[Peace-discuss] [UCIMC-Tech] flaky peace/peace-discuss at anti-war.net -- "User unknown in virtual alias table" errors
Stuart Levy
slevy at ncsa.uiuc.edu
Sat Jan 16 19:52:37 CST 2010
I see -- so the problem was that some people were writing to
peace/peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net
(which has continued to work and still does)
while others including me were writing to
peace/peace-discuss at anti-war.net
(which stopped working for a while, but should now be fixed).
If this message to peace-discuss at anti-war.net arrives then I'll be happy.
Thank you for the explanation and the fix!
On Sat, Jan 16, 2010 at 07:40:20PM -0600, Josh King wrote:
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: SHA1
>
> Hi Stuart,
>
> I'm sorry about the problem (which has just been corrected), please bear
> with my long explanation below:
>
> All of the lists and other primary mail functionality were recently
> migrated to a new server in response to significant issues with and
> increasing instability in the old mailserver. The configuration has been
> cleaned up significantly, but this introduces some major differences:
>
> The "correct" address for all lists has always been
> <listname>@lists.chambana.net, but the old mailserver handled domains in
> a very simplistic way, which is to say not at all. Thus, for instance,
> peace at lists.chambana.net was the same as peace at anti-war.net, but it was
> also the same as peace at ucimc.org, peace at thebikeproject.org,
> peace at acornactivemedia.com, etc. This obviously had some problems beyond
> mere consistency. On the old server, it would have been impossible to
> have donate at anti-war.net and donate at thebikeproject.org go to two
> different accounts, or info at ucimc.org and info at chambana.net. Also,
> someone who had the account jim at ucimc.org could also send and receive
> mail as jim at anti-war.net or jim at acornactivemedia.com, whether or not
> they belonged to those groups. We obviously don't want users to be able
> to represent themselves as an authorized agent of an organization to
> which they do not belong.
>
> The new system is much more strict: every local user has an account
> <username>@mail.chambana.net and every list is
> <listname>@lists.chambana.net, and everything else is an alias to either
> a local account, a list, or a remote account (like a gmail.com or
> illinois.edu account). We've tried to make sure that every local account
> and remote account has at least an @chambana.net and @ucimc.org alias,
> with others if we knew about them. However, there are a number of
> instances where we didn't know exactly which aliases were being used and
> which weren't, and I've been adding those as we go by keeping an eye on
> the logs and mailqueue when I can, contacting people individually, and
> keeping the server on a debug mode where it keeps a lot of mail queued
> when there's an error when otherwise it would be dropped. In particular,
> it turns out a lot of people access the same lists through a ton of
> different aliases (which often don't even resemble the actual name of
> the list). Unfortunately, we can't just alias everything to everything
> else, as we'd be running into the same problems that the new server is
> trying to solve. Also, since the new system is so much more specific, if
> we wanted to alias jim@<everydomain> to jim at mail.chambana.net, we would
> need a line for each domain, expanding the same alias to up to dozens of
> lines. We have several hundred lines of aliases programmed in to try and
> break as little backwards compatibility as possible, but it's inevitable
> that we might miss a few. I'm truly sorry for the omission, and I'll do
> my best to make sure it doesn't happen again. I added the aliases in
> which were mentioned, and if there are any other aliases for other AWARE
> lists which you would like, please let me know.
>
> On 01/16/2010 06:35 PM, Stuart Levy wrote:
> > Hello imc-tech people,
> >
> > Several of us, in writing to peace at anti-war.net or peace-discuss at anti-war.net,
> > have been getting sporadic errors like these. The result is that messages are either
> > delayed, or don't get through at all. But *some* messages have been going through.
> >
> > This became troublesome to me today when I sent out (this morning)
> > an announcement of this afternoon's demonstration, but even people who
> > happened to be reading mail today didn't see it, since it bounced -- see below.
> >
> > I'd passed along a report of the same problem, from Barbara Kessel, a few days ago.
> > Mort Brussel mentioned that he's been seeing similar troubles.
> >
> > Has anyone had a chance to look at it? Are the mail server(s) in question
> > logging anything when these "User unknown in virtual alias table" errors occur?
> > Is there any way I can look at this? I don't have an account on
> > mail.anti-war.net = 75.145.177.74 = mccoy.chambana.net.
> >
> > Do we need to move the anti-war.net mailing lists to other servers?
