Jan-Piet Mens

And now for the more information:

Aah. I see.

A woman was in town on a shopping trip. She began her day finding the most perfect shoes in the first shop and a beautiful dress on sale in the second. In the third, everything had just been reduced by 50 percent when her mobile phone rang.

It was a female doctor notifying her that her husband had just been in a terrible car accident and was in critical condition and in the ICU. The woman told the doctor to inform her husband where she was and that she'd be there as soon as possible.

As she hung up she realized she was leaving what was shaping up to be her best day ever in the boutiques. She decided to get in a couple of more shops before heading to the hospital. She ended up shopping the rest of the morning, finishing her trip with a cup of coffee and a beautiful chocolate cake slice, compliments of the last shop. She was jubilant…

Then she remembered her husband. Feeling guilty, she dashed to the hospital.

She saw the doctor in the corridor and asked about her husband's condition. The lady doctor glared at her and shouted, 'You went ahead and finished your shopping trip didn't you! I hope you're proud of yourself! While you were out for the past four hours enjoying yourself in town, your husband has been languishing in the Intensive Care Unit! It's just as well you went ahead and finished, because it will more than likely be the last shopping trip you ever take! For the rest of his life he will require round-the-clock care. And he will now be your career!'

The woman was feeling so guilty she broke down and sobbed..

The lady doctor then chuckled and said, 'I'm just pulling your leg. He's dead.. Show me what you bought.'

"An employer is told not to post advert for 'reliable' workers because it discriminates against 'unreliable' applicants". That just about makes me speechless.

"Try uttering a curse word into the Nexus One, and the well-mannered device will automatically replace the offensive expression with a string of # symbols". Americans are so ########## prude sometimes.

Get a fucking grip: "TV character Peppa Pig will be seen wearing a seatbelt in future episodes, after parents raised concerns over children following her example.

"Menifee school district in Riverside County has removed the 10th edition of the Merriam-Webster Dictionary from all school shelves after a parent complained about a student running across "oral sex" in its pages. Peter Scheer, executive director of the California First Amendment Coalition, told the Associated Press, "common sense seems to be lacking in this school". Mr. Scheer is putting it very mildly! I understand the dictionaries are back, but just the thought of this happening is very, very frightening.

So, the OZs want big to see bigger tits? "Australian censor board demands large-breasted porn-stars".

The end of the end of freedom: The German government is about to spend $ 3.5 million to buy a CD containing stolen information on German tax evaders.

Photo: Adam Jean-Jacques.

A group of 40-year-old buddies discuss and discuss where they should meet for dinner. Finally it is agreed upon that they should meet at Gasthaus Gutenberger restaurant because the waitress's there have low cut blouses and nice breasts.

10 years later, at 50 years of age, the group meets again and once again they discuss and discuss where they should meet. Finally it is agreed upon that they should meet at the Gasthaus Gutenberger because the food there is very good and the wine selection is good also.

10 years later at 60 years of age, the group meets again and once again they discuss and discuss where they should meet. Finally it is agreed upon that they should meet at the Gasthaus Gutenberger because they can eat there in peace and quiet and the restaurant is smoke free.

10 years later, at 70 years of age, the group meets again and once again they discuss and discuss where they should meet. Finally it is agreed upon that they should meet at the Gasthaus Gutenberger because the restaurant is wheel chair accessible and they even have an elevator.

10 years later, at 80 years of age, the group meets again and once again they discuss and discuss where they should meet. Finally it is agreed upon that they should meet at the Gasthaus Gutenberger because that would be a great idea because they have never been there before.

(Thanks, Matthias!)

A few days ago I noticed a large number of message delivery failures to a Domino server. They were all similar:

A message that you sent could not be delivered to one or more of its
recipients. This is a permanent error. The following address(es) failed:

  j.jolie@domino.example.com
    SMTP error from remote mail server after end of data:
    host domino.internal.example.com [10.8.4.3]:
    554 Error writing message to safe storage; message could not be stored to disk

The fact that the error indicates a problem in writing message to safe storage can really only be disk related (out of space, damaged mail.box, or perhaps full transaction logs), but why did this machine return a permanent 5xx code? There is no way for the sending MTA to react to that — it will bounce the message as undeliverable.

I don't administer these Domino servers, so I asked the administrators what had happened. It turns out one of the disks on this particular server had filled up. (Monitoring, anybody?)

I maintain that a 5xx code is wrong here; it should be a softer 4xx.

Just to be sure, I thought I'd test that on two different MTA. I chose to take a copy of the venerable sendmail running on FreeBSD.

When sendmail detects that disk space is running low (confMIN_FREE_BLOCKS), it starts rejecting messages. The log shows

rejecting new messages: min free: nnn

Let me now have a look at an SMTP transaction to that server:

<-  220 nanob1.mens.de ESMTP Sendmail 8.14.3/8.14.3
 -> EHLO home.mens.de
<-  250-nanob1.mens.de Hello home.mens.de [192.168.1.20], pleased to meet you
<-  250-ENHANCEDSTATUSCODES
<-  250-PIPELINING
<-  250-8BITMIME
<-  250-SIZE
<-  250-DSN
<-  250-ETRN
<-  250-DELIVERBY
<-  250 HELP
 -> MAIL FROM:<jpm@home.mens.de>
<** 452 4.4.5 Insufficient disk space; try again later
 -> QUIT
<-  221 2.0.0 nanob1.mens.de closing connection

The sender, correctly, gets a non-permanent 4xx code, so it has a chance to retry later. As soon as disk space becomes available, sendmail indicates

accepting new messages (again)

in the log, and it is then readily available to accept new messages.

I then took a system running Exim. After getting the disks filled up with a some incantation of dd, I let off a few mails directed to that Exim box. Here again, this server correctly refuses to accept a message if its configured limits of free space (check_spool_space) don't provide enough free space (and/or free inodes).

spool directory space check failed: space=nnnn inodes=mmmm

The sending MTA sees:

<-  220 home.mens.de ESMTP Exim 4.43 Thu, 04 Feb 2010 11:18:18 +0100
 -> EHLO jmbp.local
<-  250-home.mens.de Hello jmbp.local [192.168.1.154]
<-  250-SIZE 20971520
<-  250-PIPELINING
<-  250 HELP
 -> MAIL FROM:<jpm@jmbp.local>
<** 452 Space shortage, please try later
 -> QUIT
<-  221 home.mens.de closing connection

Here again, the target Exim server behaves correctly: the sending MTA gets a 4xx code and can attempt to transfer the message at a later point.

RFC 2821 even provides for this particular code:

452 Requested action not taken: insufficient system storage

Why does Domino return a permanent 5xx code? Richard agrees it shouldn't because the reason isn't message-specific. Are these servers simply incorrectly configured?

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