181 new of 405 responses total.
I have gotten frozen and booted 5 times today.
Re #222: Looks like the MOTD just happens to be empty of any announcements at the moment.
I'm coming in from the Web and several times I get timeouts when moving from page to page, or it just hangs for a minute or two, or three.
I am running a procmail logfile and it reports what it did with each of my mails and every few mails tells me: Extraneous local lockfile ignored. Lock failure on (my mail directory)/keesan.lock. Is this relevant to the freezeups or something I did wrong in my filter?
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several sites mention that there is a firmware upgrade for the Flowpoint/2200-12, although I haven't actually found the upgrade. It may be worth a try.
three drops in last 15 or so minutes ... freeze before drop./
Off the internet now....
Still down...
12:34pm up 17 days, 14:53, 3 users, load average: 0.23, 0.21, 0.01 Login Name TTY Idle Login Time Location Work Phone newuser The Newuser Program p0 5d Apr 24 13:51 rcurl Rane Curl *sc May 7 12:34 sgsg sg p6 7d Apr 30 08:12 "All alone, by the telephone."
Still down. Isn't there anybody that can kick that thing, wherever it is?
Why is grex so slow, with nobody on?
I just did top and sendmail is using a lot of resources with a load average of 24 or so. Motd from i (Walter) says that grex just got back online (while I was doing top, apparently) which is slowing it down. Thanks Walter for the info. Hi Mary et al. who just got here.
Hi, Sindi! Thanks, Walter!
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The following (without any message body) was in my inbox when I got home today at 17:30 (May 9). I am sure I did not send it. Who did? Is this some new virus? No attachment either. Received: from host217-42-224-55.range217-42.btcentralplus.com (host217-42-224-55.range217-42.btcentralplus.com [217.42.224.55]) by grex.cyberspace.org (8.6.13/8.6.12) with SMTP id QAA13675 for <keesan@grex.org>; Sun, 9 May 2004 16:32:50 -0400 Date: Sun, 9 May 2004 16:32:50 -0400 From: Sindi Keesan <keesan@grex.org> Message-Id: <200405092032.QAA13675@grex.cyberspace.org> Received: from i[8 Apparently-To: <keesan@grex.org>
There seems to be a rash of new email/spam/virus
crap, with bogus attachments and ruses like
imitation email error messages, et cetera.
'your email to IncreaseViagraSize.com
failed' . . wait I sent no such email.
I am thinking about making a list of the
symptoms.
Recent viruses are being sent spoofing the From: address. This makes it more likely to spread, as the unsuspecting - and inexperienced! - recipient will say "How nice, a message from Sindi, I'll just open her attachment" expecting to see an image of flowers or something, and instead...
I know about the Netsky virus spoofing the address and coming with a 40K attachment, but this had no attachment and it was from me to me and also had no message body. Odd.
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I also have gotten mail from myself. One a normal spam, and the other devoid of any text or attachment, saved in /a/d/r/drew/selfmail. I was going to change my password but since others are also getting mail from themselves - what the heck, I'm changing it anyway.
A really recent virus even has a couple photos of sexy women embedded, to be used to entice the victim into opening the attachment.
I assume malicious attachments are targeting
Windows email programs. Are there now malicious
email attachments which can do damage
on Unix?
I don't want to open one to find out.
There are, but just opening one won't do any damage. It is hard to get a virus when you have to: (save file) $ chmod +x file $ ./file
I also get 'antivirus warning report' type subjects from the grex MAILERDAEMON which I presume is also a forget from address. Can't check, it already went to /dev/null.
There was, for a while, a buffer overflow bug in Pine that would allow a specially-crafted email message to execute arbitrary code. I don't know of any worms that successfully exploited it, though.
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resp:242, 245: Sindi: yeah, those are going around, null emails which claim to be "From:" the address receiving them. I have a few and have reports of others. What this means is that the Quality Assurance department in Virusland is slacking off on the job; you have received the output from an incompetently written virus.
