Path: utzoo!utgpu!attcan!uunet!ncrlnk!ncr-sd!hp-sdd!ucsdhub!ucsd!nosc!helios.ee.lbl.gov!lll-tis!ames!haven!uflorida!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!bloom-beacon!mit-eddie!uw-beaver!microsoft!brentp
From: brentp@microsoft.UUCP (Brent Prindle)
Newsgroups: news.admin
Subject: Re: brentp@microsoft
Summary: Problems here that led to problems there...
Keywords: enough!
Message-ID: <1006@microsoft.UUCP>
Date: 10 Oct 88 18:20:28 GMT
References: <16262@ames.arc.nasa.gov>
Organization: Microsoft Corp., Redmond WA
Lines: 71

In article <16262@ames.arc.nasa.gov>, len@ames.arc.nasa.gov (Len Rose) writes:
> Did anyone else notice over 900 misc.test messages from microsoft?
> All with the same message ID,author and header..
> 
> 
> -- 
> Len Rose .. len@netsys.com {ames,att,decuac}!netsys!len
> Disclaimer: No one is responsible for anything I say but myself.



First, an apology is in order.  It looks like a lot of time on
the modem was wasted by these articles.  I am quite sorry about
this, because I am sure that I started it.  I am not quite sure
why or how it continued tho.  Nontheless, I take responsibility.
If you are one of the few who have not flamed yet, my address is

...uunet!microsoft!brentp.

but please read on first.
=================================================================

Greetings:



In case you haven't noticed, there was a major vomiting on the 
net, and the messages have microsoft headers.  Let me explain 
what happened...

In early September, I built a completely new UUCP and News gateway,
and things were working fine.  Then in late Sept, some folks here
gave voice to complaints.  It seems that articles were not making
it off of the system, and had not for several days.

So I came in one weekend (Not much time during the week, this is 
a background job.  No one else is in this situation, right? :-) and
tried to track down the problem.  Could not find any problem however,
so I tried completely rebuilding the system a few days later.  

Unfortunately, one file got deleted, which resulted in the munged
headers that have become so famous.  I realised what happened within
a few hours, after posting a test message.  I re-created the system
properly, and gave up for the evening after I still could not find
out what was going wrong.

Things happen, and the news got pushed into the background a few days,
at least until the next free weekend.  But by that time, things were
mysteriously working again!  I wrote off the whole adventure and lost
weekend as a bad feed.

The really wonderful part was that six messages had made it off the 
system before I could kill them.  These aparently sat on our feed like
so many time-bombs.  It looks like the kill I sent could not deal with
the munged article-id.  

I am still not entirely sure what happened.  These messages would 
have been expired on our system over a week ago, had I not killed
them.  They were sent out two weeks ago, and then blow up all over
the place yesterday!  Our logs do not show them going out in the 
past three days, and that is as far back as our logs go.  Even the
UUCP stats do not show any repeats or errors in the last week.

Any ideas?  I would like to find out exactly what is going on so
this problem can be avoided by all in the future.  I will continue
investigating, and let everybody know what I come up with.



Once again, sorry.
...uunet!microsoft!brentp