Wednesday, 29 August, 2007, 21:43 PST

Awhile back, Walla Walla College announced that they will be changing their official name to Walla Walla University.  This change will be taking effect on 01 September, 2007, which is just a few days from when I write this.

A side effect of this is the changing of domain names, from wwc.edu to wallawalla.edu.   It is my understanding that support of the wwc.edu domain will be going away.  If you are accustomed to accessing services here based on one of ALW's wwc.edu hostnames, you should be prepared for that access to stop working at some date in the future unless you make the change to wallawalla.edu.  Of course you may also use services based on the wa7v.com domain (e.g. gw.wa7v.com for ALWGW).

73 de WA7V

Friday, 06 April, 2007, 17:32 PST

Once again, WA7V-10 was conspicuously absent from the list of Telpac gateways, even though it was functioning fine and regularly communicating with its primary PMBO.  I thought perhaps the registration had mysteriously disappeared, like it did last time, but such was not the case.  Then I noticed that WA7V-10's primary PMBO, KB6YNO, was listed as offline on the PMBO status page.

Since WA7V-10 was not having any difficulty in establishing a network connection with KB6YNO, it was not falling back on any of its other backup PMBOs in its configuration file.  It would be interesting to know how this would affect the delivery of mail.  I might have to try it to see.

WA7V-10 is now back in the Telpac gateways list, as it is using an alternate PMBO as its primary.

Tuesday, 06 March, 2007, 18:37 PST
I was alerted by N7ZHG that WA7V-10 was not showing up on the Telpac gateway real-time status list and map pages.  It turned out that WA7V-10 wasn't even showing up on the registration page, so I had to re-register.  Once that was done, everything "automagically" appeared.  Hmm!

Saturday, 24 February, 2007, 20:07 PST

A number of governments around the world will be changing the beginning and ending dates for the timezone shift known as daylight savings time.  In the United States, DST will begin on the second Sunday in March at 0200, and end on the first Sunday in November at 0200.  If you reside in an affected country and timekeeping is important on your computer equipment, then you may need to manually intervene, depending upon your system.  Amateur radio operators in particular (who are frequently known for their thriftiness and resourcefulness) may be affected by this more than the general population of computer users, as hams are more likely to have some very old hardware and software still in operation.

Below are a few resources that might interest you if you are running Linux, Solaris, or an older version of Windows.

Read full article: 'Daylight Savings Time Resources'

Saturday, 10 February, 2007, 21:02 PST

Last night, an ALWGW user had another Internet SMTP message arrive that caused a TNOS 2.40 SIGSEGV crash.  The symptoms were the same as those encountered previously (I would recommend reading the background in "Long-term mystery SOLVED," if you haven't already), except that this time there was no X-Face: line present in the header.  The crash did occur in reject.c, but this time it was the To: field causing the problem.  Again, examining the message, no unusual characters were present, although the line was a bit long.

I reviewed and compared the earlier problem messages with the new one, and finally determined what I believe is the key to this issue.  It is not so much the actual content or type of characters that are present in the header lines causing the crashes, but rather the number of characters in any given header line.  It appears to cause a problem when any one line in the headers has more than 256 characters.  When viewed from a 2007 frame of reference, this is a significant weakness!  I will go back and examine the code as I have time, and see if I can come up with a fix.

For now, I have added a line to my Postfix header checks that silently drops any header line exceeding 255 characters:

/^.{256,}/   IGNORE

Many mailers wrap long header lines anyway.  RFC-822 certainly provides for that option.

Note: Interestingly, every time this problem has cropped up on my system, the troublesome message has come through a Yahoo group!

Wednesday, 07 February, 2007, 23:04 PST

A month or so ago, members of the Pendleton (Oregon) Amateur Radio Club were exploring the possibility of registering their own Internet domain, and moving their web hosting to another location.  A quick whois of the desired domain name (based on their US FCC-registered amateur radio callsign) revealed that their name was available in pretty much all TLDs.  On the day prior to the club officers' regularly scheduled meeting, in which they were to publicly consider the merits of this proposal, the .COM form of their domain was suddenly registered to a company in Nassau, Bahamas!  This seemed so incredibly unlikely, and yet, there it was.  The officers were advised of this, and encouraged to use the .ORG form, since they are a not-for-profit organization anyway.  The officers approved of the proposal, and determined that they would need to go before the general membership to get the final approval they needed to proceed.

A few days later, I noticed that the [Nassau company's] .COM registration was no longer showing up in whois queries!  I was completely baffled by this, as the expiration date had been one full year out.  But, there it was and I couldn't explain it.  I shrugged my shoulders and awaited the general membership meeting results to see what we were going to do.  Fast-forward to 06 February, and read on for what was to be a truly educational experience for me.

Note: Sure enough, as of February 10, 2007, whois queries indicate that the .ORG version of their domain is once again available.

Read full article: 'Domain Tasting?'

Tuesday, 06 February, 2007, 01:23 PST

For a few years, I have been having an intermittent problem with certain, infrequent Internet SMTP messages inducing TNOS crashes on ALWGW.  The occurrences have caused more than one headache, but I am glad to say that I now have a solution for it!

Note: The information in this article is still relevant, but the solution is superceded by More TNOS SMTP crashes and a workaround.

Read full article: 'Long-term mystery SOLVED!'

Friday, 02 February, 2007, 22:45 PST

Here is my current version of the shell script to process the gateways (encap.txt) file for updating an iproute2-based Linux AMPRNet gateway.  I call it "iproute2_ampr_munge."  This is a spin-off of the "tunnel-munge" script by N8FOW and updated by VE3TIX.

Read full article: 'Current iproute2 based gateways "munge" script'

Sunday, 28 January, 2007, 23:53 PST

I'm having an odd quirk with one of my forwarding partners, between his JNOS BBS and my FBB BBS. In sessions where my FBB has initiated a connection to his system, my board is not accepting bulletins from his system.

Read full article: 'FBB BBS Quirk'

Saturday, 27 January, 2007, 05:54 PST

I added a Telpac node to the system here, after having numerous conversations and a couple of demonstrations of the Winlink 2000 system by N7ZHG.  Compiling and installing DL5DI's telpac-node program was quick and easy.  Interfacing it with my existing AX.25 nodes and BBSs could not have been simpler.  If you are a Winlink 2000 user, WA7V-10 is now one of your options available for a Telpac gateway.

Read full article: 'Telpac (Winlink 2000) Gateway Node Added'