While telnetting in late last night, with minimal activity over a span of ~3 hours, I lost my connection 3 or 4 times. Is that acceptable for a system such as grex? If not, is this situation chronic? Correctable? Something that would be in any way better under nextgrex?
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Re resp:255: It looks like it's going to be chronic until someone on staff has time to fix it.
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Is grex off the internet again?
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Macdonalds is humiliating? And what does this have to do with system problems ? I just got booted again.
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Are you requesting that I repeat the whole issue here in this item?
yes.
wrong item
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re 270, then why don't you take a stab at repeating it? I don't think I can summarized it that succintly.
If it wasn't a case of the DSL nastiness kicking in just after you said it, kicking us off *straight after* saying "ok, i'm knocking hte DSL users off, sorry", was damned rude. People will have been attempting tel's and suchlike.
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Not sure what to say twenex, I sent out the wall announcing that it would be happening a few minutes before and then sent one more and it was probably 45 seconds after the "knocking" message in party that I went over to the wall and unplugged the DSL modem. Sorry that happened.
Fair enough.
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Not that I'm strying to stick the boot in, but it just didn't *feel* like anything near like 45 seconds, which was the reason for the complaint. If you say it was, I believe it.
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That's fine twenex, I understand. When we replace the modem with whatever it gets replaced with, I'll pay extra attention to leaving a longer time before pulling the plug.
Grin.
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Because I was interested in what your version of the events would have been.
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Looks like the fairwitnesses of those conferences have established userlists,
and y'all aren't on them. (FWIW, neither am I.)
The limiting files, /bbs/{confname}/ulist, are world-readable.
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re 278 Nobody is forcing you to come here. Feel free to leve at anytime, and never darken our doorstep again.
Hear hear. Feel free to leve at anytime, especially Now and Forever.
Umm... How many times do you now have to type your password, to satisfy login? It's been fighting for two days and only seems to let me on with telnet after it prints a "badlogin.html" message, (ssh fails long before that).
The backtalk2 conf userlist is people who were staff back then, for the original Backtalk testing. Guess that ought to be fixed.
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Re: #290. I regret to announce I can't corroborate this problem, except once, when it *might* have been my typying that caused the problem anyway.
pfv, when that happens to me, it usually means that one (or more) of the keys on my keyboard is sticking.
I've seen it happen when something was wrong with Grex that was causing Backtalk's login routine to time out.
third time through,.... damn disconnects!
Why does SSH keep dropping my connection? Once in a while is tolerable but this is getting out of hand!
Telnet connections are pausing frequently enough that Grex is only marginally useful. The party log should show lots of complaints.
It is a serious problem, and probably deserves to be top priority as soon as a staff person has time.
(I think we are waiting the delivery of a DSL modem.)
I was unable to telnet in. I have been telnetting because the dialin connection keeps freezing up for 1-2 minutes, and it is quicker to untelnet and telnet back than to dial again.
If the problem is definitely the DSL modem, and it's just a matter of waiting until the replacement arrives, then I will hold my tongue and try to be patient...
glad the problem has been identified and conrrectins are on the way.
Thanks for the information gelinas, I was wondering also.
1:19pm up 29 days, 15:38, 5 users, load average: 0.41, 0.41, 0.28 Login Name TTY Idle Login Time Location Work Phone amishel anton mishel p5 4d May 15 02:31 newuser The Newuser Program p0 17d Apr 24 13:51 rcurl Rane Curl *pe May 19 13:19 sgsg sg p6 19d Apr 30 08:12 viju Johnson p8 1d May 18 02:28 Net connection down. But shouldn't the idle zapper have zapped some of those idlers?
