[Beowulf] Administrivia: update on the state of the Beowulf list

[Bernard Li]

Hi Chris:

Thanks for the update and for taking care of things.  Hope everything will
be sorted out soon.

BTW, it was nice meeting you at the SLURM User Group Meeting!

Cheers,

Bernard


On Sat, Sep 21, 2013 at 5:09 PM, Christopher Samuel
<samuel at unimelb.edu.au>wrote:

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> Hi folks,
>
> As some of you may know we've had problems with losing subscribers due
> to the IP address of beowulf.org getting onto some anti-spam blacklists.
>
> I've been working with Penguin for some time by email and we had
> assumed this related to the fact that they had recently changed
> providers and the IP address that beowulf.org had ended up with was
> previously listed, and so they worked hard to get it unlisted.
>
> But we never could quite get it to stay off the lists, and then I got
> an email from someone complaining that they had gotten an unsolicited
> email from Mailman saying they'd asked to subscribe to the list and to
> click a link to confirm it which was a red flag.
>
> Happily I was in San Francisco this week for the Slurm User Group and
> so could visited Penguin Computing (thanks Arend and Adam!) and we
> worked through the logs to figure out what was going on (I don't have
> any access to the host itself).
>
> It turns out that the web based Mailman subscription interface was
> being heavily abused to mailbomb people with subscription requests
> (several thousand over the last fortnight) and sadly Mailman has no
> capacity to add any form of captcha protection to stop this automated
> abuse.  :-(
>
> So as a result we've had no alternative except to disable web based
> subscriptions to the list, if you try and hit the subscription URL
> directly Apache will now redirect you to the list information page,
> and that has been updated to ask people to email the beowulf-owner
> email address directly to ask to be subscribed.
>
> The next job is to get the hosts public IP changed so that any new
> subscribers won't immediately get booted again for the same reason.
>
> Once that is done we'll be able to accept new subscriptions to the
> list and I'll then look at approaching the many people we lost due to
> this to see if they're interested in getting back on the list.
>
> Sorry for all this.. :-(
>
> All the best,
> Chris
> - --
>  Christopher Samuel        Senior Systems Administrator
>  VLSCI - Victorian Life Sciences Computation Initiative
>  Email: samuel at unimelb.edu.au Phone: +61 (0)3 903 55545
>  http://www.vlsci.org.au/      http://twitter.com/vlsci
>
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