Xref: utzoo ont.general:2558 tor.general:2700 ont.uucp:980 can.uucp:321 comp.mail.uucp:6494 news.admin:14332 Newsgroups: ont.general,tor.general,ont.uucp,can.uucp,comp.mail.uucp,news.admin Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!sdd.hp.com!news.cs.indiana.edu!maytag!xenitec!iguana!merce From: merce@iguana.uucp (Jim Mercer) Subject: BITFTP grief! Message-ID: <1991May15.042146.29800@iguana.uucp> Sender: merce@iguana.uucp (Jim Mercer) Reply-To: jim@lsuc.on.ca (Jim Mercer) Organization: Ed (the iguana) Memorial Society Distribution: na Date: Wed, 15 May 91 04:21:46 GMT [ please note that i am under the buzz of a couple beers (a lot for me) and i really probably shouldn't be posting right now, but what the heck. ] [ see end of article for pleas for help ] [ speaking as jim@lsuc.on.ca, for reasons illustrated below ] [ lsuc.on.ca is a "central" mail hub in toronto, all connections are via dial-up, no TCP, no SLIP, just uucp ] it seems that every 6 weeks or so, some bonehead on one of our ~75 mail connections, decides to BITFTP something huge. first it was a 60 Meg VMS utility (attributed to ignorance). next it was a 12 Meg VMS uucp suite (same bonehead, attributed to lack of respect of the 'net) [ BTW: the bonehead in this case, when contacted via voice, told me "if you can handle the volume, get out of the gateway business", to which i (wished) i said "fuck you and the mutant OS you live in" ] last night it was another bonehead ordering gcc source and gas source (16 Meg) (attributed to ignorance). [ the mail processing on this bopped the load average up to 17.00+, as well as "discovering" some bad blocks on the drive which the system want's to use for inode tables. do i need this? ] i've about had my fill of this. effective now, we will be developing scanners to trash BITFTP and listserve type requests flowing via lsuc. that is requests and responses. (any hints on keywords would be appreciated) lsuc's mail/uucp system over flowed last night, resulting in unknown quantities of news and mail being dropped on the floor. coincidentally, our news partition ran out of inodes at the same time and the entire disk seems trashed. i spent an hour and a half (11:30pm - 1:00am) last night, doing damage control from at home (in kitchener). i still managed to get up and catch my bus into toronto. today (Tuesday), i spent no less than 3 hours trying to put the disk back together so we could get news and mail back up. i had to leave before the job was done (pre-natal class at 7:00pm in kitchener) and i had to leave instructions on how to shut down news before i left. when i got home, i called in and news was shut down (newsrunning off). i'm not sure what kind of news loss we'll have (major for sure) and i don't know if mail is totally functional. (the file systems were messed up) i am really peaved. [ ok jim, calm down (previous 6 lines of expletives deleted) ] Education! Education! Education! Education! Education! Education! Education! Education! we can put in place all the filters we want, but the only way to resolve this issue of file transfer by email is Education. Henry Spencer defined email at a user group meeting as (paraphrase from (currently fuzzy) memory) "text entered by hand, ie. not machine generated". file transfer by email would be fine if all of the hubs had infinite disk space for spooling stuff up to dial-up sites, but we don't. i might also note that in all 3 cases of abuse, the requested items were more than likely available locally. and if not, were of interest to the local community (ie. someone at UofToronto could have ftp'd it). please tell your users to post to the local *.general groups to see if it is local. .... how much of a net.lobby do we have to do to get pucc.princeton.edu to shut down BITFTP? can we at least get them to limit responses to systems that can be verified as being on BITNET (as i assume the system was intended)? or maybe, get them to limit responses to "official" internet sites? grrrrrrrrrr!!!!!!!!! this really pisses me off. HELP: i am looking for the following "tools": - Cnews spacefor that checks remaining inodes as well as free blocks - efficient rmail frontend which will "act" on key phrases in the To: and From_ headers - how to mark bad blocks on a 3B2/500 (SysV 3.2.1) please reply to jim@lsuc.on.ca (as i have tried to set the Reply-To: header) thanx -- [ Jim Mercer work: jim@lsuc.on.ca home: merce@iguana.uucp +1 519 570-3467 ] [ "Anarchists Unite!" - seen spray painted on a wall ]