NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: [Nav-l] Missing messages
From: Frank Reed CT
Date: 2006 Apr 15, 21:01 EDT
From: Frank Reed CT
Date: 2006 Apr 15, 21:01 EDT
George H, you wrote: "What then caused that accumulation of old messages to be suddenly cleared out, in a cloud of dust, and distributed months late, as seems to have happened to many members recently? I have no idea. Perhaps some buffer-space has been overfilled, and therefore flushed out, before starting to accumulate again." Interesting speculation. I've been puzzling over this, too, in order to define whether there is just one problem with the list, with several symptoms, or several problems. As you may recall, the same burst of echo posts followed by a list crash lasting a few days occurred in mid-November. I went to the list archives to see how that pattern matched the recent crash. Fortunately, one of my own posts made it into the echo burst back then so I was able to do a little more detective work. Here's the sequence of events for this one case: On October 18, 2005 around 4:30 in the afternoon, I sent two messages to the list: "Swinging the Arc" and "Sextant Telescope Collimation". After a couple of hours, the first had appeared in the list archive but the second had not. At least one other list member DID receive the second message on collimation. I decided to post a second copy of that post and, sure enough, a few hours later in the archive, there is a copy of the message "Sextant Telescope Collimation". So what became of the first post? I didn't worry about it. Now jump ahead to November 15, 2005. The list sent out a batch of echo posts, different ones to different recipients (the ones I received in my inbox are not the same as the ones that appear in the archive). And in the list archive on that date appears "Sextant Telescope Collimation", apparently this was the original copy that had gone missing a month earlier (and in the archive, it is marked with the correct earlier date and time stamp). Right after that, the list crashed and was offline for several days. As you suggested above, this sounds like a bounced message box has been dumped, suddenly flushing out messages that had been accumulated. But apparently a side-effect of this process is to crash the list. Of course none of this is supposed to happen. The problem of bouncing e-mail on the Internet generally is a serious one. It has become much more problematic within the past 12 months as more and more systems have installed over-aggressive spam filters. This is certainly part of the problem, and it is fair for Dan Hogan to "blame" at least that part of the probem on the recipient. But there is still a problem on the listserv side. Flushing the "bounced message box", for want of a better name, should not crash the list --as it has now down twice in the past six months. As for "NavList" (the google backup for this list which I initiated), it is of course likely that it would be better at handling these sorts of problems, but there is also a possibility that it would have some similar affliction or worse (!). As I said from day one, the idea was to make that list "experimental". It's time for the 50+ people who have signed up for that to start experimenting. Any of the rest of you who would like to see how that goes, feel free to sign up by sending a blank e-mail message to NavList-subscribe [ATSIGN] googlegroups.com. This does not commit you to any permanent change. You will receive a confirmation message asking you to visit a rather long URL. This simply confirms that your e-mail address is active and that you intended to sign up. After that you post to NavList [ATSIGN] googlegroups.com. And I reiterate, if Dan Hogan joins, I would be happy to make him a list owner immediately. We're talking about changing vessels, swapping a leaky boat for a seaworthy one (still sitting on the ways), not changing captains. Aye. As for solving the problem with the present list hosted on webkahuna, Ken Muldrew stated the case clearly, so I'll quote him: "The problems with Nav-L will certainly require Andy, and probably those upstream of him, to do a lot of work if they are to be fixed. There is very little anyone from this group can do to sort this out as it will require access to the Apache configuration files and logs. A list owner doesn't have those priveledges. Someone could ask Andy if he's willing to track down the bugs but as an unpaid volunteer, but I doubt he will be too keen. Having done such work in the past, I would need a lot of motivation; others, and perhaps Andy is one such, would do it merely for the technical challenge. He is a senior software developer and the problem may turn out to be easy for him to fix, but if you have ever read The_Cuckoo's_Egg by Cliff Stoll, you can appreciate how difficult it can be to track down apparently trivial problems with networked systems." -FER 42.0N 87.7W, or 41.4N 72.1W. www.HistoricalAtlas.com/lunars