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Date:	Sat, 28 Feb 2004 12:04:28 PST8
From:	Peter Skye <pskye@peterskye.com >
Reply-To:	scoug-help@scoug.com
To:	scoug-help@scoug.com
Subject:	SCOUG-Help: Are we still alive?

Content Type: text/plain

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i-lists wrote:
>
> YES, I am getting some test messages after a loooong silence !

So now you _like_ getting test messages! :)))

The SCOUG server was moved to a new machine a little over a week ago.
Our SCOUG President, Tony Butka, donated the machine and it works great.

The software was copied straight to the new machine (i.e. we didn't
reinstall, just copied everything) but was put on D: rather than C:. I
forget why that was done; I think it had something to do with the rate
that the log files and archives were growing and the new machine had
been partitioned so that D: was bigger than C:. Anyway, it took a
couple of days to straighten out some configuration files which were
still pointing to C:.

Then there were some other odd things that happened. Two ISPs, well.com
and pacbell.net, appeared to have technical problems of their own and
our outgoing mail queue then grew to a rather large size because they
wouldn't accept any messages (a lot of those messages were spam
bouncebacks). Our mail server can handle a large mail queue _but_ we
just learned that we're being inundated with spammers -- when I just
checked we had one spammer with about 15 simultaneous connections open
to our server. They aren't relaying, what they're doing is sending
their messages to every conceivable name at scoug.com, thus we're
getting messages for adam@scoug.com, adrian@scoug.com, allen@scoug.com,
etc. This slows down the response time on the server, so instead of
getting our own list messages out in a few seconds it can take several
minutes and sometimes a couple of hours before they are sent out.

And _then_, middle of last night, I watched as Noah Hornblower at
Rescue-Europe.com went into some sort of loop on the server trying to
send out something like 20,000 messages (I and someone else have been
through the logs, we still don't understand what happened). I watched
Mr. Hornblower from about 11pm last night until almost 3am this morning,
and I must say he's quite persistent.

I've tried rebooting the server a number of times to kick all the
spammers off, but they just connect again. Sometimes when you kick them
off their software moves to the next domain, but not these guys.

I use the test messages to track how long it takes a message to be
processed. The KEY= value in some of the messages is so I can find them
quickly in the queue (I run a search for the key).

I'm going to add some additional log reports (I have to write some code)
to help me know what's going on, and I might have the server send me an
hourly status report so I can see if things are degrading.

Rollin has been incredibly helpful through all of this. He's diagnosed
many of the problems, fixed what we can fix right now, and has been most
patient when I've asked him questions.

- Peter

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