? did you mean heels ? and even then ?!
Very astute...now, on the topic?
Re #204: thanks, slynne. You are a board member. As one of my "representatives", would you be interested in taking this issue to the board?
very professorial
does changing the password help ? I dunno if this was suggested before.
Just what I was gonna say. Rane is complaining about a lack of formal response when mcnally told rane very clearly his password was way the hell bigger than any other he'd (mcnally) come across. That sounds like a pretty clear ID of where the solution most likely resides. If rane can't change the password himself, then he should ask staff for assistance. There's certainly no need for an item on the board agenda.
re #210: The length of the password hash isn't a function of the length of the password, so I don't think changing the password will make a difference. I'm also not sure that the weirdness with the password has anything to do with why Rane can't sftp to that account. Since he can apparently log in to the account via ssh, here's what I propose: If Rane will send me a message from the MNAC account asking me to do so I will set things up so that he has permission to edit files in the MNAC web directory. That won't solve the sftp problem directly but it will give him a way to change the files (sftp them to the rcurl account, then copy them to ~mnac) in the meantime until we can figure out why sftp isn't working for mnac. I apologize for the delay in getting back to him but I was busy at work yesterday and my internet service wasn't working when I returned home last night. It's not a perfect solution but it will allow him to make the changes he needs.
Plus if rane has access to the MNAC account he can copy/move the file to his own directory and ftp from there. Temporary solution but should be better than waiting for it to be fixed.
i like that someone who i've never seen post here before came here just to bitch out rane!
I dont mind discussing this with the board, Rane.
Re #s 209 and 210: it is important to pay attention. Yes, I tried changing the password: same result. Besides, the original password had been working fine, and then stopped working for SFTP. Thank you, mcnally and slynne. While my immediate goal is to do the ftp, there is apparently a problem with how "staff" works with the users of the system, for which I put forward some suggestions.
> there is apparently a problem with how "staff" works with the > users of the system I agree, mcnally can't do it all himself. Grex apparently has LOTs of staffers, but nobody has "user support" as one of their areas of responsibility.
Re #211: mcnally's suggestion wiggled a bad connection in my brain and the bulb lit up. After consulting my copy of UNIX for DUMMIES.... I ftp'd the mnac webpage file to my account, and then from the mnac web directory copied it over. (This left a couple of secondary questions, such as why I can't ftp directly to mnac, for which I am consulting further with Mike.)
re #215 Did the SFTP password change? Are you being hacked?
The SFTP and SSH passwords are the same, and the latter works. Also see mcnally's #185 for related tests. Other avenues are being pursued...
I'm sorry, as much as I love Grex, if the amount of racist, bigoted, and repetitive posts continues to increase, I may have to leave Grex permanently. I'm sorry.
We will miss you Cyberpnk.
Been nice knowing you, softy.
It is an unfortunate side effect of that kind of vandalism though.
Its a blip on a radar not worth mentioning unless you want to feed the troll.
Price of doing business.
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On another matter, concerning what might be a problem - or a policy. I put a small .jpg file of the MNAC logo in the mnac web page here, but the link to it from the webpage remains broken. Does the system automatically refuse access to jpegs in the www directory? If so, is this still necessary, with the increased filespace now available?
Grex doesn't allow graphics, but you can get around that by making it a SVG and embedding it into the HTML. :-)
I cannot send mail from grex to grex today - I tried answerig three different people (from three continents). Rane, post the jpeg at some other site and link to it from the grex page.
Use arbornet.org for your webpage.
Does Arbornet allow you to use graphics? I use sdf because they give me a neato multics.org domain. 8-)
Re #229: already did that. How about HVCN for hosting websites? Their conferences seem to have died in 1999, but apparently they still host nonprofit websites. I considered going there for MNAC, but wasn't anxious to change the URL.
A friend is reporting that my mail is bouncing because the ?SMPT server is refusing connections? Anyone know about that?
