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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 to  bounced.  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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