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Author Message
25 new of 248 responses total.
tpryan
response 93 of 248: Mark Unseen   Oct 29 17:47 UTC 2002

        1, 2 and 3 letter logins are easy to mass-email.   Does the account
fall into this list?
keesan
response 94 of 248: Mark Unseen   Oct 29 17:53 UTC 2002

I have received spam sent to keesan at a number of ISPs, some of them not very
well known.  I think they just take logins and combine them with ISP names
and send spam out that way.

Shadow.net knows what the problem is.  Yesterday they improved their spam
filter to reject headers of a certain format.  They have had complaints from
a few other people who tried to mail their customers from shell accounts, and
they will fix the problem pronto.  The phone was answered immediately (no
menu, no wait) by a really knowledgeable support person who spoke perfect
English with a Spanish accent and who diagnosed the problem at once.  It is
nice to know some ISPs are competent (unlike AOL, Earthlink....).  I recommend
them to anyone living in South Florida.

Webmail might be a good temporary solution to grexers who cannot send mail
to places with this sort of spam filter.
albaugh
response 95 of 248: Mark Unseen   Oct 29 17:57 UTC 2002

The account in question has its ID formed by a common 7-character first name
followed by a 1-character last name (e.g. robertoa).  So I guess it's possible
the spammer just got lucky when constructing a target account name.  But I'm
still wondering if the information could have come from grex...
gull
response 96 of 248: Mark Unseen   Oct 29 18:17 UTC 2002

It could have.  The person would have to be a user first.  But it's more
likely it was just random coincidence.
albaugh
response 97 of 248: Mark Unseen   Oct 29 18:24 UTC 2002

OK, so let's say the user *was* a grex user - how does that help him find out
info about other user accounts which are inconspicuous due to lack of
participation?  If you don't wish to say because this will encourage other
spammers, I'll understand...
gelinas
response 98 of 248: Mark Unseen   Oct 29 18:44 UTC 2002

The password file can be read by anyone on grex:

} Respond, pass, forget, quit, or ? for more options? !ls -lFg /etc/passwd
} -rw-r--r--   1 root     wheel     2075714 Oct 29 13:29 /etc/passwd

It is kinda big, but there it is.
other
response 99 of 248: Mark Unseen   Oct 29 19:44 UTC 2002

wtmp?
albaugh
response 100 of 248: Mark Unseen   Oct 29 20:12 UTC 2002

OK, yes, that's the standard way one would get the user list.
mdw
response 101 of 248: Mark Unseen   Oct 29 22:10 UTC 2002

Today's high load average was due to a chain of logins created from one
particular place.  This appears to be some sort of file sharing scheme -
I'm not sure of the exact mechanism (which in any case probably invovles
client-side software which we don't have) - but the usual result is the
account gets disabled due to "high ftp volume", which then results in a
high cpu load as the client-side software is apparently too stupid to
give up on a login failure, but just tries again, over and over and
over...
davel
response 102 of 248: Mark Unseen   Nov 1 21:50 UTC 2002

Re 80, 81, 85, 87, 88, and maybe more:
I'm recently seeing email to Grex hanging in a mail queue with the message
"Deferred: Connection timed out with grex.cyberspace.org.".  It appears
that almost every message I send to accounts on Grex times out and retries
at least once or twice.  I'm pretty sure this didn't used to happen.  I have
to suspect that something in the way Grex handles mail, probably relating to
the reverse lookup, has changed to make this vastly slower (on the order of
a minute or two).  When the queue starts processing the message, it's at least
that long before it times out again.
glenda
response 103 of 248: Mark Unseen   Nov 1 22:22 UTC 2002

I have yelled at STeve for not replying to email and been told that he did
reply then have it show up several hours later.  Time stamps show that he did
send it when he said he did.  Yesterday he sent a reply at 14:00, it arrived
here around 19:00, another was sent around 17:30 to arrive around 20:50.  I
have been talking to contractors via email and was wondering about one of them
being interested in the job since he didn't respond.  Time stamps show that
it arrived here about 36 hrs after he sent it.
mdw
response 104 of 248: Mark Unseen   Nov 2 00:30 UTC 2002