In the strictest sense it's not *refusing* connections but it doesn't seem to be working properly, either.. I've telnetted to the smtp port and can't get as far as HELO, so I'm going to try resetting the exim process.. mcnally@skookum:~$ telnet grex.org smtp Trying 216.86.77.194... Connected to grex.org. Escape character is '^]'. HELO 554 SMTP synchronization error Connection closed by foreign host.
I try to telnet www.grex.org: Unknown host. I can use web interface and I can telnet to sdf.lonestar.org (Can't try ssh at the moment because it won't work on this computer with this linux, anywhere).
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I know that.. I never got that far..
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I could dial in directly to grex just now. Can other people telnet/ssh? I was testing a lucent modem and maybe it does not like grex.
For AAAGES I hadn't been able to ssh in direct. I had this problem I while ago and got it fixed, but screwed up my ssh config after an upgrade so that it wouldn't work again. For the past few weeks I have been either ssh in direct from a laptop running SuSE, or ssh'ing in to dahmer.vistech.net and then to grex. Today, without thinking, I ssh'ed direct into Grex from my Gentoo box. And it worked.
Re that problem of SFTP-ing to mnac: Changing /lib to /etc for .login and .cshrc source directories fixed it. So it had nothing to do with the pw files per-se. I also solved the jpeg problem for a homepage by putting the jpeg elsewhere and linking to it. But the question remains - does Grex still really need a no jpeg rule for web pages?
Where is the ssh config file? I have somehow copied a newer version of linux on top of my old one without /etc. Got to copy that some time, maybe it will fix the ssh problem. PRNG not seeded.
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I don't see anything related to ssh in /etc. I should read the man page and see what else I may have omitted. Maybe in /root?
Actually, what Rane is reporting is that his csh startup scripts
sourced files (global.cshrc, global.login) that used to live in
/usr/local/lib, apparently.
So there was a line in his (or rather MNAC's) startup files that
read:
source /usr/local/lib/global.cshrc
Since those files now, for some reason, live in /usr/local/etc
the startup script would cause an error when he logged in and
it was this that was apparently affecting his ability to sftp.
Changing the line to:
source /usr/local/etc/global.cshrc
fixed the problem (as would simply commenting out that line..)
I would have said that..... 8^}
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Re resp:194: In the past, vandals like this have eventually gotten bored and left, or sometimes even started to participate intelligently in discussions. I don't think extreme measures like disabling newuser are called for, yet. Furthermore, the more attention you lavish on these jerks the longer it will take for them to get bored with their stunt. Re resp:238: Re the mail problem...It's complaining because you're saying HELO before you get the connection banner. That's not RFC-compliant behavior, so Exim hangs up on the connection. (Hosts are explicitly allowed to delay the banner as a slowdown technique, for example if they're under high CPU load.) I suspect the connect ACL is delaying sending the banner for sites that match spam blacklists, because this is a pretty useful technique against spambots, and I think I suggested it once. Every once in a while you may find a broken host you have to whitelist, though. I have no idea if this is still effective against spam, or if the people who write spambot software have caught on; it's been a few months since I was administering a serious mail server of my own.
damnit ! who the hell filled up /c ?! this used to be the EMPTY partition ! i want the old /c back ! :(
You should've been on /a Sorry!
Please date messages in the motd, including those about email having been fixed.
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Was it not adopted because of policy, or just neglect?
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That sounds like the handwriting is on the wall, when those in charge are practicing neglect.
