pst@comdesign.uucp (Paul Traina) (05/11/88)
(red face) To those of you who have Erik Fair's echo servant, and also to the net in general, I'd like to appologise for some unintentional net congestion sabatoge. I wanted to test if our "alt" outward propiagation was making it to the real world, so I sent out an "alt.test" message. It was a copy of the rather humorous "misc.test digest" that was just produced by someone at udel. Anyway, the long and the short of it is: Erik Fair's all.test echo program sends mail to *every* person on *EVERY* from line. Because the alt.test message that I sent out has many from lines, mail has been sent (repeatedly) to everyone who has contributed to misc.test digest. I have taken steps to stop this (issued appropriate 'cancel'), but I'm afraid the cancel's won't travel fast enough. If you have the echo program on alt.test, your site has spent a lot of time sending out garbage mail. If you "contributed" to misc.test digest, your mailbox is now full of garbage. If you are a neighbor of some site with the echo program, you have been processing tons of mail & uucp traffic has been rather heavy lately. All in all, I've boo boo'ed big-time. It wasn't intentional, I was unaware of this feature in Erik's program. I don't know if this thing has spread like wildfire -- I hope it hasn't multiplied too much. In any case, I'm sorry (my worst fears are that this thing has replicated into a monster -- how many sites are using Erik's program?). Paul -- Paul S. Traina arpa: @pyramid.com:pst@comdesign.uucp ComDesign Data Communications -or- pst%comdesign.uucp@pyramid.com Network Equipment Technologies uucp: ...ucbvax!pyramid!comdesign!pst Santa Barbara, California, USA bell: +1 805 562-3396