Subject: From the Arministrator: Problems with distributing CCL...

From: Jan Labanowski <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 26 Mar 1999 01:14:55 -0500 (EST)

Dear CCL Subscribers...

While some of you may have enjoyed the silence in the ether, I had many
inquires about "What is happening? I am not getting CCL...". 
For many of us the CCL became the daily annoyance, but the one which is
quite addictive. Some popular proverbs about children, wifes/husbands, etc.,
come to mind.

In short... The machine which sends the CCL out to the world had a disk
problem (the /var partition which has a /var/spool/mqueue for those who
know better) was ailing. The UNIX kernel, rather than sending mail, was
frantically trying to read the bad spots on the disk surface. The average
load on this machine (Spark 10) went up to 3 or more on occasions.
Our sendmail.cf switches off the sendmail queue sweep at load 2, and
sendmail refuses connections at 3. We upped it to 3 and 4, respectively, and
hoped that load will go down at night and at least the sendmail queue
will clear, at which time we take the machine down, put a new disk,
and start again, before the ailing drive dies a gruesome death and makes
the noise of a sanding machine (sounds familiar {;-)}).
But you bet, you loose... The drive's health was more frail, and the
life support also failed (this is a spring break time, and the gurus
are hard to find). 

And I have a dilemma... I can resend all the messages (I have them archived
on several machines). But at the same time, some of them were sent,
some of them were partially sent, and some of them may not have been
sent at all. When www.ccl.net vel www.ccl.net died, it had
70,000 or so, pieces of mail to deliver in its queue. And since by
definition, you do not backup sendmail queues, since they change by minute,
it is hard to tell whose message was delivered, to whom, etc.

The suggestions are:

  Authors: Send your messages again, if you posted them between
           March 20 and 25, and you did not get any responses.
           If you do not have your own copy, you can look at

           gopher://www.ccl.net:70/11/archived-messages/99/03

           or if it does not work:

           http://www.ccl.net/cca/archived-messages/99/03

           or

           ftp://www.ccl.net/pub/chemistry/archived-messages/99/03/

           and get them from there. If there are not there, your
           message was not even received and must have been refused
           at the moment of spurious high load by www.ccl.net machine.
           note here, EVERYBODY PLEASE READ...
           ===================================
           There are many files there with *.rej in the name. These
           are messages which had been rejected by the CCL distribution
           scripts for some reason (yes, computers are stupid, and my
           perl scripts in particular...), and are usually reviewed by my
           student assistants, and resent. They should end up in the next day
           (or so), files with no *rej*, i.e., were successfully resent.
           If message is in the *rej* file, it does not mean that you are
           on black list, etc... The message scanning is much more involved,
           some trivial problems with e-mail header may direct messages for
           human review.  However, if they do not appear there, but appear in
           rej.pro (processed) and they SHOULD in your opinion, be distributed,
           please BUG ME ([email-masked]) directly. The students who review
           the messages are not chemists. Moreover, I sometimes personally
           have a problem if the message is appropriate for distribution.
           Hard cases make bad law, and some cases are hard. On the other
           hand, you do not see some of the most offensive messages even
           in *rej* files, and if we had not had these scripts, you would
           have learned more about freedom of the Internet, hot sites,
           fantastic new products, how to be rich in a week, etc.,
           which you may not want to, I presume...

  Silent Majority: Do not get upset when you see messages being posted
           again.

Thank you for your cooperation, and sorry... I am really sorry for the mess...

Now, more bad news {:-)}. Very soon, we will be moving the whole operation
to other machines and try to add more redundancy, make the Web site
a pleasure to access, etc. And there will be hiccups... But since you love CCL
and you are even tempered, and you want to end up in heavens, you will
not put a contract on my grey hairy head... But if you want to express
your frustration, please send mail directly to me and be direct (I have
a skin of a rhino, so get it off...). This will help to keep CCL focused.

Yours, 
Jan

Jan K. Labanowski            |    phone: 614-292-9279,  FAX: 614-292-7168
Ohio Supercomputer Center    |    Internet: [email-masked] 
1224 Kinnear Rd,             |    http://www.ccl.net/chemistry.html
Columbus, OH 43212-1163      |