"Email on Grex has been broken long enough for the
situation to be considered permanent."
http://grex.cyberspace.org/~ball/
Someone might want to help labia out: labiocom ft 137.204.106.65 Thu11AM 0 - labiocom ft 137.204.106.77 Thu10AM 0 - pchihao ft 222.253.76.86 19May06 0 - mbb ft p5491B806.dip0.t 20May06 0 - labiocom ft 137.204.106.115 Thu10AM 0 - cecep ft 157.95.31.123 4:18AM 0 RETR kaset_3_b.wav labiocom ft 137.204.106.81 Thu10AM 0 - labiocom ft 137.204.106.98 Thu10AM 0 - labiocom ft 137.204.106.83 Thu10AM 0 - labiocom ft 137.204.106.62 Thu10AM 0 - labiocom ft 137.204.106.68 Thu11AM 0 - labiocom ft 137.204.106.88 Thu10AM 0 - labiocom ft 137.204.106.54 Thu10AM 0 - labiocom ft 137.204.106.117 Thu10AM 0 - labiocom ft 137.204.106.107 Thu10AM 0 - labiocom ft 137.204.106.72 Thu11AM 0 - labiocom ft 137.204.106.60 Thu11AM 0 - labiocom ft 137.204.106.106 Thu11AM 0 - labiocom ft 137.204.106.85 Thu11AM 0 - labiocom ft 137.204.106.115 Thu11AM 0 - labiocom ft 137.204.106.67 Thu11AM 0 - labiocom ft 137.204.106.103 Thu11AM 0 - labiocom ft 137.204.106.71 Thu11AM 0 - labiocom ft 137.204.106.86 Thu11AM 0 - labiocom ft 137.204.106.109 Thu11AM 0 - labiocom ft 137.204.106.75 Thu11AM 0 - labiocom ft 137.204.106.100 Thu11AM 0 - labiocom ft 137.204.106.111 Thu11AM 0 - labiocom ft 137.204.106.104 Thu11AM 0 - labiocom ft 137.204.106.73 Thu11AM 0 - labiocom ft 137.204.106.114 Thu11AM 0 - labiocom ft 137.204.106.87 Thu11AM 0 - labiocom ft 137.204.106.78 Thu11AM 0 - labiocom ft 137.204.106.80 Thu11AM 0 - labiocom ft 137.204.106.69 Thu11AM 0 -
Could someone please update the motd as regards email problems of last week?
now _this_ really hurts:
& n
Message 64:
From xxxx@yyyyy.com Sat Jun 03 22:48:00 2006
Envelope-to: tsty@cyberspace.org
Delivery-date: Sat, 03 Jun 2006 22:48:00 -0400
Reply-To: <xxxxx@yyyyy.com>
From: "another AACS officer" <xxx@yyy.com>
To: "'TS Taylor'" <tsty@cyberspace.org>
Subject: RE: Web site
Date: Sat, 3 Jun 2006 21:46:07 -0400
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: multipart/alternative;
boundary="----=_NextPart_000_0004_01C8757.20071F40"
X-Mailer: Microsoft Office Outlook 11
In-Reply-To: <002a01c6865c$dbeaf0$6a1e1e0a@yyyyy>
X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V6.00.2900.2869
Thread-Index: AcaGW62keyTyYLloSxuUxrAUphJwAAMmSQAEcCZiA=
X-ArGoMail-Authenticated: xxxx@yyyyyyyy.com
This is a multi-part message in MIME format.
------=_NextPart_000_0004_01C68757.20071F40
Content-Type: text/plain;
charset="US-ASCII"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
TS - you have a problem with your email server. It keeps complaining about
too many concurrent SMTP connections. Do you have an account at a more
reliable email host?
_____
jalopy.org
Perhaps staff should eliminate the connection delays. What worked well on the medium-sized email server I used to administer may be ill-advised for the volume of mail Grex handles.
Having some problem with my web interface to the BBS. Some articles don't show up eg: in agora 184, 189, 177 178 and many more. Any idea why? AM i doing something wrong? I use Firefox 1.5.0.4 on Win2K.
Err ignore #262 Solved.. I needed to check "All items" Perhaps that could be made more obvious!
... but that would remove the thrill of finding NewStuff (tm) every time you login ... <g>!