Haven't worked with the idle zapper yet, not sure, would think so. DSL back up. I'll be trying out the replacement DSL modem after work today
Patience? What patience? ;-P
On the DSL news front, I tried out the new modem, but it remained in IDSL mode and wouldn't connect to our SDSL connection. I'm taking it home and will reread the manual to see what I missed. Also, our old DSL modem managed to lock up starting about 1:00am EDT today, I didn't get a chance to run down to the Pumpkin until about 2:00pm to kick it. Amusingly, the stats for the old modem from 2:15pm to 7:00pm, when I disconnected it to try the new modem, were perfect with no errors what so ever. Did anyone happen to notice if they had lag between 2:15pm and 7:00pm today? I'm still talking to our ISP in case it turns out to be the line. :)
If the new DSL modem isn't linking to the provider's DSLAM it's probably because you need information about what settings to use; hopefully the provider can provide them if they haven't already done so. I'm not sure what information you have about the connection already but DSL comes in a pretty wide range of flavors, including different line codings, different protocols, different authentication specifications, etc.. It's not realistic to just plug in a DSL modem and expect it to work without knowing more about your provider's setup. Most probably you already knew all that, but I mention it just in case you didn't. DSL is unfortunately not as "plug and play" as many other networking technologies.
in ancient china, communications took a different route. everyone knows about the chinese pea shooters that young boys like to wield. but where did this enwielding custom come from? it came from a sort of training. in ancient days, the land of china was covered by vast networks of bamboo connecting post offices in cities towns and villages to other post offices in other ctvs. messages would be transported pneumatically by blowing strongly into one endexpress mail was also sucked. the people learned how to do this by first practicing with pea shooters.
After a fairly long hiatus, grex connectivity problems are back. Welcome to Grex, Lagadelphia - City of Brotherly Lag.
.. not right now ... someting is going right .. for the moment.
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Admittedly, even after most of a year working for a DSL provider I haven't mastered a good deal of the lingo (the telco side being perhaps even worse than the computer side for having its own vocabulary) but at least as I have usually heard them used, "ADSL" vs "SDSL" shouldn't matter. The "A" and the "S" stand for "asymmetric" and "symmetric" and refer basically to the upload and download speeds. Those aren't generally things that need to be set up in the customer's modem, they're more usually limited by the provider at the DSLAM. I won't know the specifics for your DSL provider but it's possible I can still provide advice on the DSL issue. Don't hesitate to ask if you need assistance..
Re: #314. Yeah; people who complain about computers being hard to use wuold be totally lost in the telephone world if what i've seen of it is anything to go by. As a self-confessed geek, the stories in Levy's HACKERS about theMIT Hackers who engaged in phreaking struck me as really nerdy. Yes, I can smell the irony right here. It's burning my butt.
re #314: My mistake -- I thought in the other item you'd said "ADSL", not "IDSL"..
So, what's "IDSL"?
"Intermittent Digital Subscriber Line". Strangely unpopular, though.
I see. Thanks. Maybe the "intermittent" has to do with unpopularity. maybe peple think it's Redmond Quality h/w.
Sorry, the day job has been pretty full today and I still have a class to teach tonight, so I haven't made much headway. IDSL stands for ISDN Digital Subscriber Line and is usually used where ADSL and SDSL can't reach due to the excessive distances from the Central Office. The issue appears to be that I'll have to replace the firmware in the DSL modem to deal with SDSL or RFC1483, as it is currently set to deal with IDSL/Frame Relay/RFC1490. Anyway, I'll be looking into tonight after class.
Plus the silly manufacturer really writes their stuff like you'll always have a Windows PC laying around to install all sorts of nasty software on it just to do things like TFTP. We've got a perfectly good OpenBSD box to do that with instead. :)
Gah. Clickanddroolville.
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Heh. nice one :-)
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Re resp:315: I recently had to deal with an SBC employee who needed some specific information about our phone system at work. He kept using telco lingo that I didn't understand, and when I'd say "I don't know what that is" he'd just repeat the same thing over again. He was totally incapable of communicating with anyone who wasn't familiar with the jargon. We've been trying to switch our phone system from KMC to SBC, but for some reason they want a bunch of highly technical information that we don't know and have never had to provide before.
