karl@kant.cis.ohio-state.edu (Karl Kleinpaste) (09/08/89)
Don't do that. OSU Computer Science was down for two days this week for major machine room hardware hacking. During the downtime period, an incredible $#!+load of news and mail piled up behind osu-cis. When we brought our machines up late yesterday afternoon after hacking completion, the load on ALL of our Pyramids (we have 4) soared solidly into the teens and higher. So osu-cis has been fighting like the dickens to catch up on it all, and he's not being especially successful up to this point (he's only a "little" Pyr 90x). The problem has been severely exacerbated by the fact that CompuServe announced the mail gateway, which also flows through osu-cis. And of course there's a blortful of people wanting to get archive stuff as well. And then someone out there had the unmatched _gall_ to request the whole of GNU Emacs source with uucico running -x9. For those of you not familiar, the -x option to uucico invokes debugging. It tells uucico to babble incessantly about what it's doing. Higher digits means more verbose levels of debugging. The max is -x9, which is a packet-level trace of uucico's activity. This usually means that more data gets dumped about what's being transferred than actually gets transferred down the port. Most importantly, invoking -x9 at YOUR end also puts MY end into -x9, dumping to /usr/spool/uucp/.Admin/audit. This evening, osu-cis simply stopped, with sendmails having blown out the swap area, and the relevant spool filesystem completely swamped because of an audit file well in excess of 18Mbytes. We are another 5 hours behind the flow of news and mail as a result. DON'T DO THAT. It's in extremely bad taste. If you must, use -x9 long enough to prove that a connection works, or to find a problem. Don't leave it on when you do large software transfers from a public archive site such as osu-cis. --Karl