Re 261 re 259: I see this all the time - mail to cyberspace.org hangs in the queue for hours to days, often generating warnings after 4 hours. If I connect to the SMTP port, I see that "too many concurrent SMTP connections" message, & an immediate disconnect. And I've also gotten complaints about mail to my Grex address not getting through; & this is much more of a problem for Grace, who has no other email address. But is this really a problem with the delay? It seems to me that the delay must be really, really, REALLY long if this is the case; when I see the too-many-connections message the disconnect is *immediate*. What is the maximum allowable number of SMTP connections (or processes) set to? Can this be bumped up, if it realistically is much too low? I realize that the limit is set to keep mail from completely busying out the system. But that doesn't mean that the default limit (if that's what it is) is reasonable for Grex. If the limit is inherited somehow from the previous hardware, it's even less likely to be reasonable. (But that seems a bit unlikely, given that we went from a hacked sendmail to something else at that time.)
Grex's mail config sucks, but I'm afraid I don't know enough about exim to fix it. The maillog shows we're dropping connections on the floor pretty much constantly, but I'm not sure how to fix that. I have a hypothesis that it may be due to our policy of introducing a 30s delay for any host listed in one of several RBLs, which I think causes a lot of tied up exim processes, but my attempts to reduce that delay to 1s by tweaking the exim.conf file have probably not been successful.
Several people report that they can never send me mail, including from mindspring/earthlink, which is impatient so it always times out.
Re #267: That's what prompted me to post what I did on my Web site. It's pointless people trying to send me email on Grex unless they happen to be another local user here.
I see what people mean about a problem with e-mail. I had sent a message here a few days ago that arrived within minutes, but last night I sent one that has still not arrived after nearly 12 hours.
ssh did not work just now but telnet does. Please someone remove the email not working message from last week (motd).
My unscientific observation is that my incoming and outgoing mail have stopped working for approximately the last 24 hours. I realize that some of this is still my fault for not having moved to a modern mail platform.
I have received some mail dated today, but not what I sent yesterday. Has it gone into a black hole?
I got three mails from AOL today (they have fixed the problem of refusing to accept mails from us too).
sdf.lonestar.org is working now, but freeshell.org is not, and the disk quotas all set themselves to 0 (with 400MB free) and I had to 'tweak' them - I wonder what people do who have not paid for the use of 'tweak'. I posted this info for people who signed up at freeshell.org for more reliable email than grex, which has been astonishingly reliable recently.
After a few days with no spam, the dam broke this morning and 21 spam messages poured in. But the message I sent two days ago has not. Where is it?
Your message must have drowned in the flood of spam.
I also am seeing much more spam. OTOH, SMTP connections are not being closed (or much, much less frequently) with that too-many-smtp-connections message. I suspect no mere coincidence.
In an attempt to end the backlogs that were causing many valid messages to be dropped, I disabled two of the three spam blacklist checks to see whether that would improve mail delivery. Apparently it hasn't had any affect on the delay problems people are complaining about, only facilitated the delivery of more spam. I'll put back the copy of the exim configuration I kept from before my changes, restoring the status ante. I apologize for the extra spam; it was an experiment to see whether some tuning of the system would help the situation; unfortunately I don't know enough about exim to figure out how to increase the number of simultaneous connections it will accept. I *do* know that the mail log is full of dropped connections, constantly, and it would be nice if whoever committed us to exim would look at them.
Mike, could you set up some simple script that would let people use spamassassin? I have never ever had a false positive (I only require three points to dump suspected mail) but still sometimes get false negatives. Spamassassin with 3 points was getting at least 3/4 of my spam. (I added some more filters on top of it). Unfortunately it puts some large files into a ./.spamassassin directory but they could be deleted automatically at login.
Re #278 - so my message to me here was killed by a Grex spam filter? From a UM server address? Why would any of those be in a spam blacklist?