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I do like the bridges over nothing... they bet they are exciting when it rains.
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Time to change the motd?
We usually leave notices up about a week, so no, I don't think it's time to change the motd.
That's good, since some people don't log in even weekly. But an item that says something like > Grex was off the DSL at 7:00pm EDT for a few minutes to try out a different > DSL modem. The test was unsuccessful. Staff is looking into it further. without specifying a date then becomes very confusing. Was this before or after the May 19 loss which was also in the motd? I admit that I'd rather have staff working on the problem than writing motd notices, though.
The motd is now one week old and the Wednesday referred to is last Wednesday. I have not had any problems for the past few days on grex.
Yep, if motd authors could remember, it wouldn't be a bad idea to prefix each item with the date the item was added, e.g.: 5/19: Grex was off the DSL at 7:00pm EDT for a few minutes...
IT appears to be down again
It's working normally now. Did someone fix it, or did it do it by itself?
I am getting frozen connections again, when telnetting from grex to elsewhere.
lag, drop, lag, drop, drop, drop. (my experience tonight trying to post two responses in agora..)
An update on progress (or lack thereof) with the replacement dsl modem might be nice. It's starting to get worse again.
Just got dumped from my telnet connection. Viva dialins....
Seems to have been down since this morning...at least, the two times I've tried to SSH in, it's timed out. How's the new modem coming?
Grex is still off the net.
Login Name TTY Idle Login Time Location Work Phone
amishel anton mishel p5 17d May 15 02:31
newuser The Newuser Program p0 30d Apr 24 13:51
sgsg sg p6 32d Apr 30 08:12
tpryan Tim P. Ryan *qe Jun 1 17:50
tuks stalin p2 2d May 29 20:12
viju Johnson p8 14d May 18 02:28
Looks like I'm the piker with the short conversation.
It's back!!!
Last night for a period of time grex's url's were pointed elsewhere. www.cyberspace.org brought up a search engine. www.grex.org brought up a different search engine. In the past when grex went off the 'net, you would get a "page not found" or some other error. If somebody at grex's isp changed its urls to pointers to point elsewhere, does that indicate more than just a hardware problem?
That sounds very weird, Richard. Are you sure your browser isn't infected with adware? Sometimes adware will redirect your browserto where it wants to go. What browser are you using, and what search engine did you get?
That sounds like the most plausible explanation to me, too.
That or a localized DNS problem. A couple weeks ago I absolutely could not get a connection to a well-established website for a couple days. Couldn't even send mail; it would bounce.
well I did have some evilware that snuck in and installed itself on my hard drive. But thats a side effect of doing a lot of websurfing. A lot of those pop up ads on ad driven sites come loaded with hidden downloads. But I've never had that particular issue at other times when grex was off the web. Its an annoying bad habit of my computer that its supposed to notify me if anything is being downloaded, but things still get by it and install themselves anyway from time to time
My roommate had the same thing happen to him recently. He had to boot up in safe mode and delete some files, before they had a chance to run. spyware.com was helpful.
My ISP is now checking mail, and they have blocked 4 mails perportedly from Microsoft about critical security upgrades that they say have virus attached. Is that normal?
Roughly speaking, yes, it is normal, bru.
No it's not. If there are security updates, you'll receive them via IE, either through Auto Notification or by clicking Update Windows in the Tools menu.
Conflicting answers above can be explained as a confusion between: "yes, it's normal to block them", and "no, it's not normal to receive them."
Normal to get them? Well, I was getting them on a regular
basis, until Earthlink learned they used less resources to block
the virus attached.
Using Update Windows is the better method for finding about
security updates.
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Right; Microsoft does not distribute its security updates by e-mail. Several viruses DO distribute themselves by e-mail by masquerading as Microsoft security updates. So blocking them is normal, and receiving them is normal. Even applying them is also normal. However, applying them is not desirable.
