Lusers for sale

The following post was in response to a post by Alan Cox complaining about one of our uberlusers

In <4ovagg$nnk@lightning.swansea.linux.org.uk> alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk (Alan Cox) writes:
>No but can you firmly LART this jerk for me before I teach him how to play
>mail responders for real. Note the little luser couldnt even get his auto
>responder to put his own from address in and still has the cheek to sign
>himself postmaster. Note also the clueless 105 column or so formatting

Well, I've given him a verbal LARTing a few days ago. We know this luser all too well at TCP Towers. He has managed to cause quite a bit of stress amongst the trolls a number of times. The problem is that this guy wants to know more about the Internet. That in itself isn't a problem as it means that the luser is attempting to get a clue. The problem happens when he doesn't want to go and learn for himself. Even though we've pointed him in the directions of FAQs, books and even RFCs, he still comes to us asking for help or opinions on various topics. Now, short questions I'm willing to look at, but 200+ line monstrosities ?

However, after being on the net for ~18 months, he thinks he knows what he is doing. The problem is that he doesn't really.

Yes, he is one of those most dangerous of lusers - they think they know what they are doing, but only have half a clue. As to him calling himself a postmaster ? Yep, it is a lot of cheek for him to do that, "postmesser" could be better.

In this case, the luser is attempting to get himself off a mailing list that is generating too much email. In his favour, he did at least try the standard methods of unsubscribing which failed. Contacting the list maintainer also failed. However, the thought of attempting to contact the postmaster at the mailing list site or us didn't enter into his head.

Instead he decided to setup an auto-responder to send messages back to the mailing list. Thankfully, him only having half a clue, he screwed up the configuration so that it only sent it to the people who had sent the EMail, and not the mailing list. His account would have been toasted by now if he'd succeeded in his aim.

However, after a brief verbal LARTing were he admitted the error of his ways and an agreement to post a public grovelling, I let him off the hook. I was fairly reasonable to this guy on the phone. On a number of occasions I've been forced the reset the modem he is on and ring him up and basically say "XXXX, what the hell are you doing to <such and such> ?". Apparently, this time it sounded more like a parent to naughty child. Or as one colleague put it: "No Jonny, don't hit Robby. Talk to me first" or similar. I think he got the hint that I was really pissed off with him and that I'd remove his account the next time he does something this stupid again.

>No suprise I guess that its an NT box.

Oh yeah, I know all too well that its an NT box. I'm still getting bad flash backs from when this guy was attempting to run an SMTP server and failing badly. First he tried some weirdo SMTP server from hell that often refused mail that had his machine name in uppercase for no apparent reason. Looking further, I found that the server had a different idea of what RFC821 was from rest of us. So, after me telling him that it was a bad idea for him to run that server, he switched to another one. It looked like a port of sendmail to NT. Things rapidly went downhill from here as he started asking about sendmail.cf files et al. I politely refused to help him out here... not unless he was willing to pay our normal daily consultancy rate anyway (which he wasn't). [sigh] more than once he managed to give me a gift containing 800+ error messages from sendmail.

[Something from one of my lusers snipped]

Announcement from TCP Towers: Luser sale now on.

• The net.kook who likes to flame everyone in sight and changes his opinions every time he posts.
• The NT luser who only has half a clue. Watch him spam those mailing lists!
• The luser who just requested alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.wet-and-messy
• The strange dual contemporary music teacher beast
• The plain vanilla annoying luser.

Get your luser now (or we'll bite your legs off) !

For more details contact the unfriendly TCP Towers sales trolls at:
luser-sale@tcp.net.uk or phone 01703 393392

Two examples of our lusers have been prepared by the trolls:

• The colorful luser
• The simple luser

Posted on 6th Jun 1996