In case you are unaware, some ISPs, etc, filter HARD on umich.edu. I know from experience because several times in the last year or so I've had that problem with another ISP I use blocking the umich mail. There reasons were quite understandable. Apparently, a lot of spam or other problems involve umich.edu addresses. I was once told it had to do with all the freebies the students download using their umich accounts (presumably a reference to the hidden "zombieware" some freebies contain) though I don't know the details. In any case, if you haven't learned already, be warned now: a umich.edu address is apt to be filtered by any number if ISPs for any number of reasons. I'd suggest an alternate address for time-critical communications.
I cannot send mail from grex or even postpone it.
Sdf.lonestar.org is also inaccessible again. When I try to telnet it gets stuck - how do I exit from the attempt (in DOS, Ctrl-C does not work)?
I've never used telnet under DOS, but in UNIX if you enter Control-] you should get a prompt. Enter q and press enter and you should quit. If you don't get the prompt then I have no idea.
Thanks. First time today sdf at freeshell was 'down', an hour later it had been up for over 3 days. ???
I'm not able to get any mail at all into Grex.
Ctrl-] works when I am ssh'ed to grex, but what I need is a way to end a telnet attempt FROM grex to freeshell/lonestar.
re #280: > so my message to me here was killed by a Grex spam filter? I have no way of knowing that, but probably not. Delaying messages from sites that are believed to be spam sites potentially affects delivery of messages from all sites. Let's say that Grex is configured to support N simultaneous mail connections at any given time. Now imagine a whole bunch of sites that are listed in these RBLs connect and attempt to deliver messages. Because they're listed in the RBLs their connections are intentionally delayed to slow down spam delivery. What happens if N of these sites are being kept waiting while your non-blacklisted mail site attempts to make the N+1th connection? If I understand the system properly your connection, the N+1th, is rejected because the mail server is busy and it's assumed that the host trying to deliver it will reconnect later when the Grex server isn't busy. But from what I see in the log files I think we're being more or less constantly bombarded with connections from other hosts and there's never a time when Grex's server is not busy and dropping connections from other hosts that want to connect. I really hope I'm misunderstanding something fundamental here but whether I am or not something is clearly very wrong with mail delivery.
Grex is not accepting mail for the last day or two, and yesterday (and probably today) was not sending mail either. What is the problem and is anyone working on it? I have a couple of craigslist ads listing my grex address, because freeshell was broken at the time.
fastmail.fm offers 10MB webmail without ads. Login at least 8 characters.
When are we going to get e-mail back on Grex? Or is now the time to "jump ship" from using Grex for e-mail?
Some of us "jumped ship" a long time ago.
As much as I hate to say this, I dont think that grex currently has the staff needed to maintain email up to the standards we all would like. This is especially true since there are so many excellent free email services out there (like gmail).
I tried to offer a gmail invitation to Grace. They supposedly sent her email containing the invitation. But since mail to Grex isn't going through, she never got it. AFAICS Grex is just plain not accepting mail at present. Always that same too-many-SMTP-connections message.
Last I knew grex was not sending outgoing email either. I don't know any other place besides freeshell to get a shell account that will let us use non webmail with mail, mutt, or pine, and set up spamassassin and procmail. Is anyone working on this problem?
Rane in resp:291 :: It was probably time to leave Grex's email service about a year ago. I'm still doing too much mail here, unsuccessfully, too. Dave in resp:294 on Gmail invites: Have grace get a hotmail account, then send the Gmail invite to the hotmail account? Sindi in resp:295 :: There are probably good reasons there are very few public shell accounts with e-mail any more. Email has become a very difficult and hostile environment. There is little reason to expect volunteers to work like beavers to give you reliable 1985-style e-mail any more.
Here's the deal. I'm out of town, on the first vacation I've had in quite a while. As much as it annoys me (I conduct most of my personal e-mail through Grex and there's no telling what I'm missing, same as many of the rest of you..) I'm not planning on spending my vacation learning how to administer exim properly and fixing Grex's e-mail. Unfortunately nobody else from staff seems to be responding to, or possibly even reading this conference posts. When I get back I'm willing to take a shot at getting a mail configuration working on Grex, but if I do it I'd prefer to use postfix, a mailer I'm more familiar with. Also, there may be a period when mail doesn't work at all while things are swapped over. If people can live with that I'll give it a try when I get home.