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Indeed, why not ^
I've been getting denials of access by both ssh (login refused) and telnet (connection closed before the login prompt) since last night. Yet Grex is up, and the DSL line is up. WTF is going on here?
Grex is closing my ssh connections after barely a minute or two of time on-line. No messages given.
No idea, russ; ssh works for me.
working here ... better than the last few weeks, actually! kewl.
Re: 354 > But thats a side effect of doing a lot of websurfing. Not really. I surf all the time, and have no problem. I just don't use Internet Explorer. I tend to prefer Mozilla 1.6, unless the website requires a broken HTML and/or CSS parser, such as one would find in IE.
I like Firefox, which is really just Mozilla without all the non-browser stuff. I haven't run into a website in a long time that I had to resort to IE for, except for Windows Update.
Agreement.
I'll second that agreement.
It's down again.
So the new modem didn't fix things? Or was it never installed?
It died on me while I was posting a reply. Consequently, I lost the reply.
Down again. "who" list a number of sessions that don't have normal ip's. Should those be there?
I just did "finger" on all those strange ip's. Except for newuser, they are users whose sessions have been idle for many days. Perhaps someone with administrative authority should log them out?
Yes, it is down. I also notice the long idle times - is the zapper dead? > 6:01pm up 52 days, 20:20, 7 users, load average: 0.29, 0.21, 0.01 > User tty login@ idle JCPU PCPU what > tuks ttyp2 29May04 13days 10 7 emacs > amishel ttyp5 15May04 28days 37 36 emacs > sgsg ttyp6 30Apr04 42days 1 1 -bash > viju ttyp8 18May04 25days 1:02 10 pine > macraur ttyq3 Sat 4pm 6days 9 2 pine > davel ttyt5 5:59pm 4 1 -bash > newuser ttyp0 24Apr04 41days /bin/sh 42 *days*?
And, of course, the net connection is out to lunch again: failed at around 4:30 pm Friday, after having been flaky all afternoon.
I suggest forgetting 175-179 to save time.
I'm continually surprised at your stupidity, if it can be called that.
No space left on device, file not saved (pico, small file).
A small amount of space has been freed up on /a but utilization is near 100%. Staff, please help!
I freed up another five percent. More later, when I have more time.
Thank you.
And it looks like someone else freed up a bit more space.
You're welcome!
/a is at 100% again.
The last 3 times I dialed in I did not get a connection on the first try. The responding modem gave either a constant tone(not searching for the matching protocol) or no tone at all. It sounds like you have a defective modem.
Lynx is very slow tonight. It took 3 minutes just to get to this point to enter this response.
It went back to "normal" at about 12:45. Did somebody do something to the system?
Looks like some vandal is at it again - 110 newresponse items, and items 'activated' but with no response.
I think Tod went through and scribbled all of his responses. He does this on a regular basis. I've adopted a policy of filtering him so I never see his comments to begin with. Filtering is my way of dealing with twits. I prefer it to public whining. ;-)
I think it would be better to have a system-wide solution, rather than having to do it person-by-person.
I'd rather that staff work on something more vital, like NextGrex. If that project still exists, anyway.
LIttle things are being "worked on" all the time - add scribble-window to the list.
"scribble-window"? What would it do?
(Never mind; I got the answer in a more current item.)
What happened? I was not able to get on Friday night or Saturday morning. The modem would answer and connect, and then disconnect.
GREX seems to be messed up again. Very long time to get login prompt and then Lynx doesn't find any outside links.
So why does it still take forever to get a login prompt?
DITTO!
The DSL line is obviously down again.
And was just power-cycled.
The system is very flakey tonight. It took three tries to dial in. The connection was then dropped after a few minutes. It took two more tries to get on again. The response time was also very erratic, sometimes responding immediately, and then frequently taking 20-30 seconds.
You have several choices: