Conference 7.286::atarist

    This is either a p**s take, or a ton-of-bricks handed management
    system. Sure one can get annoyed if a process gets circumvented, but
    you first of all politely try to find out if it was intentional, not
    hang the guy first then hold the trial later!.
    
    Anybody confirm this withdrawal of service independantly?.
    
    Richard

I'm getting quite a lot mail from all over the world now. Most of them
wish me to go to hell or Saddam, or whatever. My answer with an 
explanation for them all is the following. Could someone please post 
this for me to the Atari newsgroup on UseNet.


Dear Sir,

I understand you are quite angry, but you first should hear the story from
my point of view:

I used the mail server for some time now with now trouble at all.
During the last two weeks I've sent some requests across the network but
got no response at all. After some time I thought they're lost, so I resent
them. Now it seems as if these mails were not lost but terribly delayed, so
they came to the server within a time fram of hours or a few days.

-> I do not know why these mails were delayed! I'm not responsible for this!

-> I did not intentionally go around any restrictions or quotas! I do not
know how these restrictions work! I'm not interested in going around
them! I've sent out my requests as I did in the past!

I'm sorry if this caused you and other people a lot of trouble, but I used
the server the same way I used it all the time before.

I hope this clarifies this a bit
-Hans Kaiser




From:	DECWRL::"[email protected]" 12-FEB-1991 10:04:35.64
To:	suosws::kaiser, [email protected], [email protected] 
CC:	
Subj:	mail server 

After receiving an explanation from Hans, reviewing my log files and
conferring with Brian Reid, I have pieced together what happened.
I don't think the quota system was subverted intentionally. There
is a DECNET mail convention that the mail server did not anticipate.
 
I still find it odd that someone would send more than 90 requests over
the course of 4 days when it is clearly stated in the server instructions
that there is a limit of 5 requests per day. However, I'm willing to
exuse it as naive exuberance, especially after taking the mail problems
into consideration.
 
Thanks to Brian and Bill for their time. I'll try to smooth things out
with the sys-admin here.
 
Jon Brode  --  [email protected]
University of Michigan - Atari Archive Manager
 
% ====== Internet headers and postmarks (see DECWRL::GATEWAY.DOC) ======
Received: by decpa.pa.dec.com; id AA27483; Mon, 11 Feb 91 12:31:44 -0800
Received: by terminator.cc.umich.edu (5.64/1123-1.0)
	id AA06510; Mon, 11 Feb 91 15:31:10 -0500
Date: Mon, 11 Feb 91 15:31:10 -0500
From: [email protected]
Message-Id: <[email protected]>
To: suosws::kaiser, [email protected], [email protected]
Subject: mail server

    Well,
    
    Not wanting to make this matter any worse, BUT:
    
    Not being an expert (only a user ;-)) on the Atari, having read this
    saga makes me wonder whether Mr Jon Brode of Michigan Uni is actually
    mature enough to be in charge of something like this... ok, he's
    offering a service (which many people ENJOY and APPRECIATE), but need
    he be so ``agressive'' in his reply to Mr Kaiser?
    
    His reaction seemed TOTALLY unfounded, and only now has he decided to
    retract his degrading comments about Mr Kaiser...
    
    The fact of the matter seems to be that Mr Kaiser did infact process 90
    requests, but surely the limit should be controlled and extra requests
    should be denied instead of ``slagging'' the requester off to the whole 
    of the UseNet community.
    
    In my mind, the immature reaction of Jon should infact be questioned, 
    and  if i were Mr Kaiser, i would expect more than this letter as an
    apology. 
    
    MY OWN OPINION...
    
    				Lewis.

    Hans,
    
    You shouldn't be apologizing for anything! I've requested bundles of
    stuff from various archives before and when I request over my limit I
    get a mail back saying so and suggesting I request the other files the
    next day. You didn't bypass any quota checks deliberately; it's obvious
    that the problem lies with the server software they've implemented. I
    just hope that the bloke who went off his trolley about the whole thing
    doesn't end up working for a computer company dealing with customers...
    
    "What do you MEAN you've found a bug ? You've been TRYING to do that,
    haven't you... I'm going to complain to the Managing Director of your
    company about that and I hope he never lets you use our software
    again!"
    
    If I were you I'd expect an apology in public (since that is where he
    decided to incarcerate you) and I'd also forward the details of the
    whole episode to HIS "postmaster".
    
    By the way, did you get those 90 files sent to you ? Any chance of
    making them available ? ;-)))

>>    By the way, did you get those 90 files sent to you ? Any chance of
>>    making them available ? ;-)))


Sorry, I've already deleted the files. BTW: most those 93 files were 
duplicates, because of the delayed and resent messages.

-Hans

    
    Hans' explanation sounded absolutely ok for me, that could have
    happened to anybody (I think we have some experiance with networks,
    do we?). It's a sh***y way to blame someone in public with rough words
    like those I read, before asking for an explanation. A simple polite
    mail could have cleared up things. Usually I'd expect a warning message
    to stop fooling around or something similar before being punished.
    I think I wouldn't like to get that guy as my system manager...
    Hans, anyway somehow you choose to become famous the bad way :-)
    
    Bernd
    
    

I've appended a Usenet comp.sys.atari.st posting by Brian Reid.  Brian does a
very good job of explaining what happen. The real guts of the problem is
explained about half way through (time/date in the FROM: field). It's a fairly
long posting but if you are following this thread then it is well worth
reading.


	Ray

Article        34450
From: [email protected] (Brian Reid)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st,comp.sys.atari.8bit
Subject: Re: Bye Bye BART
Date: 12 Feb 91 16:59:27 GMT
Sender: [email protected] (News)
Organization: DEC Western Research
 
 
I am the manager of the USENET and electronic mail gateway between Digital
Equipment Corporation and the rest of USENET. The unfortunate incident for
which Mr. Kaiser has been so cruelly blamed was completely an accident, and
is the result of a "culture  clash" rather than any malice. It is perhaps
best not to use harsh words until you have finished understanding an incident.
 
Hans Kaiser works in Digital's software support office in Stuttgart, Germany. 
Like most Digital field offices, it is equipped with VMS computers and
connected to Digital's DECNET network. The converstion between internal
DECNET and external protocols is performed by the DECWRL computer for which I
am responsible.
 
VMS and DECNET do not have the concept of queueing mail. When you send a
message, either it is delivered instantly or it bounces. The idea is that you
want the sender to know instantly if his message did not get through.
As a result, VMS mail users have, through the years, grown accustomed to
believing that if they do not get a "message sent" message, then their
message did not get sent.
 
Whenever mail is relayed from one network to another, rather than just queued, 
the concept of "immediate delivery" is somewhat meaningless, because you
haven't really delivered the mail, but rather have just handed it off to some
intermediate postman. But user expectations are still very strong: if a
user sends an internetwork message, and doesn't get back a "message sent"
reply, his experience leads him to believe that the message was lost.
 
Last week we had a head crash on the primary disk on our DECWRL relay
computer, and for various reasons it took almost 3 days to get the machine
back up. We announced this failure on the appropriate internal Digital
newsgroups (dec.mail.config), but did not send individual notification to the
tens of thousands users of the gateway, as we sometimes do when we are
certain that it will be down for a long time.
 
During this interval Hans Kaiser was trying to retrieve files from the Atari
archive server. He is not a reader of dec.mail.config and probably did not
know that the gateway was down. He sent some retrieval requests, and got no
reply.
 
Here comes the "culture clash" that I mentioned in the first paragraph.
 
When a VMS user sends a mail message that does not get delivered, he is
conditioned to believe that it has been lost or deleted, because that is what
happens in the normal case. However, these messages that Kaiser sent were
neither lost, nor deleted. They were carefully queued, waiting for the DECWRL
gateway to come back up again, so that they could be sent.
 
When he got no response, Kaiser sent more requests. This is the natural thing
to do in the VMS world. If it didn't work, and if you are following
instructions, then try again. Maybe something will have been fixed.
I don't know exactly how many times Kaiser repeated the request over the
3-day interval, but I am sure that if he had known that his messages were all
being queued, instead of vanishing as he thought, that he would not have
repeated them.
 
Eventually (I think it was on Wednesday night, California time) the DECWRL
gateway was brought back to life, and all of the queued messages were sent to
the Atari archive server in one lump. Archive servers are in general
programmed to have per-user quotas, so that if something like this happens,
it won't bring the archive server to its knees trying to handle so many
requests at once.
 
Alas, here the "culture clash" strikes again.
 
The DECNET mail protocol does not support a "time and date" mechanism. The
only information that it records about a message, besides the message body,
is what we Unix/IP people know as the "To" and "Cc" and "Subject" and "From"
fields.
 
In DECNET protocol it is up to the receiver of a message to timestamp it
with the time that it was received. The reason for this is that since
there is no queueing, the time that a message was received is guaranteed to
be equal to the time that it was sent. As a result, the network mail
protocol has no mechanism to record the time that a message was sent.
 
The documentation for the DECWRL mail gateway, which we distribute to all
employees who ask for it, instructs them to use the gateway by sending mail
with a certain mail program that is not part of the software that Digital
ships to its customers. This program, called "nmail", is helpful in smoothing
the peak load on the gateway by queueing at certain times. However, since the
mail-sending software knows that the mail might be queued, it records the
time that the message was actually originated. This is because the "Date"
field in the message will contain the time that it was delivered and not
the time that it was actually sent. "nmail" does this by adding the date and
time to the "From" field of the message. It really doesn't have much choice,
because the DECNET mail protocol supports only a "To", "Subj", "From",
and "Cc" field, and there is a fixed limit to the size of the "Subj" field.
 
