Noticed that newuser is still down after more than a week. Is this a quiet policy decision that has been made in light of the most recent sabatoge? Grex needs newuser up and soon, or this place will shrivel up and die!51 responses total.
Nonprofit Schmofit!
I agree with that, basically. A few more days.
I miss the Brazilians.
"#2 of 3 by STeve Andre' (steve) on Wed May 18 19:22:29 2005: I agree with that, basically. A few more days." This was a month ago. Newuser is still gone. Has staff made a policy decision re: newuser? Shouldn't that have gone through the board and the membership? Or does staff get to decide on its own that open newuser goes away and doesn't ever come back in its old form? what gives?
Can we get some of the board members to address this problem?
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Wouldn't that at least require a vote by the membership?
They're rewriting it to figure out a way to prevent naftee and scholar from creating new accounts.
we already have a bunch of accounts
That's not it at all. Steve just never did it. Nor did he tell anyone else how to.
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There has to be a balance. The board shouldn't set a staff members life priorities around grex, but nor should it ignore something as crucial as newuser supposedly is.
newuser is unlucky
> I don't think the board should have the authority to boss the staff around > such as "You must fix newuser by such and such date." I think they should, and they do. We have been without newuser for more than a month (not sure the exact amount of time), with no clue about what is being done to fix it, or when it should be fixed. We all understand that staff are all volunteers, but that isn't an excuse for procrastination. I just don't see the reason why we can't be honest about why this has gone unaddressed. I also don't understand why the Board of Directors doesn't think that the fact that newuser has gone broken this long somehow doesn't affect their chances at reelection, or the overall health of the organization. Again, I simply don't understand why there is this lack of information. It seems that this organization is bent on hording the truth about things such as this. This is the precise conditions that foster speculation and deceit, and lead to the break up of an organization.
Hard to get new members won't you don't get new USERS.
nharmon - I'm sorry you are frustrated. Here's the information, as I understand it. When Grex went down last time, a number of entries int he password file got munged. If newuser is allowed to run while they are still munged, bad things could happen to the password file. Plus, the people who own the munged entries can't get into Grex. STeve started to fix the problem, and promised to finish fixing it. Then he was called away and hasn't been back for at least a month. STeve has always been very responsive to crisis situations on Grex, and often (as in the case of the last crash) is the first staff member to react when something goes wrong. But it's harder to motivate STeve to do things when there is not a perceived crisis. I presume he has moved on to other peoples' crises. STeve has a history of promising to do things very soon, then not getting to them until months or years later, if at all. The board (and Mary in particular) have been trying diligently to get STeve to tell the rest of the staff where he was in the process of restoring the password file, so that someone can pick up where he left off. There has been no response so far. The best thing to do, I think, is for some staff member to wade into the problem and try to figure out what state things are in. A separate problem is the question of why the password file got munged in the first place. It's possible there is something in newuser that doesn't play well with OpenBSD. Some staff member needs to step up and have a look at that. Mike McNally, at Mary's urging, has agreed to look at the current problem.
Thank you for taking the time to let all of us know what is going on with newuser, Mark. We appreciate it sincerely. And good luck to Mike McNally in fixing the problem. I'm sure if he runs into any problems, he knows he can post them to Garage for some of us to help out with.
thank you, nharmon
thank you, naftee
I say we install xnew.
I suggest that if newuser is going to be down indefinetly, grex temporarily allow anonymous posting (at least through the backtalk interface which Im sure can allow it, when a user reading anonymously wants to click post, they can be prompted for whatever name they want to post under). Grex shouldnt ever have the appearance, as it does at the moment, of being a closed system. If people come here and see grex and want to participate, and cannot sign up for their own accounts, don't turn them away. Let them post anyway.
How many paying members have we lost since we lost newuser along with some old accounts?
uh....from my impression....we've actually gained a few.
anonymous posting? hah. that seems like a bad idea.
SO DOES YOUR PARENTS FUCKING THE NIGHT THEY CONCEIVED YOU< BNUT DON"T FORGET THAT HINDSIGHT IS EWWWWW WHEN IT"S LOOKING AT YOU
Has anyone ever told you that you have exquisite typing skills?
I can tell you why not.
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Re #22: Sindi - I don't know how to tell if some members are not able to get on Grex.
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lolz
Here's a bit more information on the problem: ". . . the nulogfile, the file that contains the record of every run of newuser is munged. There are many duplicates of accounts there, with many accounts having the same uid. It appears that only the logging is messed up, not the actual /etc/master.passwd data, but this means that we're going to have an interesting time ressurecting the accounts" (STeve Andre, in a message to the Grex Board and Staff, on Apr 30, 2005). On May 7, 2005, Glenda noted: "We turned the newuser program off while we work on fixing the problem so that the newuser logs are not overwritten. We are working on getting the accounts that were created but not activated from the logs and activated. Newuser will then be turned back on." So the *real* problem is resurrecting the lost accounts. Once that is done, we can move forward.
Aruba, I was asking if we have fewer paid members now than we did before newuser was disconnected (and some old users' accounts stopped working) - back in April, I guess it was. If I were a paying member whose account stopped working, I would think twice about continuing to pay for it.
There hasn't been a drop in membership yet, but I agree with you.
Has there been an increase in membership?
why would there be an increase in membership when some paid members apparently can't even access their logins? grex should not allow itself to be a closed system. ever. It is in violation of grex's stated mission. If newuser is going to be down any longer than it already has been, allow anonymous posting for the time being.
Grex newuser is down. Has been done. Will be down. Correct?
Newuser is back up now.
WOW! How did that happen? Squeaky wheel? Thanks to whoever fixed it.
After talking with STeve about what needed to be done, I re-enabled newuser yesterday. I was planning to hold off making an announcement until I had a chance to get to web newuser as well, as only the dial-in / telnet version is currently functional, but since the cat's out of the bag. The last I checked about 25 new accounts had been created since the restart without incident. However, it is still possible that we'll have to turn it off again if more problems surface. I hope that won't be the case, but hope people will be understanding if it turns out more work is needed. In the meantime I agree with what appears to be the general consensus -- that open newuser is important to the spirit and the mission of the system, and thus I think we ought to be erring on the side of opening it until/unless problems become evident, not keeping it closed until we can prove that it's safe.. If people are happy about it being back I suggest they thank STeve, who did far more work on it than I did; basically I followed his instructions to re-enable it but STeve is the one who has put major effort into trying to reconstruct what happened back in April.
> why would there be an increase in membership when some paid members > apparently can't even access their logins? Because those users who can sent in money, and the members who were unable to log in were paid up through June?
Great work, Mike!
thanks STeve and McNally
thanks, richard ! can someone update the motd ?
Kudos to the staff, and especially to Mike McNally!
Thanks Mike! Re #35: There hasn't been an appreciable change in membership since April.
thanks, aruba @Q
No thanks to you naftee.
you do a bung-bung in another man's anus
nponon, it's "bung bung bung in other men anus"
TROGG IS DAVID BLAINE
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