From: rrezaian@austral.chi.il.us (Russell Rezaian)
Newsgroups: chi.mail
Subject: Re: clout uucp stats
Keywords: weekly summary
Date: 15 Oct 92 07:30:09 GMT
Distribution: chi
Organization: DOC Data Processing Systems

In article <Bw2nuo.J0L@portal.hq.videocart.com> karl@ddsw1.MCS.COM writes:
>Your complaining about Randy not getting in his car and going to reboot a
>machine is COMPLETELY, 100% IRRELAVENT and out of line with regards to the 
>point at hand which Randy had raised -- that FTPMAIL is overloading CLOUT 
>modems and systems to the point of unusability or at least excessive volume.

The point in question happens to be debatable.

In point of fact, as I have mentioned before (but when have facts ever
mattered on Usenet?), the recent clout outage had noting to do with
ftpmail.

So, any ftpmail filters would have been useless.

>I believe the point Randy made is that CLOUT (machine in reality?) >CRASHED< 
>because someone tried to FTPMAIL a few tens of megs of code (or worse).

machine and clout are two competely different machines.  clout only does
mail, and machine only does news.  The News SIG is the policy organ behind
machine and Randy Suess is the person who runs it.  He is, and has been
doing an excellent job.  We are making more use of the resources, and
Randy has not only been happy to help he has even provided equipment to
make it possible for us to do even more with machine.

clout is not Randy's baby.  It is not even connected with the News SIG,
and has it's own organizations to create policy.

As for ftpmailing a "few tens of megs" as I mentioned before, it wasn't
ftpmail, someone sent something from an account on the Internet to
annother account.  And as for it being tens of megs, the file that killed
us was 43 part uuencoded tarfile (just one) that occupied 8 megs of disk
space.  I don't remember what it was, I didn't bother checking, I just
tried to erase the damned thing...

>Perhaps what CLOUT needs is a smail filter which disallows SMTP connections 
>from some sites (like the FTP MAIL servers :-)  I have such a patch which I 
>use for other reasons if CLOUT is interested in using it.

That might be interesting, feel free to get in touch with me and we can
work out some way for you to send it to us.  Preferably not via E-mail :)

>CLOUT is a VOLUNTEER system.  When people believe things are free and 
>unlimited they tend to abuse them.  When people then tolerate that abuse, 
>it is encouraged.  Enough of this and the entire system breaks down and 
>stops working for everyone.

A very real and valid point.  We try to make it clear that resources are
limited.  Some people never quite understand that, others don't realize it
applies to them.  This is not something in our control, nor is it
something that we are likely to be able to do anything about.

Facist tactics however, are far more devastating to the system.  That's
why we don't drop conections when they are abused, that's why we don't
unilaterally forbid some types of mail.  Some solutions can be worse than
the problems.

Yeesh, I do sound bad here...  Sorry, I am not really this naive.

>The point Randy made remains valid -- there is what I (and he) characterize 
>as abuse of FTPMAIL.  My position is that >any< third-party use of FTPMAIL
>(that is, use on UUCP links without permission of ALL intervening
>administrators who make dial calls and perform store-and-forward for you) 
>is abusive and ought to be forbidden.

Forbidding things is a lot easier said than done.  I would love to have
alook at your SMTP filter, it might help.  But my faith in human nature is
such that I believe trying to address the problem with facists regulation
will only make things worse.  This has been an unpaid political diatribe.

BTW, I am not defending ftpmail.  I think it's often abused, and quite
frankly a pain in the neck.  But I can see how some people might need it,
and call me Jeffersonian, but the code Napoleon is stupid.  (Hows that for
being esoteric to the point of irrelevance?)
--
Russell Rezaian			|  rrezaian@austral.chi.il.us