Many of You <telecom@eecs.nwu.edu> (04/16/91)
[Moderator's Note: This letter from Jeff Wasilko is typical of several received over the weekend. PAT] Pat: I was trying to get some stuff from the archive at MIT, but can't log into it. Here's the error message: Connected to lcs.mit.edu. 220 mintaka FTP server (Version 5.57 Thu Dec 6 10:57:23 EST 1990) ready. 530 User anonymous unknown. Login failed. Do you know if they planned to take the archive machine down? Jeff [Moderator's Note: No, they did not *plan* on taking it down. What happened, according to Mike Patton, a sysadmin at MIT who is my contact there for the Telecom Archives was that Saturday night, some unknown person uploaded some really huge files, taking every bit of free space they had. Then the same person posted notices telling everyone to come and get the files. This person had no association whatsoever with MIT and had the nerve to use them for a transfer site with all that stuff. Mike said at one point Saturday night there were over 100 ftp jobs going on at once. The machine came to almost a complete halt and their only choice at the time was to completely disconnect anonymous ftp 'for the duration'. Today they fixed it so there can be no anonymous uploads, and Mike said things should be back to normal by the time most of you read this. I'm sorry for the interupption in service, but it was some abusive person taking advantage of MIT's facilities. PAT]