Nothing has changed on grex recently that would affect any of this.  If
there is a high load average on grex, grex will temporarily stop
receiving mail - it's been doing this at least since we were on the
sun-3.  A timeout of a minute or so for the reverse lookup probably
means something is up with somebody's DNS server - if this is important
to you, you might want to figure out which IP address and DNS server is
being slow.  "slow" behavior can be hard to recognize due to name
caching, so there are a lot of sloppy system administrators out there.
I don't know enough about the path STeve's mail takes to reach Glenda to
speculate why it might be slow.
gelinas
response 105 of 248: Mark Unseen   Nov 2 01:17 UTC 2002

Right; look at the "Received:" lines, comparing timestamps, to see where it
got delayed.
uw
response 106 of 248: Mark Unseen   Nov 2 02:34 UTC 2002

when i try to change my password, it says 'changing password for user grease."
and then that our uids dont match, of course. 

weird.

gull
response 107 of 248: Mark Unseen   Nov 2 06:15 UTC 2002

I'm getting a lot of mailing list messages twice, or out of order, lately. 
I also had someone complain mail they were trying to send me bounced the
first time they tried, because Grex wasn't responding.  I'd guess it's
probably the unusually high load averages lately doing it.
mcnally
response 108 of 248: Mark Unseen   Nov 2 06:18 UTC 2002

  Mail to mcnally@umich.edu forwards to grex and to an archival mailbox
  on a webmail service that I don't often check.  Lately I find that
  messages frequently show up in this other mailbox a full day before
  they arrive in my Grex mailbox.  Something is going on with our mail
  reception that wasn't happening before.
russ
response 109 of 248: Mark Unseen   Nov 2 07:03 UTC 2002

I have also noticed large delays in receiving e-mail; sometimes
my inbox almost looks shuffled, as time of arrival has little
relationship to time sent.  Some days I get very little e-mail,
and then later I get a flood of things sent during the dry spell.

It looks like Grex needs to do something about mail priority.
cmcgee
response 110 of 248: Mark Unseen   Nov 2 19:39 UTC 2002

yes, i was surprised that an email sent to me at 5 pm yesterday showed up
today, but was certainly not iin my mailbox when i sent that erson mail at
10 pm last night.
keesan
response 111 of 248: Mark Unseen   Nov 3 01:33 UTC 2002

I would like to thank whoever fixed several problems with lynx:  it no longer
loads pages 2-5 times, r works to remove lines in the bookmarks file, and I
can set options and save to disk.
keesan
response 112 of 248: Mark Unseen   Nov 3 01:37 UTC 2002

I have polytarp on my don't write-tel-chat-talk list in .login (I just
checked) but keep getting talk requests anyway.  What might I have done wrong
in setting this up?  I used the change program.
polytarp
response 113 of 248: Mark Unseen   Nov 3 01:39 UTC 2002

I only sent you ONE talk request.
Jesus Christ.
russ
response 114 of 248: Mark Unseen   Nov 3 12:05 UTC 2002

Re #114:  Turn off talk.  Problem eliminated.
goose
response 115 of 248: Mark Unseen   Nov 3 17:40 UTC 2002

There goes Russ, talking to himself again.....
polytarp
response 116 of 248: Mark Unseen   Nov 4 04:01 UTC 2002

bkk      ttyq7    10:30pm           24     10  lynx www.literotica.com 
polytarp ttysb    10:25pm           32      2  grep bkk 

3



I HOPE THIS WILL BE STOPPED.
gelinas
response 117 of 248: Mark Unseen   Nov 4 04:06 UTC 2002

Why?  And what should be stopped?  Your using "ps -auxwwww"?
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