> >
> >
> > ----- Forwarded message from Mail Delivery Subsystem <MAILER-DAEMON at pop.ncsa.uiuc.edu> -----
> >
> > Date: Sat, 16 Jan 2010 14:45:44 -0600
> > From: Mail Delivery Subsystem <MAILER-DAEMON at pop.ncsa.uiuc.edu>
> > Subject: Warning: could not send message for past 4 hours
> > To: slevy at ncsa.uiuc.edu
> >
> > **********************************************
> > ** THIS IS A WARNING MESSAGE ONLY **
> > ** YOU DO NOT NEED TO RESEND YOUR MESSAGE **
> > **********************************************
> >
> > The original message was received at Sat, 16 Jan 2010 09:58:33 -0600
> > from zanamavir.ncsa.uiuc.edu [141.142.2.177]
> >
> > ----- The following addresses had transient non-fatal errors -----
> > <peace at anti-war.net>
> >
> > ----- Transcript of session follows -----
> > ... while talking to mail.anti-war.net.:
> >>>> RCPT To:<peace at anti-war.net>
> > <<< 450 4.1.1 <peace at anti-war.net>: Recipient address rejected: User unknown in virtual alias table
> > <peace at anti-war.net>... Deferred: 450 4.1.1 <peace at anti-war.net>: Recipient address rejected: User unknown in virtual alias table
> > Warning: message still undelivered after 4 hours
> > Will keep trying until message is 5 days old
> >
> > ----- Original message follows -----
> >
> > X-Envelope-From: slevy at ncsa.uiuc.edu
> > X-Envelope-To: <peace at anti-war.net>
> > Return-Path: <slevy at ncsa.uiuc.edu>
> > Received: from zanamavir.ncsa.uiuc.edu (zanamavir.ncsa.uiuc.edu [141.142.2.177])
> > by pop.ncsa.uiuc.edu (8.11.7/8.11.7) with ESMTP id o0GFwXe07127
> > for <peace at anti-war.net>; Sat, 16 Jan 2010 09:58:33 -0600
> > Received: from osage.ncsa.uiuc.edu (osage.ncsa.uiuc.edu [141.142.2.56])
> > by zanamavir.ncsa.uiuc.edu (8.14.3/8.14.3) with ESMTP id o0GFwajl016480
> > for <peace at anti-war.net>; Sat, 16 Jan 2010 09:58:36 -0600
> > Received: (from slevy at localhost)
> > by osage.ncsa.uiuc.edu (8.11.7/8.11.6) id o0GFwZ814377
> > for peace at anti-war.net; Sat, 16 Jan 2010 09:58:35 -0600
> > From: Stuart Levy <slevy at ncsa.uiuc.edu>
> > Message-Id: <201001161558.o0GFwZ814377 at osage.ncsa.uiuc.edu>
> > Date: Sat, 16 Jan 2010 09:58:35 -0600
> > To: peace at anti-war.net
> > Subject: yes, demonstration today -- Sat Jan 16th, 2-4pm, Main & Neil
> > User-Agent: Heirloom mailx 12.0 3/4/06
> > MIME-Version: 1.0
> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
> > Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
> > X-milter-cli-pbsmtp-Report: /usr/local/scripts/checkdracdip
> > __
> > dracd passed
> > X-Null-Tag: b418932f2280b68b2f285cbdac183c54
> > X-NCSA-MailScanner-Information: Please contact help at ncsa.uiuc.edu for more information, rimantadine.ncsa.uiuc.edu
> > X-NCSA-MailScanner-ID: o0GFwajl016480
> > X-NCSA-MailScanner: Found to be clean
> >
> > Yes, remembering Martin Luther King's denunciation of the war in Vietnam,
> > AWARE will be demonstrating this Saturday afternoon in opposition
> > to US wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan (and where next? Yemen, Iran, Venezuela?),
> > and to the states of mind that see military force as the answer to
> > any question.
> >
> > Please join us today -- Saturday, Jan. 16th, from 2-4pm, at the corner of
> > Main and Neil in downtown Champaign. Bring a sign, use one of ours,
> > or just stand with us.
> >
> > ----- End forwarded message -----
> >
>
> - --
> Josh King
> - --
> "I am an Anarchist not because I believe Anarchism is the final goal,
> but because there is no such thing as a final goal." -Rudolf Rocker
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