FYI sunhelp.org down

[Maciej W. Rozycki]

On Wed, 14 Oct 2020, Grant Taylor via cctalk wrote:

> > I suppose the list server relies on the same nameservers in a way that
> > prevents e-mail distribution from happening.
> 
> I don't think so.  At least I thought that the hot wiring that I did to my
> mail server only effected /sending/ of email.
> 
> The changes I made to the DNS server would have effected /receiving/ of email.
> 
> I have successfully sent a message to the geeks at sunhelp mailing list /and/
> received my copy of said message from said mailing list.
> 
> > I have since resubmitted the same message manually to sunhelp.org's SMTP
> > receiver (the original message is still in the outgoing mail queue:
> > 
> > smtp/sunhelp.org: B/W/23993316: (196 tries, expires in 2d17h) smtp; 466 (No
> > DNS response for host: sunhelp.org; h_errno=0)
> > 
> > ) to see what happens and got a DSN ack even, but the message did 
> > not get through.
> 
> Were you sending a message to geeks at sunhelp or a different address?

 It was to <rescue at sunhelp.org>.  The resubmitted message eventually made 
it through last Tue, Oct 20th, after a week of being held:

Received: from ohno.mrbill.net ([184.94.207.190]:57765 "EHLO ohno.mrbill.net"
        rhost-flags-OK-FAIL-OK-FAIL) by eddie.linux-mips.org with ESMTP
        id S23991030AbgJTMxVN8USJ (ORCPT <rfc822;macro at linux-mips.org>);
        Tue, 20 Oct 2020 14:53:21 +0200
Received: from ohno.mrbill.net (localhost [127.0.0.1])
        by ohno.mrbill.net (Postfix) with ESMTP id E173B1E0DF9;
        Tue, 13 Oct 2020 22:55:12 -0500 (CDT)
X-Original-To: rescue at sunhelp.org
Delivered-To: rescue at mrbill.net
Received: from cvs.linux-mips.org (eddie.linux-mips.org
        [148.251.95.138]) (using TLSv1 with cipher AES256-SHA (256/256 bits))
        (No client certificate requested) by ohno.mrbill.net (Postfix) with
        ESMTPS id 84C0D1E0915 for <rescue at sunhelp.org>; Tue, 13 Oct 2020
        22:55:10 -0500 (CDT)

which I think does coincide with the revival of mrbill.net services:

   Domain Name: MRBILL.NET
   Registry Domain ID: 1373333_DOMAIN_NET-VRSN
   Registrar WHOIS Server: whois.namecheap.com
   Registrar URL: http://www.namecheap.com
   Updated Date: 2020-10-19T15:39:08Z

and makes me conclude my suspicion was right.

> > So local hot wiring of name resolution (which I suppose could be as easy as
> > adding a /etc/hosts entry rather than going through the hoops of setting up
> > a manipulated name server) might be good enough to get at the web pages, but
> > not to get the list going.
> 
> Ya ... email tends to be more reliant on DNS.  At least unless you explicitly
> tell it to not use it for specific domains.  And that's exactly what I did.  I
> hard (hot) wired email routing so that email for sunhelp.org goes to
> ohno.mrbill.net, which is resolvable do to my DNS hot wiring (forwarders).

 I wish it was the case.  The admin of linux-mips.org, a friend of mine, 
has vanished since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in Europe last 
March -- I do hope nothing wrong has happened to him and he does surface 
sometime.

 Anyway, he's the only one who can remove a stale /etc/hosts entry here 
for vger.kernel.org, which prevents me from posting to any Linux kernel 
mailing lists hosted there unless I resort to some horrible hacks, which 
in turn tend to randomly break sending e-mail elsewhere.  Sigh...

  Maciej