Well, I'm at least reading this item. Don't know that I'll have time to work on exim either. (Mail server configuration is in general something I haven't had a lot of experience with.) As I recall the history, we're using exim because a staff member at the time we were transitioning to openbsd was intimately familiar with it from work and volunteered to set it up. Unfortunately, for reasons that I think were beyond his control, he's no longer an active staff member, so we no longer have a resident exim expert. I think that if you're willing to work on mail configuration and nobody else is, the mail software we use should be your call, so I would support switching to something you'd be more comfortable with.
Thanks Mike and John. Perhaps I should start an agora item in which we can post messages for other grexers. In the meantime I won't use the grex email address for craigslist postings.
what on earth would sindii post on craigslist ? does she write about GreX twits in the rants & raves section ?
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The number of simultaneous connections is governed by the 'smtp_accept_max' variable. Unfortunately the Exim documentation doesn't mention what the default setting of this variable is. A couple other suggestions to streamline the process: - Currently you wait up to 30 seconds for an ident response. This happens during the connect phase. I'd shorten that. Set "rfc_1413_query_timeout" to something in the 10 second range, if you absolutely can't live without it. I find ident isn't very useful these days, so I tend to disable that lookup entirely. - You have 'deliver_queue_load_max' set to 1.0, which means you aren't doing any deliveries when the load average is above that value. I might bump that up to 2.0, since Grex seems to run pretty high load averages at times. This may be part of the reason you aren't getting much mail through. This is a tricky one; you're potentially trading off system responsiveness for getting more mail through. If you've got more people who are familiar with postfix, switching might be a good idea. MTAs are funny that way; they're complex programs and people who know one generally find any others to be incomprehensible. For example, I know Exim reasonably well, but I'd be lost with Postfix, and I can just barely get Sendmail going.
I'm familiar with exchange, but not out of choice.
I could never get mail from earthlink/mindspring, it always timed out (they did not wait long enough). Is that related to the previous response?
re #302: I tried bumping up the load average limits for queueing and delivering mail to 2.5 or 3 or something like that before I also tried cutting out several of the RBL checks. It didn't appear to make any significant improvement in delivery or in the number of messages dropped. If you're knowledgable about exim configs you could have a look at the configs, suggest specific changes (maybe edit a copy, I'll look at the diffs, and apply them) if you have the time..
Re 297 (way back): Mike, I certainly didn't mean to be dumping on you. My experience over the years has been that you're willing to help people whenever you can, & I'm confident that you approach staff stuff the same way. I know I wasn't the only one complaining; but I for one wasn't pointing any fingers. Meanwhile, it sure looks like someone did *something*. The dozen queued-up messages that had been trying to go to Grex for several days now seem to have suddenly vanished from the queue - & as I haven's gotten any bounce messages, I think they must have gone through. But a new message I just sent seems to be hanging there. Dunno.
I just tried to send myself a mail with pine. I did not get the usual error messages but it took a long time to go from 0% to 100% sent and then got stuck at 100%. Ctrl-C exited pine and told me I had sent the mail (after I waited a few minutes for the prompt) but the mail has not arrived.
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finger root -- Charlie Root, mail last read June 12, logged in from msu.edu, running sh which is using 14% of CPU, causing load average to be around 8. Amazing that I can still see what I am typing. sh is a shell.
sh is now up to 16% of CPU time. It was 13% when I first looked. Another hole to be plugged? 166 processes, of which 1 is running and the rest are stopped.
Make that the rest are idle or zombie, 1 on processor, and sh is 15%.
Charlie Root has been running ssh since approximately 5:47. jp2 has been logged on since 5:38 and is running 'j p 2'. The rest of us are running bbs, party, lynx, bash, and the like.
