[Peace-discuss] [UCIMC-Tech] flaky peace/peace-discuss at anti-war.net -- "User unknown in virtual alias table" errors

[Josh King]

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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
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> 
> 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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