Re: Is lkml dead?

Matti Aarnio (matti.aarnio@zmailer.org)
Tue, 4 Dec 2001 17:06:08 +0200


On Mon, Dec 03, 2001 at 10:43:29PM +0100, Ragnar Hojland Espinosa wrote:
> On Mon, Dec 03, 2001 at 08:35:04PM +0100, Hans-Christian Armingeon wrote:
>
> Seems that its hickuping a bit..

I would say "that is an understatement"...

For several good reasons there has been an attempt at renumbering
vger into an alternate address space. That project, however, did
yield massive amounts of DNS lookups failing in a way which did
yield "NO ERROR" status, but also no data at all.

Moving vger back to old address failed partially too, and it took
serious gymnastics to sort things out again.

The situation motivating for such drastic operation of renumbering
is that some systems consider it right and proper to reject email
just because DNS lookup does timeout somehow on them (no attempt
of yielding 400-series error codes).

Some people (a LOT of people) seem to think that it is right and proper
to analyze the parameter value given to the EHLO/HELO greeting verb.
ISP's know that they just can't do that, world is full broken MUAs
(for some reason, usually at M$ systems) which are trying to submit
email via ISP hubs.. Spam-spewers usually do get that part correctly.

Some people seem to think that it is proper to even imagine of analyzing
that the SMTP client's IP address has working DNS reverser entry.
(Combine that with a failure to handle timeouts..)

> --
> ____/| Ragnar Højland Freedom - Linux - OpenGL | Brainbench MVP
> \ o.O| PGP94C4B2F0D27DE025BE2302C104B78C56 B72F0822 | for Unix Programming
> =(_)= "Thou shalt not follow the NULL pointer for | (www.brainbench.com)
> U chaos and madness await thee at its end."

/Matti Aarnio co-postmaster at vger.kernel.org
-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/