Someone at work has a misconfigured mail server on their Linux desktop machine. They are running a cron job that spews out mail messages (errors from a wonky find command to prune email messages it seems). These messages find their way to the university's mail server, and slows it down. It happened a month ago or so too, and then there was about 10-50 messages or more each second.

@Kusalananda The standard mail protocol doesn't seem to have effective protections against this sort of thing.

Actually, dealing with this sort of thing is the job of the local IT team/group. What are they doing?

@FaheemMitha They are trying to track down who's sending the emails ;-)

@Kusalananda Oh, they don't know who is sending it? Of course - silly me.

The headers should in theory have the origination IP address, but there are certainly scenarios where that could be obscured.

@FaheemMitha The admins of the main mailserver are very different from the admins of the domain sending the mails. The university is a large organisation, and I doubt these people ever meet. The local admins should know whose machine it is sending the mail based on its IP, but there seems to be some difficulty tracking people down over the summer.

In any case, the user was eventually found, and claims he has "fixed it". It's unclear whether this means he's fixed the faulty command or corrected his machine's mail server config.

@Kusalananda I thought you said they were trying to track down the person.

Sounds like he shouldn't have root on his machine, in any case. I wonder if he is faculty.

@FaheemMitha And then he was found. Or rather, he made himself known.

@FaheemMitha We have the option to administer our own machines.

@Kusalananda Oh, since you posted that comment? That was fast.

@Kusalananda I'm in favor of that in principle. But people need to have a basic idea what they are doing.

@FaheemMitha The basic idea that most have is "Cool! I get to run my own favourite Linux at work!".

@Kusalananda Choice is a good thing, certainly. But so is not causing problems for other people. For example, having ones computer infected and made part of a botnet probably won't make the world a better place.

I used to run some Debian machines ion the UNC and Duke networks once upon a time. I appreciated being able to do that.

Sadly, Duke isn't interested in Debian. Historically the Triangle Universities have run Red Hat and their derivatives.

@FaheemMitha We do have rules. Unfortunately, these are often not read until they have been broken.

And also, none of the self-adiminstrated systems are reachable from outside.

@Kusalananda So you have a firewall?

Is this a university or a research institute?

Hello Everyone!

Hello alone :-)

Bonjour and congratulations for World Cup.

@PrabhjotSingh I'm happy about it but I really have done nothing more than drinking beer in front of TV :D

Thanks though

@Kiwy Well done on that though!

@Kusalananda Yeah I'm pretty good at drinking beers from all over the world my prefered being the german's and belgium's beers (it depends of the circumstance)

@PrabhjotSingh What I meant is simply that I'm very happy about the World Cup I remember the one 20 years ago I was 9 there's a lot of emotion in this victory, but I take no proud of it. I didn't win, a great team of French guys did

@Kiwy Yes I remember then Fabian, Zidane and Ronaldo were stars. I was Brazil fan at that time.

I have no privileges in front of TV.

@PrabhjotSingh what do you mean by privilege ?

@Kiwy Drinking in front of TV.

Now I am very jealous of you.

@PrabhjotSingh why's that ? are you young ? or is it just a cultural behaviour ?

I am just kidding.

@Kiwy India is a free country.

@PrabhjotSingh I know but for any reason it could be that your parents if you leave at there place don't want it or whatever reasons, there's so many culture you can never know all the custom of a country. I find myself learning some of them in French family that I never heard before everyday.

@Kiwy yes my parents are conservatives but at 32 you could become a rebel without a cause.

Yes I agree we live in modern tribes(when we call it customs).

@Kiwy In tribes every second thing is a taboo. I could be wrong.

Hey guys.

@FaheemMitha Hi! I just took a nap.

Hola Senor

Hi @Kusalananda. I hope it was refreshing.

@FaheemMitha Not really. Woke up sweaty (because it's +32 degrees and somehow I had managed to get the duvet on top of me) and dazed. Coffee has sorted me out to some degree though, and water.

@Kusalananda 32 is definitely on the warm side.

I had a quick look for A/C units, but they're all sold out everywhere :-/

About 70 serious forest fires across the country at the moment, and more than +5 degrees above normal July temperatures.

@Kusalananda Sold out everywhere? That's surprising.

I'm going to build some cities in "Cities: Skyline" for a few hours until the temperature drops below +30 and my head starts working again.

I'm mildly envious - interpersonal.stackexchange.com/q/16615/5639

All the bread we get here is really quite awful. Edible, yes.

@Kusalananda Is that some kind of code?

@FaheemMitha It's a game.

And suppose it doesn't drop below +30?

@Kusalananda I figured.

@FaheemMitha We do have "tropical nights" at the moment, meaning the night temperature does not drop below +20, but it certainly drops below +30. Indoors is a different matter, but I think it'll drop here too, eventually.

@Kusalananda 30 isn't really tropical.

It is if you're Swedish.

Humans often have quite different internal thermostats.

Personally I prefer it on the cooler side.

Somewhere in the 60s F is good outdoor weather.

@FaheemMitha That's about +15 C and sounds perfectly reasonable to me too.

But other people feel differently. Women seem to like it warmer on average.

@terdon if you're around, would you mind dropping a comment on a deleted question? unix.stackexchange.com/questions/456831/… The asker deleted after I pointed out some background material to show that their question wasn't precise enough, then they deleted because they thought that other question is a duplicate, but now that they've clarified their question (in the comments at least), it is not a duplicate

So I'd like to recommend that they undelete, but since they've deleted, I can't reply

@Gilles I’ve voted to undelete, on the off-chance enough other users pitch in...

@StephenKitt oh duh, I can do that, thanks. Just needs one more 10k user now.

@Gilles ;-)

It’s an interesting question, and the lscpu approach is probably going to end up being somewhat disappointing to the OP...

yes, I'm not sure which part of my answer they thought would apply, but none of them would work directly

It hard-codes 32-bit support on a bunch of architectures, and also equates lm with 32- and 64-bit support (along with zarch and sun4[uv]).

I don't even know whether there's a cross-platform answer for that, and whether the answer would be the same for all syscalls

it depends on the history of syscalls on each particular architecture

@Gilles yes, it does indeed

@Gilles @StephenKitt I undeleted it. Go for it.

@terdon thanks

@StephenKitt Go ahead if you know the answer. I don't and I'm getting too tired to research it tonight.

I'm going to edit the question based on the comments

one more deleted vote needed on AU

not anymore

Merci beaucoup!

I forgot you're superman on all sites!!!