Bruce Toback [among others] wrote:

> I haven't received anything from the HP3000-L list for the last 36
> hours.  Is the list active, and I've simply dropped off? If so, is
> there any way of recovering the posts for that time?

On Wednesday, 14 Jan 1998, an underground power distribution unit
adjacent to the campus "exploded", launching a few manhole covers
several feet in the air.  Several buildings on the north end of campus
were without power until late afternoon, and a block of student housing
was out until the following day.  Raven resides in one of the buildings
that lost power, and the UPS drained (no generator, just battery).

This caused a recurrance of the #^$%!@ CMOS problem that has caused
problems on Raven 2-3 times previously, notably it booted up with the
correct time, month, and day, but in the year 2010 (it was 2014 last
time, at least it's getting closer :-) ).

Several postings went through with the 2010 date before we noticed and
corrected the problem (we thought), but some files were left in the mail
queue.  If you look at the hp3000-l archives, at the bottom you will
find the non-Y2K-compliant "January 1910" archives, along with the
previous occurrance of this problem "April 1914" :-)

To make a long story short, if your host.domain had mail in the queue
when we made the correction, your mail became "clogged" since the mail
creation date was January 2010.  Queued mail is rechecked every "n"
minutes to try delivery by something resembling:

   if current_time - mail_queued_time > 5_minutes then retry;

Well, 1998 - 2010 is a far cry from being > 5_minutes, so you're hung.

I removed the erroneous entries from the mail spool and restarted SMTP
around 11:30 AM EST today (16 Jan 1998).  Bruce, your mail was speeding
on it's way shortly thereafter, along with ~4500 other items in the
queue.  Sorry for the delay and any inconvenience to anyone affected.

Now back to more work-related issues...

> # store /;*tape
> /sbin/sh: store:  not found.
> /sbin/sh: *tape:  not found.
> #

Sheesh... $%#^@%* HPUX...

Jeff Kell <[log in to unmask]>