A: Email addresses ending simply in @luc.edu are known as aliases. Aliases enable Loyola email account holders to move their active accounts from one system to another as required yet publish a single email address. Aliases are entries in the alias table; this table serves as a switch board. For example, jdoe@luc.edu might be an alias in the alias table that forwards to an Orion account jdoe@orion.luc.edu. If the holder of this account chooses to receive email at jeandoeset@yahoo.com, rather than at her Orion account, the alias table is updated at her request so that anything emailed to jdoe@luc.edu is re-directed to jeandoeset@yahoo.com. Note, however, that the alias table is separate and distinct from Orion, Groupwise or any other email system: even after the alias table is updated, anything emailed to jdoe@orion.luc.edu will bypass the alias table and go directly to Orion. Hence if you have published your Orion email address, or if your correspondents have added your Orion email address to their personal email address books, you should consider setting up email forwarding in your Orion account (discussed elsewhere on the Orion FAQ). These same behaviors and considerations apply to GroupWise email accounts.
The alias table is also used to facilitate departmental and institutional email communication. For example the webmaster@luc.edu and student-affairs@luc.edu aliases each forward to several individuals involved with those functions.
To request an update to your alias, send an email to alias-admin@luc.edu or contact the Information Technologies Helpdesk. We do not accept alias update requests from non-Loyola email accounts out of concerns for security; send your request only from your Orion or GroupWise account.
Please note: alias-admin has no administrative access to GroupWise. We cannot setup forwarding rules for your GroupWise account. As noted above, a change to your alias entry DOES NOT effect email sent directly to your GroupWise account. Setting up forwarding rules from GroupWise is your responsibility. Please contact the Information Technologies Helpdesk for assistance with GroupWise.
Please note: Because of the consequent maintenance difficulties we do not setup "vanity plate" aliases; we only setup aliases for standard Loyola UVID accounts. Say, for example, that Ann Smith has a completely normal alias entry as follows: asmith1@luc.edu -> asmith@yahoo.com. And then Andy Smith wants a vanity plate as follows: andysmith@luc.edu -> asmith@orion.luc.edu. When the time comes to clear the alias table of defunct entries we run the risk of incorrectly deleting perfectly good entries, in this example, Ann's.
Q: Does Pine, like GroupWise, have the capability to create rules?
A: Procmail is the facility for automating mail processing on Orion. See the Orion Resource Index for references.
Q: How do I print from Orion?
A: Technically speaking you don't print from Orion. Rather, you transfer files to your workstation and print them to your workstation's printer. Similarly, if your telnet or ssh client has a print function you can print the contents of your screen to your workstation's printer. In any case Orion knows nothing about your printer, the job is handled by your workstation.
There are several ways to prepare email in Pine for printing; we will mention only a few of them here.
A) Use Pine's Export function to create files of individual pieces of email. Export saves these files to your home directory unless you specify a different location. You can then use your workstation's FTP (File Transfer Protocol) client to transfer these files to your workstation for printing.
B) Another method is to transfer raw Pine "folders" from your mail directory to your workstation. Each Pine "folder" is actually a single unix mail file, not a directory containing several files. After using FTP to transfer the "folder" to your workstation edit the resulting file with your favorite text editor to remove potentially unprintable attachments. Do not modity the raw Pine folders on Orion as this might lead Pine to behave unpredictably.
C) To print email attachments (.jpeg, .bmp, etc.) use Pine's Save function and then FTP the resulting file to your workstation for printing.
There are many different FTP clients, hence FTP usage is beyond the scope of this discussion.
Q: How do I setup my POP3 email client (e.g., Eudora, Netscape, Outlook, etc.)?
A: Set your "Inbound", "INBOX server" or "Incoming E-mail server" to orion.luc.edu. Set your "Outbound", "SMTP gateway" or "Outgoing E-mail server" to mail.luc.edu. Set the frequency for checking for new e-mail to 10 minutes or *higher*; you should check for new e-mail no more than once every ten minutes.
Please note: The Unix Team is not sufficiently staffed to support workstations in addition to our servers; hence, we are unable to provide support for workstation software such as POP3 email clients. If you experience a problem with email, please login to Orion and try to replicate the problem using Pine, Orion's supported email reader. Please contact the Information Technologies Helpdesk for assistance with POP3 email clients.
Q: Anyone who emails me gets the following message, what's up?
This email account is currently unable to receive messages.
Please try another means to contact the recipient, or
try to resend your message at a later date.
System Administrator
Loyola University
Information Technologies
admin@orion.it.luc.edu
A: This is an auto-generated response. You are over your disk quota. Delete some email or other files.
Q: I am over my disk quota and I've deleted many files and a lot of email yet the system still reports that I am over quota. What is the problem?
A: Disk usage as reported by the quota command is updated once a night. The numbers are not indicative of current, real-time usage. Try du for actual usage.
Q: My account has had restrictions placed on it for being 'over quota' for about a week now. I believe the problem has been taken care of, as I cleared out all large files last week. Can you please lift the restrictions now?
