8/4     With both kais and mehlhaff's archive out of action (why?), can someone
        please point to another public access archive?  Sometimes motd even
        contain useful information, like the script posted early here that I
        did not save.  (I also cannot run it for the lack of disk space.)
        \_ my motd archiver is back online. IT requires manual restarting when
           soda reboots.  Not a problem when soda is stable... -ERic (mehlhaff)
        \_ kchang seems like a smart guy who does stupid and annoying
           things, why didn't he run a script on soda that diff'd the motd
           then transferered the diff bits back to him at ucla?
           fingering 60 times a minute seems like a very inelegant
           non kchang perl hack solution.
        \_ How the hell could finger be considered a DoS attack?!  Was this
           just done for personal vendetta reasons against him?
          \_ back when the net was young and the hills were green,
             system administrators logged tcp connections like rlogin
             and finger and who and stat and ftp.  now no one cares anymore,
             all the traffic is http, but the EECS admins probably
             have the same logging scripts in place from the early 90s.
             i remember some soda dude who went off to stanford would
             finger the account of his ex-gf on soda like once every
             5 minutes, for hours, at random times, all day every day.
             it stuck out in the logs because it was always the same
             domain name, to the same account, all the time.  i emailed
             the victim and she probably emailed the dude and he stopped.
             i can see how the EECS admins would notice kchang fingering
             the motd every 10 seconds.
           \_ The above seems to refer to kais' statement.  So is kchang
              squished again because he runs a world accessible motd archive?
              \_ no
              \_ Considering the amount of censoring he does on the entries
                 before they are categorized and posted, I find it less than
                 useful as an "archive."
           \_ He was fingering Soda through EECS more than once a second.
              It filled up the EECS network logs and made them unhappy.
              Read the last meeting minues and following discussing on the
              newsgroup.
              \_ can't they just ask him to finger less?
                 \_ they could but kchang is unpopular enough that no one
                    at the csua would suggest the obvious common sense
                    solution.  if everyone lost an account on the first
                    strike, then we all would've been squished by now.
                    kchang is special.  it was an unpopularity squishing
                    like all of them.
                    \_ "all of them"...  I think you know naught of what
                       you speak.  Longstanding CSUA (perhaps unwritten)
                       policy is "if you get your account back, don't
                       fuck it up." That said, I can't speak to why they
                       actually squished kchang, but comparing a second
                       squish to a first is apples to oranges. --scotsman
                       \_ if it isn't written, it isn't policy.  if you want
                          a policy that says a second squishing has a lower
                          standard than the first or that post-restoration
                          from a first squishing a person is on probation
                          of some sort, then write the policy and publish
                          it.  otherwise, yes, it is apples to apples.  orgs
                          are properly run by written policy, not whim.
                    \_ ok, I checked the newsgroup.  from the discussion,
                       it seems that they were not about to squish him,
                       and even made fun of tom when he tried to chime
                       in and get kchang squished.  so what changed their
                       minds in the end?
                       \_ "they" != politburo
                   \_ warned, deactivated in 98.  reactivated and warned
                      to behave.  deactivated again.
             \_ it also caused problems for EECS because soda makes ident
                requests to remote systems that access soda's finger server.
                imagine the EECS webserver getting pummeled by multiple
                identd requests every second.
        \_ Here, now you can run your own private script.  Don't forget to
           mkdir /csua/tmp/username.  The next thing that can be done to this
           is to prevent check-ins if the motd is about like 100 KB (someone
           puts binary junk in it):
           #!/bin/sh

           cd /csua/tmp/$USER

           while [ 1 ]
           do
               co -q -f -l motd
               cp /etc/motd.public motd
               ci -q -m_ motd
               sleep 120
           done
           \_ Or make it check the output of `file /etc/motd.public` ro make
              sure it says ASCII.
           \_ BAD IDEA. If everyone on Soda did this, the space would fill
              up in no time.
        \_ I run my own motd archive.  I once posted the path to it.  Check
           the archives.
           \_ Thanks for recursing.