Why does this matter? It matters because the Atari archive server at the
University of Michigan looks at the "From" field of an incoming message to
avoid processing too many simultaneous requests from the same person.
There is a "per-user" quota for each day. The problem is that when you send
the mail using a mail program that encodes the date and time of the message
in the "From" field, then every message looks like it came from a different
user. 
 
As a result of this, when the DECWRL mail relay came back to life last
Wednesday, it sent many dozens of retrieval requests to Michigan all at once,
and Michigan's software failed to understand that they were all from the same
person because the "From" field on each of them had a different date and
time. As a result, the Michigan archive server tried to process all of them
at once, and, evidently, melted into a pile of slag.
 
Since I work for a company that sells computers, I suppose the loyal thing
for me to do at this point is to try to sell Michigan a bigger computer to
use as the archive server, but I don't work in a sales office, I work in
Corporate Research, and what I want is for everybody to be happy. I am very
sorry that a combination of accidents inside Digital, in Germany and
California, caused this unfortunate incident on a university computer at
Michigan, and I will happily offer the services of the excellent network
programmers at DEC Western Research to help ensure that the Michigan archive
server does not meet this fate again. Mostly I want people to know that this
was in no way the fault of Hans Kaiser. If it was anybody's fault, it was my
fault, for accidentally failing to copy the serial number of a certain disk
drive onto a service-contract renewal form for 1991, thereby leaving the disk
unprotected by maintenance contract. Disks often fail on purpose when they
learn that they are not covered by maintenance contract.
 
If you have sent Mr. Kaiser (or Herr Kaiser, as he probably prefers to be
called) a nasty message, it might be civil to send him another one letting
him know that, now that the facts are known, you aren't so angry any more.
If you find the need to be angry at somebody, please be angry at me. As the
manager of an electronic mail gateway, I'm used to it.
 
Brian Reid
DEC Western Research Laboratory

    A legal friend of mine that I mentioned this business to
    pointed out that mailing a lot of people accusing a third
    party of, in this case, wilful misuse of the umich server
    could possibly be construed as libel or slander. I'm certainly 
    not suggesting that legal action is appropriate but it strikes 
    me that if people are as free and easy with (widely-distributed) 
    accusations and abuse as they appear to have been in this case 
    then it's only a matter of time.

I've received an apology from Jon and we agreed to forget the story. Two people
out of I-don't-know-how-many others who sent me very flaming mails answered 
also with apologies. I'm willing to leave the story as it is now. 
For sure I will not involve any legal persons.

But what I experienced now: there are people on UseNet who did sent me a bunch
of mails within some minutes, with nothing else in than lots of pages with
approximations for PI. If we would have a smaller machine with not enough 
disk space or network lines with much less capacities, I think that would
have caused us some trouble. Maybe this could be a reason for a legal 
department to be involved.

-Hans

Has there been any word on wether or not this access will be reinstated?

If not, is there an alternate way to get to those archives?

Steve

(I did post a reply to the usenet saying that it seemed a fairly stiff penalty
 for an accident, but as yet no response).

>Has there been any word on wether or not this access will be reinstated?
Jon is working on modifying his software and trying to convince the system
management to allow mail access again.

>If not, is there an alternate way to get to those archives
You can use FTP mail servers.

	Ray

>You can use FTP mail servers.

I KNEW you were gonna say this :^)

I've seen a couple of references to this, but not enough of an explanation so 
that I can get it to work. How do I go about this?

Steve

    Hi,
    
    	The panarthea archive is working for me now...
    
    _John_

From: [email protected] (Jon Brode)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st,comp.sys.atari.8bit
Subject: BART's Back
Date: 5 Mar 91 16:10:15 GMT
Sender: [email protected]
Organization: University of Michigan Math Dept., Ann Arbor

BART is on-line again. Make sure you read the help file and understand
the limits that you are to work under. Ignorance is not an excuse.

I don't think it's possible to spoof the quota sysem "accidentally"
anymore. If you are trying, it isn't that difficult, but be forewarned
that when you're caught we'll notify your postmaster and post your name
to the net.

Your quota is 400k or 5 files, which ever comes first. Your quota is
restored after 24 hours of inactivity. If you are persistant enough,
your quota will never get restored.

Jon Brode  --  [email protected]      [email protected]
 Atari Archive Manager
Article is xrefed to comp.sys.atari.8bit:2202
  
I haven't tried it yet, but I assume it's correct.

Steve