This one comes up ever 3-4 years or so in sysadmin communities, and I read it every single time. because it's worth it.<p>It's one of those things that I highly doubt would have occurred to me to have even checked, or given even a moments thought to, under normal circumstances.
Another email incident at Microsoft worth reading [1].<p>[1] <a href="http://blogs.technet.com/b/exchange/archive/2004/04/08/109626.aspx" rel="nofollow">http://blogs.technet.com/b/exchange/archive/2004/04/08/10962...</a>
If only every bug report that I received had been processed by a geostatistician... Usually I get a "hey, I can't get X to work". One of three responses from me usually fixes it: "Is your computer on?", "are you online?", and "try hitting refresh".<p>I am actually surprised the sysadmin in this scenario thought it was a bad thing that the statistics department did their research and presented a well documented error.
Shouldn't this account for a round trip, and the speed through copper (~ 2/3rd of the speed of light)? That would lower the radius to much more than 500 miles.
Another of the 10,000 here - this is such a delightful story.<p>Also just discovered the "units" conversion program and disappointed that the default Mac library has only 586 units. And shockingly there don't seem to be compatible libraries out there.
Better link that contains more headers (showing the email's date, and linking to a FAQ):<p><a href="http://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html</a>
This always reminds me of the email around the world: <a href="http://phrack.org/issues/41/4.html" rel="nofollow">http://phrack.org/issues/41/4.html</a>
Since I've seen a few comments about units not having lightseconds so here are a few ways to add the missing unit if you don't have it.<p>1) Add this line under the lightyear definition in /usr/share/misc/units.lib (or wherever `man units` says the standard units library is under the FILES section)<p><pre><code> lightsecond lightyear / 365.25 / 24 / 60 / 60
</code></pre>
2) If you're on a mac and use homebrew just `brew install gnu-units` and then run `gunits`
Absolytely a good reading. Sometimes this kind of readings can help in a complete different problem. Sometime happens you are dealing with another problem, then you remember this story, and you figure out what's wrong because there're some similarities. I remember to have fixed a problem with Postgresql remembering a story about Unicode and Postfix, different domain, but similar problem.
That was great out-of-the-box thinking, and I wonder if that could be used as one of these job interview questions:<p>Q: "Your email server for some reason is only working for addresses within 500 miles of the server. What may go wrong?"<p>And let the candidate think logically and reach some sane answer, even if not 100% accurate (i.e. check routers first, connectivity, DNS, timeouts...)
If you're a sysadmin and someone brings in a consultant who gets root access and upgrades the whole OS to a new operating system which then almost takes out email.. wouldn't that be a problem?<p>If I were the sysadmin and that happened, I would need to have a meeting with some people. What's the point of being a sysadmin if he operating system is randomly going to be completely changed without someone telling you?<p>I have a fair amount of built up rage. This seems like one of those situations where it is actually your responsibility to rip people a new one.
Every time I read this I am reminded of units(1) util, which is super useful and I always forget about and revert to Google. But yeah, that connect timeout to 500 mi correlation is fun too.
> <i>And also being a good system administrator, I had written a sendmail.cf [...]</i><p>Say what? Nobody writes a sendmail.cf from scratch, unless they are crazy.<p>> <i>... that used the nice long self-documenting option and variable names available in Sendmail 8 rather than the cryptic punctuation-mark codes that had been used in Sendmail 5</i><p>Good system administrators stick to conservative, portable subsets of configuration and scripting languages, rather than bleeding edge stuff.<p>When they deviate, they have a clear plan. They document their choice to use something new and shiny, and they keep it separated from the default system configuration.<p>Since SunOS came with Sendmail 5, the upgraded Sendmail 8 should have been installed in some custom location with its own path so that it coexists with the stock Sendmail, and is not perturbed if the OS happens to upgrade that.<p>A good syadmin would stick that in some /usr/local/bin type local directory, and not overwrite /usr/bin/sendmail.<p>The consultant was not wrong to update the OS. People have reasons to do that. The consultant should have consulted with the sysadmin, of course. But even in that event, it might not have immediately occurred to the sysadmin what the implication would be to the sendmail setup.