Re: E-mail crashing Win NT

Kevin M Bealer (kmb203@psu.edu)
Thu, 30 May 1996 07:57:25 -0400 (EDT)


On Mon, 27 May 1996, Nick Andrew wrote:

> > >Perhaps you should get an operating system that doesn't crash when
> > >e-mail passes through it!
> > [...]
> > Sean,
> > my recommendation to you is to send a message to postmaster@vger.rutgers.edu
> > and see if the cause of your problem is actually with the listserver.
>
> Since this is a Microsoft operating system which is crashing, the correct
> procedure is to contact Microsoft for support.
>
> Nick.

Almost certainly, it is Microsoft's bug and their responsibility, but for a
few MB's space, it might be a good investment to set a small Linux system up
as well.

1. You know it won't crash (on these emails), because we all recieved those
mails; you would know if email on a linux list was such that it crashed
linux. :) (This is mostly relevant in ref. to #2.)

2. You can stick it (a simple linux box) in between you and the net, and
just let it sniff and record connections invisibly... when (if) the
system dies you can look through piles of networking logs, etc.

3. By all means use linux to fix you problem by telling MS you need a
bug-fix or you'll have to switch some of the machines to Linux. :)

4. You may find a need for a Unix like system in the future... as such it
might be handy to get a few of your people used to it now.

And you might as well ask vger (politely) to look at the log and see what
went through... if you can get a message ID surely someone will have a copy
of the message in question, they could uuencode it to you and you could
(perhaps) set up an email filter as a temporary fix. If you could identify
a simple sequence that repeatably broke your system, it would not probably
be hard to cruft up a simple "flex" parser or something similar to remove
said glitches from email... This type of error is probably either 1. only
fixable in MS source code :( or 2. triggered by a really simple condition,
like no newline char at the end of an email, etc. If you can identify which
message it was, someone on here just might guess the problem. An
experience hacker could probably make a filter in 25 min. with flex for any
number of simple conditions. (porting it to a non-unix socket system may
require rarer skills.)

(BTW) I don't know the scale of your company so of course I don't know how
practical some of these suggestions are.

Good luck with you problem in any case.

__kmb203@psu.edu_________________________Debian__1.1___Linux__1.99.7___
"Love is a snowmobile racing across the tundra and then suddenly it
flips over, pinning you underneath. At night, the ice weasels come."
-- Matt Groening