Reader Comments on Aardvark Daily 26 March 2002
Note: the comments below are the unabridged
submissions of readers and do
not necessarily reflect the opinions of the publisher.
From: NonGuru For : The Editor (for publication) Subj: Recipient unknown According to your column, mail sent toHit Reload For Latest Commentsbounced. As well it should -- govt.nz is a second-level domain, analogous to co.nz. Presumably the mail should have been sent to <postmaster@dsw.govt.nz>, indicating a specific destination domain Aardvark responds This is a tricky one. Note that the first returned email made reference to the address "postmaster@govt.nz" and also note that the government's main website is at www.govt.nz which (perhaps eroneously) suggests that govt.nz is being used as a valid domain. From: Stuart For : The Editor (for publication) Subj: DSL pricing Now, according to computerworld, Telecom is introducing new, fast dsl which suits businesses; adsl is apparently "more suited for residential access". So, does this mean we can expect price drops or quota increases in jetstream? Or is that too much to hope for? From: anonymous For : Anonymous Tipoffs Subj: (none) As a current XTRA employee I can say that the post made by that person to Slashdot is based partly in fact, partly in misinformation. Fact: XTRA allocates a smaller pool of bandwidth (separate from it's main pool) for ports commonly used by P2P applications. Fiction: Running out of IP addresses. Absolutely not true. There are issues with Microsoft Operating systems not understanding .0 or .255 address's when these have been allocated, we are correcting these issues. DSL Network Outages: The Xtra ADSL (or Velocity) network is tightly integrated into our core. Thus any ADSL specific outages will almost certainly occur at Telecom's end. If an outage affected XTRA ADSL customers for example, it would almost certain impact all customers connecting to our network. I work closely with the helpdesk, and they have never, ever been told or asked to lie about these issues. The reason the P2P sharing issue was confused, was due to a breakdown in communications between management and technical. Bad yes, big conspiracy no. From: abu For : The Editor (for publication) Subj: Recipient unknown maybe the government has registered a domain name www.govt.nz? like www.co.nz is also a valid url. also, from most emails that i have received, the format looks like: Name <name@email.address>, so Postmaster@govt.nz (postmaster@dsw.govt.nz) would indicate the person is Postmaster at govt.nz, and the email address is postmaster@dsw.govt.nz. From: Richard For : The Editor (for publication) Subj: Recipient unknown... abu said: ----- Postmaster@govt.nz (postmaster@dsw.govt.nz) would indicate the person is Postmaster at govt.nz, and the email address is postmaster@dsw.govt.nz. ----- Not quite true - Anything in parentheses (the curved brackets) is defined in the RFC as a comment. This is an older address form (now deprecated - RFC 2822, section 3.4), equivalent to postmaster@dsw.govt.nz <Postmaster@govt.nz> This indicates that the address is, in fact, Postmaster@govt.nz. In short, DSW has a rather badly configured mail server. From: Ian For : The Editor (for publication) Subj: Government postmasters In answer to the questions posed yesterday by nonguru and abu, I replied to the attachment denial message I received by clicking the reply button, and the message was "sent" to postmaster@govt.nz because that was Netscape Communicator determined was the address to which replies should be sent. I cannot be answerable for how the Government sets up its autoresponders, or indeed for their spelling of attachment ("attachement") in a part of the message Bruce omitted. From: Matthew Poole For : The Editor (for publication) Subj: umm, who's confused here? Your anonymous informat says: "Fiction: Running out of IP addresses. Absolutely not true. There are issues with Microsoft Operating systems not understanding .0 or .255 address's when these have been allocated, we are correcting these issues." It may well be RFC permissible to assign addresses where the last octet is all 1s or all 0s, but many routers will drop packets to those addresses as they believe them to be broadcast or network (respectively) addresses. One also wonders why Xtra would be using supernets on assigned IP addresses, the only scenario in which .0 and .255 addresses could possibly be assignable.
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