The ADN Post

The Grim Reaper Tightens Its Grip on Mail on CMS (and New Grim Reaper Rules for ADN UNIX Machines Too)

Perhaps you remember our "Grim Reaper"? We introduced him to you in "More on Mail" in the The ADN Connection in November/December 1994. In CMS, the electronic mail in any account's electronic mailbox (its CMS reader) slows CMS down for everyone -- each and every item uses up a small but very real chunk of the computer's memory. The Grim Reaper is software that helps us keep CMS running smoothly by discarding CMS mail items that are either old or excessively large.

In our continuing effort to keep CMS running at an acceptable speed, we have tightened the rules that the Grim Reaper uses to select mail for automatic deletion. The new Grim Reaper rules for both CMS and the ADN UNIX machines are given in the table below. They look pretty much like the old ones, but the limits on the total number of items that you can have in your CMS reader have changed, and so have the details of the rules governing large files.

• Email Limits on ADN CMS:
• Email Limits on ADN UNIX:
• Full Internet Access Available on all ADN-ii Dialin Lines
• An Assignment Submission and Grading System Now Available on icarus
• The Library Comes to the Web
• Inform on the World Wide Web
• The Class Scheduling Assistant's on the Web, Too
• Some News Doesn't Fit
• University of Illinois Site License for Microsoft Software

Note to people using Eudora: In the new version of Eudora, if you use the "Leave mail on server" option with CMS, Eudora might not recognize when you've received new mail. This option leaves the mail that you've read on the "server", which, in this case, is your CMS reader, so we'd very much prefer that you didn't use this option anyway!

The most important difference under the new rules is that accounts owned by students may have a maximum of 50 items in their CMS readers at any time; accounts owned by faculty or staff may have a maximum of 250 items. The oldest items in your reader will be deleted when necessary to keep your reader under these limits.

These limits apply only to mail on CMS that you leave in your CMS reader. The limits don't apply to mail that you read on your personal computer with a mail program like Eudora, or if you use the CMS mail command to receive incoming mail to your UNREAD NOTEBOOK, or to mail that you receive from your CMS reader.

Because the UNIX operating system is different from CMS in the way it handles incoming mail items, the Grim Reaper rules for the ADN UNIX machines are much simpler than those for CMS. There are limits only on the total size of all the mail items you can have in the system mail spool. And the consequences for going over the limit on ADN UNIX are much more forgiving -- we move the excess items to system scratch space and send you a note explaining how you can get them back. As is usual for UNIX scratch space, anything stored there will eventually be deleted.

Here's how to tell the size of your UNIX mail inbasket:

Your incoming mail is kept in a single file in the system spool space with your netid as its filename. You can use ls -l to see how big it is. The file name is /var/spool/mail/netid on tigger and /var/mail/netid on icarus.

Instructors use project to define and manage class "projects"; students then can use turnin to submit files to their class's projects. Together, turnin and project provide functions for icarus similar to those provided on CMS by graderun. These commands are not available on tigger (the ADN UNIX server for faculty and staff), but instructors whose students are using icarus will probably want to have an account on icarus anyway. (Do you need one? Contact the Client Services Office at 413-0003 or send electronic mail to consult@uic.edu.)

The old inform command is still available on CMS; it's useful when you want to print pretty PostScript copies of specific documents. To use the old inform command on CMS, specify the old option; for example, if you wanted to print a copy of a CMS Quick Facts document, you could use: inform quick facts cms (old

Printing on the Web: Please don't get the idea that you have to use Charlotte -- or CMS -- to print from the Web. If you're using a graphical Web browser like Mosaic or Netscape, look for "Print" under the "File" item in the menu bar. If you're using Lynx on UNIX, press p, save the item you're viewing to a file, then use your regular UNIX print command to print the file. (See Quick Introduction to ADN UNIX Services or the ADN UNIX Quick Start Guide for more information; they're in the Inform Getting Started with UNIX menu.)

Using Inform on the Web: It's pretty easy to get to Inform from anywhere on the Web. If you're starting from the UIC Web home page (URL http://www.uic.edu/ ), page down to "The Computer", then select the word help in "How to get computer help at UIC."; there's a link to Inform at the bottom under "Self Help". (That takes a bit too long, doesn't it? It doesn't have to; make a bookmark for Inform. Then it'll only take a click or two.)

But the alt.* groups are still available. We also moved the ADN's primary news server (news.uic.edu, a.k.a. news.cc.uic.edu) off of CMS, to a UNIX workstation. This server has substantially more capacity than the CMS Netnews server. So if you read your mail using tin or trn on an ADN UNIX machine, or if you use a newsreader on a personal computer on the ADN-ii or by SLIP, using the news.uic.edu news server, the alt.* groups are still there.

Want to know more? There's lots on Usenet/Netnews news groups, news readers, and news etiquette available on Inform; use the search keyword usenet.