[Roger -Dot- Lee(Admin)]

That's right, ladies and gentlemen, and anyone that I happened to leave out unintentionally: it's finally over.

After struggling with web servers and other such nonsense in an attempt to put a halt to this while giving our favorite overrequester the opportunity to visit the rest of the site, I finally called out the Cavalry. With the help of our very own VAXMan, Our Favorite Overrequester has been permanently banned from the site. They can still tune into the station all they wish, but attempting to connect to the station (or, for that matter, send email to the station) will be met with an eerie silence.

(Email blocking is a regrettable side effect of the effort to put a stop to the overrequesting).

WARNING: HEAVY GEEK FACTOR BELOW. For the feint of heart, those with supressed constitutions or weak bladders, or anyone else who doesn't want to read it, move on. Nothing to see here.

You've been warned.

BEGIN HEAVY GEEK FACTOR

The suggestion given by VM was that we block them at the routing level. This has the effect of taking the packets that arrive from their network to be routed to a non-existent location. Thus, they can't connect. At all. Nada. None. This goes for port 80 (HTTP), port 25 (SMTP) and whatever else they may wish to try (that's not already handled by our firewall). Unbeknownst to me, they slipped in a 'reject' parameter into the routing tables. I was not aware that this existed in Linux (our host OS for the web site). I thought this was limited to SGI, Sun Solaris, and anything else that descended from the SVr4 code base. Score another one for Linux. You can't do that on Windows.

END HEAVY GEEK FACTOR. Thank you for your patience.

Anyway, one simple command to the routing interface by Yr. 'umble Narrator has left Our Favorite Overrequester unable to request. I have taken steps to assure that the new routing tables will survive a reboot.

I will, over the next few days, take the opportunity to return all of the songs I was forced to remove due to said overrequester to the station request rotation.

Thank you for your patience in this matter. Hopefully we will never have to endure another situation like this again.

Roger -Dot- Lee

PS: I was going to post the email thread between Our Favorite Overrequester and Jim, but the idea no longer amuses me. In fact, this entire episode sickens me. If someone is interested, they can either shoot me an email or post a request here. If I get a request or two, then I might post 'em. Otherwise, I think I'm going to let this die like the pox ridden cow it's become.