The host 'hamradio.ucsd.edu', which is the current home of the '44net'
mailing list, is planned to be decommissioned in the next few months.
If everything goes right, on September 19th (Tuesday) morning (Pacific
time), I will move this mailing list from hamradio.ucsd.edu to its
new home on mailman.ampr.org, which is currently an alias for amprgw.
After the move, all future submissions should be sent to
44net(a)mailman.ampr.org, and the outgoing mail will be sent from that
host too.
Please be prepared to update your address books and spam filters.
All subscriptions will remain the same.
The archives will move there too.
I'll set up forwarding on 'hamradio' so that postings, replies, and
such sent to the old address will be forwarded to the new address for
some time, until 'hamradio' is decommissioned.
This is supposed to be simple. Wish me luck!
- Brian
Because of the high volume of traffic on the 44net list as of late,
Jann suggested creating an announce-only moderated list. That list is
now online at 44-announce(a)mailman.ampr.org. It's separate from this
list, so subscribers to 44-announce only won't see all the traffic on
the 44net list.
https://mailman.ampr.org/mailman/listinfo/44-announce
All postings to the 44-announce list will be held for review and
approval by the list moderators, so there will be some delay in message
distribution. I anticipate very low volume on that list.
I've set 44-announce to be a public list. The list will show up in
the general mailing list index on the mailman.ampr.org machine, and
the archives of the list will be available publicly so it's likely that
various search engines will index them. I've had significant problems
resulting from this policy in the past, but those were non-moderated lists
so maybe this will work better. The list of subscribers is not public.
Note that whether a list is public or private, fake names can subscribe
and harvest poster's addresses from postings and use them for spam.
Not much I can do about that if we're to still have the option of replying
to the individual poster.
It's a new list, so please be patient while I tune the parameters.
- Brian
I like the MIME version of the digest, but I am seeking advice on how to
add an option that I need.
On the "digest" version, when I turn on "Display Attachments Inline",
the emails appear looking like this:
... but in order to reply to an individual message, I have to find the
same email among the .eml files in the "Attachments" menu, and use that
to preserve the threading. I'd like to have a button I could click to
reply to an individual message from the screen shown above. I hope
someone else on the list has cured this in the past few days.
Bill, W4EWH
I like the MIME version of the digest, but I am seeking advice on how to
add an option that I need.
On the "digest" version, when I turn on "Display Attachments Inline",
the emails appear looking like this:
... but the .eml files which _are_ the individual emails do not appear
in the "attachments" bar unless I turn the option to display them in
line off, and there doesn't seem to be any way to reply to the
individual messages displayed as part of the digest, since when I click
the "reply" or "Reply to List" choices, I get a draft email which is a
copy of the digest, not the individual email I want to reply to.
The question is, then, how I can add (or turn on) an option to give me a
clickable link to reply to an individual post without having to turn off
the "display attachments inline" option.
Sorry to clutter the list: I hope someone else has come across this in
the past few days.
73,
Bill, W4EWH
Bill, W4EWH
> It's a single mbox format file that is broken up into individual messages
> which are stored in directories by date. A script to feed them into an
> NNTP posting program. There are currently over 10,000 such messages.
Well OK, it is not the kind of data volume that you could not afford to store in two different native formats.
(given today's size of disk drives etc)
> There are difficulties.
> The Mailman authentication data is stored as a Python 'pickle' (compressed
> dictionary file). There is a program to export a list of users, but
> it does not permit querying a single specific user, nor does it export
> passwords.
> NNTP has a Perl hook for authentication. Someone would have to write a
> Python program that could extract the necessary per-user data from the
> Python dictionary, and be called from the Perl NNTP authenticator.
Again a case where it would be so convenient to have a central store of authentication info that
could be queries by many different services...
E.g. when one of the APIs would be LDAP (as someone already suggested), it would be really
simple to write a Perl hook that does an LDAP query.
> Across the Atlantic. The NNTP server is in England, the Mailman mailing
> list is in San Diego.
My suggestion was to run INN on the gw server that now runs mailman, and keep it local.
You could run a couple of servers around the world, but of course each of them would
be facing the authentication issue. There should not be yet another "register here
for access" thing.
Rob
> >/A good project on AMPRNet would be to setup a user authentication /> >/system that can be /> >/used for our services without running the risk that some (ab)used /> >/party suddenly /> >/draws back the support, or delays validation of new applicants (if /> >/only due to lack /> >/of volunteers to do the validation). /> Now, this is a great idea. Could also be used for IPv6 netblock
> validation.
Yes, although a more dynamic method like BGP appears to be more suitable for that.
Such an authentication system should offer a method to authenticate users that want
to log on to some service and it should have some attributes for each user that
can be used in queries for authentication.
Things that come to mind:
- does the user have a (verified) amateur radio license
- category of the license (preferably with allowed band ranges)
- client certificate(s)
- password(s)
Probably more can be added.
The problem of course is the manual work required for license validation.
We could devise some method to use earlier validations by Echolink and LOTW,
but when we want to do our own validation we require the volunteers that look
at scanned license documents and accept/reject them.
An issue is the storage of so much personal information in a database, which
requires compliance to rules for personal data protection that are (or are
becoming) quite strict in many countries.
When we would have such a system on AMPRNet (preferably also usable from internet)
it could be used for many purposes where we are now limited in practice.
E.g. to set up a next-generation Echolink-like system that is open/free.
Rob
Maybe after the dust has settled it would be worth investigating to install a local NNTP server (INN)
and the mailman-to-usenet gateway? Or some way to give an NNTP server access to the mailman archive?
(I don't know how the archive is stored in mailman... is it just a collection of mail files, 1 message per file?)
Of course it would require some study and maybe some hacks, it would e.g. be nice when the NNTP
server authenticates the users using the mailman accounts (until we have that general authentication
service, at least...)
Rob
