Date:         Tue, 19 May 1998 09:47:53 EDT
From: Lost Marbles <mbarker@MIT.EDU>
Subject:      [WRITERS] FILLER: Slowdowns?

[what?  your posting got stuck in the email?  sure, and my reality
check bounced, right?]

I've heard that the list may have been slow in delivering mail
today--quite possible.  I'll try to look at headers a bit later today
and see if the delays are where I suspect they'll be.

For the technically interested--MIT has just been the target of two
days of repeated attacks on systems all over campus.  The particular
focus of the attack was linux systems (if you are running linux and
you have a mysterious "named" crash--it's one of the daemons--you are
probably under attack, and now have a problem, because things are NOT
what you think they are now).  Unfortunately, due to the method used,
they also brought down sun and sgi systems (our bread and butter
workstations).

Back to the generic level--lots of stuff at MIT has not been working
well for the last two days (Sunday and today) which may have slowed
down the mail service...

The good news--we have put out a fix so we shouldn't be vulnerable to
this problem in the future.

The bad news--I'm tired, and behind on my reading...I'll catch up
later this week, but...

[OWC: Obligatory Writing Content?  Well, suppose that even in postings
that are obviously off-topic, you add at least a little comment about
writing, perhaps an observation or hint of some kind, maybe just a
handy URL...that's an OWC!]

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