A: The file system quotas are automatically enforced by AIX, the operating system that Orion is running. Information about the quota for your account can be retrieved by issuing at the Orion shell prompt the command:
quota
this should produce results similar to the following:
Disk quotas for user xxxxxxx (uid xxxxx):
Filesystem blocks quota limit grace files quota limit grace
/u3 5532* 5120 6144 none 179 5120 6144
In this example, the "soft" quota for the account is 5.1 Megabytes and the hard quota is 6.1 Megabytes. These are the standard restrictions on Orion. The "none" under grace shows that AIX has automatically traced the account as having been over the soft quota for over the one week grace period. This is due to the fact that the account currently contains 5.5 MBs which exceeds the soft quota by 400Kbytes. Once the additional 400KBs have been removed from storage on Orion, the operating system will automatically reset the grace period for being over soft quota back to one week.
Q: Is it possible to have a script running (I'm assuming through cron or procmail?) that would email a certain address (my pager's email) each time I get a non-mailing-list email (i.e. emails that have "+" next to them in pine)? Preferably it would email my pager with the real email's subject and text, or if that's not possible something like "New email waiting."
A: Procmail is installed on Orion and is configured as the local mailer. This means that configuring your Orion account to filter based on procmail only requires that you add a .procmailrc file to your account and does not require a .forward file. Most mailing lists will add "Precedence: bulk" to the header of the email which provides a method of filtering. By doing "man procmailex" at the Orion prompt you can get a listing of example filtering rules for formulating a .procmailrc file. Included in the examples is doing mail forwarding and filtering based on the exclusion of fields in the email header. Note that Lynx will accept command line arguments; this may come in handy for web-based pager interfaces. Unfortunately, the methods of paging via the Internet are not consistent between pager providers, so it is not possible for us to provide a global ready-made .procmailrc.
Q: When Orion is shutdown is GroupWise also shutdown? Can I forward my Orion email to GroupWise so I can check it in the interim?
A: Orion downtime won't cause GroupWise to go down. When Orion is down it can't forward incoming email, but mail will start flowing in once Orion is back up. Further, most email systems try over several hours or days to resend failed mail deliveries, so in most cases you won't miss anything.
Q: When Orion is shutdown are ppp and slip dial-in services still available? Is there some other machine available for outgoing mail forwarding?
A: Yes on all counts. The Orion password table is copied to another machine and the slip/ppp terminal servers validate against that machine when Orion is down. POP mailers should always use mail.luc.edu as the outbound mail server.
Q: Several hours ago I sent an email and now I've received an email with the following message: WARNING COULD NOT SEND MESSAGE FOR THE PAST FOUR HOURS THIS IS ONLY A WARNING YOU DON'T HAVE TO RESEND MESSAGE. What is the problem?
A: The server to which you are trying to send is not accepting email at this time. This is not a problem with Orion or with your email account. If your message is time sensitive you might want to consider contacting your party via other means.
Q: I am not able to send or receive messages via write, talk or ytalk. What is the problem?
A: The AIX man pages contain an entry for nearly every operating system command on the system. You're looking for information on the mesg command. To view the manual page for mesg, enter:
man mesg
Q: Why does Orion demand that I change my password so often? Why are Orion's password criteria so complicated?
A: Orion requires you to change your password every three months. Orion does not permit simple dictionary words as passwords because they can be cracked by widely-available brute-force password guessing programs. Apollo, Orion's predecessor, was involved in perhaps the world's most famous computer break-in. Search for "loyola" on this page: http://www.gulker.com/ra/hack/index.html. Orion's security policies are in place to protect the data of all its users.
Q: I forget the password of my account at Orion. How can I restore it? Can you email me a new password?
A: Due to security considerations, we do not send passwords in email. If you are unable to call the Help Desk during the day for help with your password, probably the easiest way to restore it is to fill out an Orion password restoration form. The form should be returned to a Loyola Computer Center and presented along with your Loyola ID.
Q: Every time I try ftp, I get a message that my password is invalid. I can ssh (secure shell) into orion no problem. What's up?
A: Your password has expired. Ssh won't tell you about that whereas telnet will. Ssh will also allow you to continue using an expired password whereas telnet and ftp will not. Change your password with "passwd" and you'll be back in business with ftp.
Q: I regularly use ssh instead of telnet for secure access to Orion. Am I stuck using standard ftp for file transfers? Doesn't that, at least in part, defeat the purpose of using ssh?
A: Your concerns are well justified. Ftp does not encrypt your username and password as they are sent across the network to Orion for authentication. For that matter no part of an ftp session is secure; everything is sent across the network in clear text, unencrypted, for any sniffer or protocol analizer to see. And, by the way, sniffers and protocol analizers are readily available for modern day operating systems; they are useful tools for network and systems administrators.
Take a look at scp (secure copy) by typing "man scp" at the Orion prompt. To use scp from your workstation you'll need an scp implementation that runs on your operating system. If you are running a flavor of unix on your workstation then try using ssh directly for file uploads to Orion:
cat filename | ssh -l username orion.luc.edu "cat > filename"
Or file downloads to your workstation from Orion:
ssh -l username orion.luc.edu "cat filename" | cat > filename
http://orion.luc.edu/faq.html
revised November 2000 by
admin@orion.luc.edu