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State Dept E-mail Crash After "Reply-All" Storm
twistah writes "It seems that a recent 'reply-all storm' at the State Department caused the entire e-mail infrastructure to crash. A notice sent to all State Department employees warned of disciplinary actions which will be taken if users 'reply-all' to lists with a large amount of users. Apparently, the problem was compounded by not only angry replies asking to be taken off the errant list, but by the e-mail recall function, which generated further e-mail traffic. One has to wonder if capacity planning was performed correctly — should an e-mail system be able to handle this type of traffic, or is it an unreasonable task for even the best system?"
Haha, sex change team.
Of the reply all button. Please do not respond with the reply all button. What they need is a reply some button.
I remember my first year of college when I wanted to send Xmas greetings to 'everyone'. I remember, the IT director of the college running from computer lab to computer lab looking for student number xxyz.
Fun times.
What's the M Sex Change Team? People who still haven't gotten over Judi Dench playing M? Come on, folks, M is a title, not a person; it's not a sex change!
Good to know that rigorous competition in the marketplace has totally eliminated misuse of 'reply-all' in the private sector. I look forward to continuing to have a lower life expectancy and higher infant mortality than Canadians and Swedes.
I remember 10 or so years ago a disgruntled employee managed to send a heartfelt "Fuck You" to the entire 27,000+ employees as he was being given the heave ho.
That one tied up the network for some period of time. I always wonder who the bright star was how had composed the distribution list for the entire company directory.
This is the sort of thing that listservs seem to do pretty well.
I just wish I could convince more of my users to use them. I have one winner who sends a list using 300+ CC's. The anti-spam system on the mail server slows that list to a crawl (deliberately). They wonder why it takes 3 hours to send, and I tell them to use the list server that we set up, but it's different and they don't want to be bothered. I think I'll make it take 6 hours next time.
That one tied up the network for some period of time.
Thats why I always use qmail for my Fuck You messages.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
I saw a weird variant on that back in university.
One of the engineering departments had a room full of (at the time) fairly high end sun workstations, and these were used both interactively and for people running longer compute jobs overnight.
To facilitate overnight jobs, the admins had set up a round robin dns alias that updated every couple of seconds to point to the machine reporting the lowest load average.
One of the students in my class had the bright idea of "If put 'ssh lowest' in my bashrc file, every time i open a terminal window it'll automatically pick the least loaded machine".
Fast forward a few minutes and we've got 80 sun workstations which have all systematically ssh'd to each other and none of which will accept any new connections...
"The term Deltic (meaning in the form of the Greek letter Delta) is used to refer to both the Deltic E.130 opposed-piston high-speed diesel engine designed and produced by D Napier & Son, and the locomotives produced by English Electric using these engines, including their demonstrator locomotive named DELTIC and the production version for British Railways, who designated these as (TOPS) Class 55."
For a train your English is quite good.
Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.
TFA mentioned the use of the recall feature that is only supported by Exchange servers and Outlook.
Of course not :
# cd /var/spool/mail
# rm *
see ? It's all been recalled !
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.