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True, it's much better to log in as someone else and the su to root. OpenBSD doesn't nag about it just to be contrary. ;)
I just got my first mail sent to grex in about a week, and was able to answer it (I hope) in under 30 sec, but I still never got the mail I sent myself earlier. Thanks if someone fixed something.
Load average is back down from 9 to .4. How would we mortals figure out what is causing the load average to go up so we can report it to staff?
One of the things which is causing mail failures, I believe, (but not the only one) is that periodically /var/spool runs out of free inodes. It runs out of free inodes because there's a totally absurd number of files in several subdirectories of /var/spool/exim which never, ever seem to get cleared out. Can someone who's familiar with exim tell me what purpose the various subdirectories of /var/spool/exim serve and how files in there are supposed to be purged? Because we don't seem to be doing it properly..
I am still getting mail from June 8 - better late than never. Thanks again STeve et al.
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I was able to reply to a few June 7 mails that just showed up but now I am getting an STMP greeting failure when I try to send mail. We picked the wrong week to try to sell a car. Turns out lots of people were interested a week ago.
Today I have been getting mail progressively from June 9, June 8, June 7 and now June 6. I wondered why people had stopped writing. Thanks again.
In among the June 7 I just got a May 23 mail! Rane was saying it took up to 12 days to get mail at grex, but this is about 21 days. How does the mail manage to get so bogged down? Can exim be instructed to deliver the oldest mails first instead of the newest ones?
There are some old pieces of mail in the queue which I think will now get liberated. Exim is likely going to get a little more tweaking before this is all over. But mails are moving fairly quickly now. It took about 1.5 minutes for mail to get from msu.edu to grex, and faster than that the other way around.
Wow! The e-mail dam has burst. But, thanks!
Re resp:317: I don't have the permissions to see what's in /var/spool/exim here, but on my own machine I see four directories. db/ - This only has four files in it, on my system. I think it contains Exim's retry database. input/ - This holds the message queue. If I remember right there are two files per message, one containing just the headers and one containing the message body. If you've got a lot of crap in there, you need to figure out why messages are stacking up in the queue. A common culprit is undeliverable bounce messages, which Exim "freezes" and keeps in the queue until the time set in the "ignore_bounce_errors_after" option is reached. You want this time *short* because undeliverable bounces are almost always the worthless backscatter from spam runs. Right now Grex has this set to 2 days, which I'd say is on the long side. msglog/ - This holds log information about messages that are in transit. The files here (one per message) are normally deleted once the message is delivered, although sometimes they get missed and linger. Again, if this is full, it might be because you have a long queue. This information is duplicated in the main log, so it's safe to say "message_logs=false" in the beginning part of exim.conf and delete the contents of this directory. This should help the inode problem. scan/ - This is a temporary directory where messages are unpacked while they're scanned by external software like ClamAV or SpamAssassin. I don't think Grex is running either of those programs, so there shouldn't be anything in there.
The msglog directory has tens, or possibly hundreds, of thousands of files, some of them dating back to 2004. I presume those aren't from messages Grex is still attempting to deliver..
Remember that Grex crashed a lot, for a while. Most likely Exim never got to delete those files due to a crash, or perhaps there's a bug that causes them to occasionally escape deletion. Like I said, they're safe to delete, and if you set "message_logs=false" you shouldn't have to deal with them anymore. They're really only useful for troubleshooting delivery problems, and the same info can be gleaned from the other logs with a bit of effort.
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I'm not arguing with that. I've got four old message log files on my own small server, and I have no idea why. Frankly, I think the whole individual-message-log thing is a misfeature that should be removed, or turned off by default. UNIX software in general doesn't seem to clean up after itself very well. If it did there wouldn't be a need for periodic /tmp cleaning scripts to get rid of old, stale lockfiles and the like.
its officially summer
I could not dial either number just now and connect - they both just rang.
what ! m-net seems to be down :(
:( plz fix
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