IMPORTANT! Old-Ways List Info

[lslater@gpu.srv.ualberta.ca (Linda Slater)]

IF YOU ARE A CURRENT OR RECENT SUBSCRIBER TO "THE OLD 
WAYS", THE LOREENA MCKENNITT MAILING LIST, PLEASE READ ON.


----

Short Explanation:  If you want to be on The Old Ways and did not
receive some e-mail from me explaining my hard drive problems, 
please
resubscribe.  (old-ways-request@tomservo.b23b.ingr.com)

----

Long Explanation:

Some days, it's just not worth being in a technological society.

A lot of you have probably noticed that there has been nothing from
The Old Ways for a few days.  Simple reason:  my hard drive crashed
over the long Labor Day weekend last weekend, and just got repaired
yesterday.

Shouldn't have been a problem, because these systems here are 
backed
up nightly.  Once the new drive comes in, simply restore from the
latest backup, and everything's fine.  On paper, anyway.

In practice -- at least, in this case -- my lists of bounce mail
subscribers and digest subscribers didn't get restored (along with
some other stuff which is going to be a hassle to replace, too) for
two reasons:

1)  a minor flaw on a backup tape
2)  the practice of reusing backup tapes

I lucked out in that my current work-related stuff survived, and my
old work stuff gets dumped on another computer. (Which of course
probably gets backed up with the same tapes that my computer gets
backed up on.)

What it means, though, is that the best list of subscribers I could
find is nearly three months old, and is all in one list instead of
broken down into bounce and digest lists. (I had made it because I 
was
trying to figure out the breakdown of the list by countries for
someone who was taking a survey of list managers.)

In the last 3 months, a buncha folks have joined, a handful have
unsubscribed, and a few have changed addresses.  And a lot of you
prefer the digest option.  (I save all the email I get from people
joining or quitting.  naturally, that file is Missing In Action, too.
This whole thing looks malicious.)

So, here's my recovery plan:

-  The old list I found is now the list of bounce list subscribers.
If you need to be removed, changed to the digest, or need an address
change, tell me (old-ways-request@tomservo.b23b.ingr.com).  If not,
then don't do anything and sit tight for the next couple of days until
it gets straightened out.

-  I'm going to saturate the appropriate Usenet groups and other
mailing lists.  Maybe we can catch most of the people who have
subscribed recently.

-  I'm going to add a couple of lines to the automation that sends out
the digest every night which will copy the current lists to various
places on various other disks every night.  Just in case this happens
again. 

When I got in on Tuesday from the holiday, I rigged things up so I
would get all the mail coming in.  All the subscribe or removal
requests I've received since then have been made, and everyone 
who
sent mail to The Old Ways has been added if you weren't already on.
I'm sure I lost some stuff over the weekend, though.

By the way, the posts that have come in since then are still around,
too. I'll bounce them out early next week.  I hope we'll be back in
business by then.  Until then, please hold off on any posts.

I'm sorry about all this, gang.  It's both baffling and annoying on
this end, too.  But I've been thinking I needed a few more gray hairs,
and this should do it :)

Thanks, and sorry again for the inconvenience.


Christian




-- 
Christian Walters      *  The first time Flo said "kiss my grits," a little
dcwalter@ingr.com      *  something inside all of us withered and died.
Intergraph Corp        *                            - Tom Servo, MST3K