[SC.LUG] Re: Exciting news

[Andrew Hutchings]

On Saturday 28 January 2006 09:18, Adrian Wontroba wrote:

> Others include causing an ISP some grief when I went away for a few
> weeks and my own mail system crashed (power problems), all was well
> until I returned, when their system got quite upset when it tried to
> deliver; and recently loosing a months worth email locally when a
> machine died and its backups proved to be less good than they should
> have been. Most embarrasing. Shades of Sledge Hammer's "Trust me, I know
> what I'm doing" moto.

The best one I saw (although a nightmare at the time) was when I ran the 
servers for a hosting company (50 servers, 2 racks in Manchester uni), I 
think this happened about a year ago now:
I woke up one morning to alert text messages coming in thick and fast, had a 
look and 4 MX servers had crapped themselves one after the other within the 
space of an hour.  It took as no time at all time find which domain was 
causing it and we managed to block mail to that domain while we figured out 
what happened.
It turns out that the client was using and exchange server to send the mail 
and our servers to receive it.  He had managed to send a mail with well over 
1000 addresses in the To: line.  5 of the recipients also had old exchange 
servers.  All of the exchange servers had a bug where if it got a message 
from an exchange server with non-local addresses in the To: line it delivered 
them (it couldn't tell the mail didn't come from itself).  So you had the 6 
servers bouncing the mail around, a million bounces come back to our servers 
and us taking the rap by everyone because the MX records for the domain 
pointed to us.  It took 2 days to clear up the mess and educate the exchange 
owners that they hadn't't patched in years.

Regards
Andrew

-- 
Andrew Hutchings (A-Wing) - Linux Guru
Linux CDs and DVDs - http://www.linuxiso.co.uk/
Linux quote 83/232: "If you can't beat them ... steal their best ideas and 
outspend them." - JESSE BERST, Editorial Director, ZDNet AnchorDesk, on 
Microsoft's business strategy.
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