[cobalt-users] Status of cobalt-users

[Craig Bernstein <cobalt-users-admin@xxxxxxxxxx>]

I want to take an opportunity to try to put an end to some rumors of 
mysterious origin that keep coming back to me via the list members.

There are no plans to shut down the cobalt-users list.  There is no need 
to send me email every time the list goes down for a few hours asking me 
if it is gone forever.  I promise that if that was going to happen I 
would let you know as far in advance as possible.

As most of you know, the cobalt-users list goes back in history almost 
as far as Cobalt itself.  In late 2000, Sun acquired Cobalt and there 
have been a lot of changes over the last couple of years.  There is no 
such organization as "Cobalt" at Sun anymore.  The engineers that 
designed the hardware are mostly in the Volume Systems Products group, 
and the people who provide technical support are in Enterprise Services. 
 The resources ES provides are listed at:

https://osc-amer.sun.com/OSCSW/svcportal?pageName=CobaltHomePage

These resources include web forums that are monitored by ES personnel as 
well as the knowledge base, documentation, software downloads, and the 
option to submit service requests on a pay per incident basis.

I work with most of the Cobalt sofware people in the group now known as 
Linux Software Engineering.  Most of the Cobalt lab and Internet stuff 
including the mailing lists have wound up in my lap.  Despite the snide 
comments to the contrary, my group does care about the Cobalt user 
community.  I will continue to support the list on a best effort basis, 
but it will always take second place to my job supporting the engineers 
who are working on future Linux products from Sun.

The reason the lists were down this weekend is that the power to our 
labs was shut down for an extended period due to the construction of a 
large data center in this building.  The outage far exceeded our UPS 
capacity (remember the list server is now hosted in a "lab," not a 24x7 
data center like the Sun Cobalt Discussion forums) so systems needed to 
be shut down.  In addition, the sendmail daemon on the list server has 
taken to randomly dying off lately, causing mail delivery to be delayed 
a few times over the last few months.  I will continue to try and chase 
down that problem and would ultimately like to move the whole list to 
another box, but see my above comments about engineering priorities...

This list has always been a user community based resource.  If an 
individual or a group within that community is willing to provide a list 
elsewhere that the group agrees is more reliable or useful or whatever, 
I certainly won't be offended.  That is something you need to decide 
amongst yourselves.  Otherwise, please feel free to let me know if you 
have any problems with the list and I will do my best in the time that I 
have available to keep things running smoothly.

In exchange, I ask only for your patience.  Oh, and I guess, while I'm 
on the subject, I ask that you try to demand some sanity from your mail 
administrators.  I'm increasingly getting useless bounce messages from 
list members' servers about "Dirty Words" and nonexistent "viruses" and 
"unauthorized" attachments.  Most of the time they don't state what the 
'dirty' word is, or where the suspected virus was found.  That makes 
them nothing but a waste of my time and bandwidth.

My current favorite is the one I get regularly from "Autoresponder 
<mailer-daemon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>" that tells me "Please note, this email 
address will no longer be operational after January 31st, 2003".  There 
is no one from "rmci.net" on the list and <postmaster@xxxxxxxx> does not 
respond to my inquiries for more information about what/who the heck 
they are talking about.  Grrr... if I get adequate information in these 
messages I will try and work with you.   Messages like these repeated 
"Dirty Words" notifications with no futher explanation will just result 
in your subscription being removed.

Thank you for your continued support of Cobalt and Linux at Sun.  Please 
let me know if you have any questions or concerns...

--
...Craig Bernstein