Digest woes?

Pat, I've been catching up with about ten days of TD (out of town and then a cold... :-) ), and was wondering what was up, and didn't see you discuss it (I could have missed it ...).

I got about 6-10 issues with no 'number' information in the subject, and each was exactly 30K long. These were about numbers 184-190 (from the inside info), I think.

Then/and, other issues before that had the sender in various formats.

More issues from being spam-overloaded or something else?

Thanks for your illuminating info, as always!

Lee Sweet Datatel, Inc. Manager of Telephony Services and Information Security How higher education does business.

Voice: 703-968-4661 Cell: 703-932-9425 Fax: 703-968-4625 snipped-for-privacy@datatel.com

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[TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Ah, so you noticed ... well, I at first thought that maybe John Levine, who administers the mailing list through majordomo had fallen asleep at the switch(board) ... although I did think it a bit unusual that my volume of hate mail had fallen off a little (although the amount of spam and viri had stayed constant or maybe increased a little.) Then I discovered that about 6 or 7 issues (184 through 190 I think) had not made it though the sendmail here at massis. I do (at least) two things here: a script of mine, from years back when I still had all my marbles intact, called 'posterd&' (the ampersand means to run in the background) which in turn calls 'nntpxmit' (a process which posts comp.dcom.telecom on several sites at the same time, message by message) and 'hypermail' (a script which posts the individual messages in each issue 'usenet style' message by message on
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I also run 'send-telecom' (which itself calls up a background job called 'send.now', the purpose of which is to (1) make up the latest-issue.html file on the fly and (2) preserve a copy of the Digest in our archives in numerical order and last but not least, (3) invoke [or would you say PROvoke] an instantiation of sendmail to get this out to the mailing list readers, with a few clever tricks out of sendmail which I am allowed to use as a priviledged user at MIT [such as the -f flag allowing sendmail to refer to me as ' snipped-for-privacy@telecom-digest.org' rather than just as 'any old sap user@ lcs.mit.edu'. [Quite aside, but now and then some other site somewhere on a spam-fighting tangent discovers that our sendmail here allows me to make 'those adjustments' and it kicks my stuff back or shreds it undelivered, whatever].

In the process of doing these two jobs, I sometimes grow impatient, since hypermail -xp takes fu---- forever it seems, now that I have those Google ads in there, and the larger my stash of messages gets, the more ads I get people to look at, etc. So my diseased brain, in its wisdom thought of an 'improved' way of handling things: I would invoke posterd& and after seeing it get happily on its way doing its job I would then invoke send-telecom, letting them both run at the same time, while I went to have a cigarette and feed the cats. Ah, but this new scheme of mine, this shortcut led straight to hell, an express lane so to speak; it failed, miserably, as diseased brains are want to do; the sendmail (portion) of the send-telecom job got broken, because sendmail could not find a couple files it insisted on having, since the earlier script (posterd&) had not yet had a chance to create them for sendmail to find. _Not all_ scripts running in the background which invoke sendmail bother to tell the invoker when something goes wrong, so I sat here blissfully assuming that things were going along fine.

I still have not figured it all out yet, although transparently 'it' works the way it should from the reader's perspective. You cannot write a Unix script without lavish commenting to remind yourself what you did [and no _real man_ ever bothers to document his scripts] then go back twenty years, two heart attacks and one brain aneurysm later and understand what you wrote or how to fix it if it gets broken. By purely hook and crook, I found out one thing (after I had manually forced those six or eight issues you got all at once through the sendmail slot at the postoffice): the regularly scheduled issue got through okay! But I had done it _exactly, precisely_ as I had done it in the past when posterd& and one of its components hypermail -xp only took a few minutes to run instead of the twenty minutes it takes now with all those God Damned Google ads that have to be on each page it creates. So ... if I do it in _this_ order (posterd& _then_ send-telecom) by George, John Levine gets it, the readers get it, etc. So, there has to be one or more files _in common_ to both scripts which send- telecom needs (but posterd& has not yet created or has created but is working on them when send-telecom comes looking for them or maybe posterd& had the audacity to rm them while send-telecom was using them or looking for them, etc), I dunno. I have the scripts back to where they mostly work, but I still have to do some manual 'tidy up' afterward on them. Ah, if we could have only known twenty (even ten!) years ago what we know now about mailing lists, interaction with the web and stuff like that. Maybe someday my hero will come along and work all the inconsistencies and bugs out of my scripts so I can do this in a modern way. I know I sure cannot do all that any longer. Enjoy it and use me while you can. Someday I won't be around to get kicked any longer. PAT]

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Lee Sweet
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