From: arl@cs.hut.fi (Ari Lemmke)
Subject: Re: Mailing List ?
Organization: Helsinki University of Technology, Finland
	<1992Dec9.205759.8368@sfu.ca> <1992Dec9.233156.4910@klaava.Helsinki.FI>
Date: Sun, 13 Dec 1992 08:47:31 GMT

In article <1992Dec9.233156.4910@klaava.Helsinki.FI> wirzeniu@klaava.Helsinki.FI (Lars Wirzenius) writes:
:   rchen@fraser.sfu.ca (Robert Chen) writes:
:   >Does the mailing list run on niksula or not?  
:
:   The mailing list linux-activists@niksula.hut.fi (or joker.hut.fi, same
:   machine) is not, currently, in operation and has been down since
:   Saturday.

	Yes, due heavy load we had to take list off, and I
	reprogrammed Mail-Net totally with perl. Now it
	can handle bigger lists better - massive lists
	are digested.

:   >When I first stopped receiving mail from the list, I tried a finger
:   >@niksula.hut.fi.  Sure enough it was up and had plenty of people
:   >logged in.  It still is up, as of 5 seconds ago.  Lars (above) says
:   >it crashed.  
:
:   As far as I understand, niksula did crash (a couple of times), but is
:   (and seems to stay) up now that the mailing list is disabled.  I could
:   be wrong (I'm not a niksula user).

	True, it did crash multiple times. There may also
	be a hardware bug, but after taking list off it
	has not crashed ;-).

	If you see plenty of people in a computer with finger
	it does not mean they are logged in. We use GNU finger,
	and finger @joker.cs.hut.fi shows about 20 machines
	(i.e. niksula 'student laboratory').

:   >Others say they are upgrading the mail software.  Can
:   >anyone tell us what the real story with the mailing list is?
:
:   Well, they _did_ upgrade the mail software also.  This was also
:   because of the mailing list: it seems that sendmail wasn't able to
:   send out the more than 8000 mails per day (on a silent day :), so they
:   changed to a different mailer, but it didn't help much because the
:   computer still had problems.

	We dropped sendmail and installed zmailer, but it seems
	that although good ideas in it, it's not too good and
	stable. Maybe our postmaster installs smail as soon
	as possible (within year or two ;-).

:   The mailing list is not permanently out of order, however.  It should
:   start working again in a few days, but it might have to start sending
:   mails in a digest format, i.e. several incoming mails are concatenated
:   to one, with about one digest mail going out per day.  This should
:   reduce the mail load considerably.

	I finally got all modules to work .. 2500 lines perl code,
	and still needs more. I have been programming it, and
	no time for news etc... but "The 1st Linus meeting" ;-)
	took time also little bit ;-).

:   One problem with the mailing list is that while it has always been
:   mostly meant for small work groups, it is also used for asking
:   questions (often enough questions almost directly from the FAQ) which
:   would be better to post to comp.os.linux (or answered by reading the
:   FAQ).

	I hope people understand that sending FAQs through mail
	to 900 people (biggest list here), is not what one
	wants from a mailing list.

	We have had only few ignorant person sending mailing
	list requests to mailing list within half a year,
	the software prevents those .. so I do not need
	to blacklist people any more ..

	So finally the system is up and running ..
	[the famous last words, until he notices the system
	has looped sent 7000 mails ... like .. ].

:   Lars.Wirzenius@helsinki.fi  (finger wirzeniu@klaava.helsinki.fi)
:      MS-DOS, you can't live with it, you can live without it.

	arl
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux