Man, I hate RoadRunner/TimeWarner/Spectrum

I run a bunch of mailing lists. Most of them are very active, not too many members, and very chatty. They are also very low-maintenance. One of my mailing lists is an announcement list for our neighborhood association, and has 500+ members, many of them elderly. It gets about 3-4 posts a month, and it’s very high maintenance (see my previous remark about elderly members). A large number of those members (over 50 of them) have rochester.rr.com email addresses. RoadRunner was the first broadband in our neighborhood, offered by Time Warner. Sometime after I went around the streets knocking on doors trying to convince people to sign up for an independent fiber internet company (Greenlight), Time Warner became Spectrum.

I guess some of their infrastructure was owned by Charter? I don’t know, it’s just that the MX for rochester.rr.com points to a charter.net server. Probably due to an accquistion or something. Not relevant.

For my sins, I upgraded my server a few months ago to Debian 13, while simultaneously upgrading my mailing lists from Mailman 2 to Mailman 3. And a few days ago I discovered that since the change, a large proportion of rochester.rr.com users were getting booted off the list because their mail was bouncing. I found this out because a sweet little old lady got the message saying her subscription was being removed because of these bounces, and responded to the bounce message saying “but I don’t want to be removed”.

Since that time, I’ve been trying to diagnose and fix the problem. What I saw in the logs was that RoadRunner gives you a code when it defers or bounces, which you can look up

https://www.spectrum.net/support/internet/understanding-email-error-codes

And most of the deferrals and bounces were getting a 1300 or 1370 code, both of which mean too many concurrent connections, or too many recipients in one connection.

The first thing I found was that Mailman was VERPing every message, which obviously makes it easier for Mailman to determine who bounced, but also means that Postfix is making 500+ simultaneous outgoing connections. I decided it would be better if Mailman just passed the whole shebang off to Postfix and let Postfix pick that apart. That took a bit of doing, including adding a configuration parameter to my mailman.cfg file that `mailman conf` told me was already the default. *Sigh*

Ok, once I had all 500 members coming as one block to Postfix, I set up a separate transport “slow_smtp” just for rochester.rr.com. For that one, I set up 

slow_smtp_destination_concurrency_limit = 1
slow_smtp_destination_recipient_limit = 5

which I thought would mean it would make one connection at a time, and send 5 messages each time. Turns out the concurrency_limit wasn’t doing what I thought it would do – ie make sure that there’s only one connection at a time. I don’t actually know what it does because it looked like there were several connections at once. I showed my configuration on the Postfix Users mailing list, and Wietse Venema rather defensively said “The _destination_concurrency_limit and _smtp_destination_recipient_limit features are implemented by decades-old code that has not changed $forever.” And we all know that old code never has bugs in it. Besides, I was assuming I was configuring it wrong, not that the code was wrong.

Anyway, after some back and forths with Venema and another guy who thought I didn’t know how to read a log file (turns out he was partially right), I added

slow_smtp_destination_rate_delay = 5

which did seem to meant that it would delay starting a new connection for 5 seconds after the last one, and if I’m understanding this correctly, means that as long as the previous connection is processed in 5 seconds, the next one won’t be simultaneous. In practice, what I seem to be seeing is that the first batch of 5 gets sent, the second batch of 5 gets sent, and the rest get “status=deferred”. Some time later (about 8 minutes?) it send the third set of 5 and the forth set of 5, and deferred the rest. After 4 sets of retries, the last 19 users got “status=bounced” instead of “status=deferred”. I have no idea why they suddenly decided to start bouncing. I suspect it’s just Time Warner because arseholes.

I’m still searching for the magic configuration which will allow the non-RoadRunner users to keep going as normal, and RoadRunner users to trickle through in whatever configuration it takes.

Ending up

This is part 5 of 5 of our long North-ish Ontario trip:

We spent a nice day with John and his wife Janice. We had a bit of a storm, and Janice went out in some of the worst of it to retrieve two Adirondack chairs (or Muskoka chairs) that had blown off a neighbour’s dock and were floating in front of their breakwall.

With a bit of prompting, I managed to get John to talk a bit about his team’s entry in the Concrete Toboggan Race, an achievement I’ve been in awe of since he and the other participants revealed it back in 1985. I think I was kind of out of the main loop back then so I didn’t know anything about it until their triumphant return. But they’d worked on this for over a year, while maintaining their course work and other stuff.

After leaving their cottage, we headed down to Darlington Provincial Park. By cutting out Parry Sound, we cut out about 6-8 hours of driving, which we were getting a bit tired of any way. Our first night there, we got to take my two daughters and my three grandchildren out to dinner. Afterwards, James made a fire (sort of) and we made s’mores. Liane and her two children stayed in our campsite overnight. I took the two boys out fishing a couple of times. Then Alyssa and James and their daughter came back and brought the makings for dinner. Vicki was starting to get quite sick and so we were really happy that dinner was taken care of.

After the dinner and everybody left, we were both pretty exhausted, so we didn’t think about the garbage bag we’d left tied to the door railing outside. At least we didn’t think about them until Riot alerted us to the presence of two fart squirrels (skunks) in the night. They spent quite a long time tearing open that bag of garbage, and licking all the plates and forks clean. And Riot didn’t stop barking the whole time, and probably some time afterwards.

Waking up the next morning, we were operating on very limited sleep, Vicki was sick, and we had to get on the road by 2pm. Also we were pretty sure we were nearly out of fresh water, which meant we had to be careful about washing and flushing the toilet.

We just barely made the checkout deadline. RVLife was routing us along Hwy 401, and normally we ignore the GPS and head up to the 407ETR (Express Toll Road). But in my sleep addled state, I thought “why would the 401 be crowded on a random Wednesday afternoon?” I don’t know if it was because of the World Cup, or just because Toronto is always jammed up, but we just crawled through Toronto. We finally got up to speed and were making good time. Except for a bit of an excursion to find diesel. And then we hit the border and we stopped moving again. And somewhere around this point, Riot decided to inhabit his Goblin King persona and started very loudly yapping, just constantly.

At first Vicki thought it was because he wanted one of his toys that he’d dropped. But she retrieved it and it only briefly shut him up. Then we decided to stop at a road stop, and feed them, but that only gave temporary respite. I tried opening and closing his back window, and that would distract him for a few seconds.

We finally hit our driveway about 6 hours after we left Darlington. Both us had no energy to do anything, but at least Riot finally shut up. And I was starting to get a cough, probably related to whatever Vicki had.

It was an awesome trip, and I’m glad we did it. I just wish I had the energy to clean out the trailer and put everything away.

Lessons learned:

  • We can handle a few long travel days as long as we have a couple of stay days to recover from them
  • A 5 gallon bucket is a good thing to have
  • Between Walmart, Canadian Tire and Giant Tiger, we can find just about anything we need on the road.
  • Things break down, plans change. Be flexible, try to be self-reliant.
  • Skunks are not to be trifled with
  • DEET is the greatest invention in the history of the world, even if Vicki hates it and won’t use it.

Coming home

This is part 4 of 5 of our long North-ish Ontario trip:

We got a couple of nice weather days in Algonquin Park. On the first good day, Vicki and I went for a paddle. Paddling across Pog Lake didn’t fell like anything other than a good paddle with my wife and best friend, but when we turned the corner into the Madawaska River, and got into the corridor of trees and river, I suddenly felt a spiritual connection that I hadn’t felt in decades. A swallowtail butterfly nearly landed on my kayak, and Vicki said “that’s your mom”.

Madawaska River

We paddled down to the dam, and then turned around and paddled upstream to Lake of Two Rivers. There was a strong breeze and there were waves that shouldn’t have bothered me at all, except the thermarest pad I’ve been using for my sit bone pain raises my center of gravity just enough to made me feel like I’m paddling my Epic V12 instead of my Epic V10 Sport. So I decided discretion is the better part of valor, and turned around. And nearly dumped twice while turning around. Swallowtails showed up a few times as we paddled home.

The next day, we rode our bikes on the rail-to-trail path. Last time I visited Algonquin Park, part of that abandoned railroad was used for the Booth Rock interpretive trail, but now it’s a full blown trail for many miles.

We rode through the campground to a t-junction with the trail, and as we were standing there looking at a sign with historic information about the railroad, we heard an awful screeching. We looked over, and a couple on e-bikes were heading straight at us rather than going around (there was plenty of room to go around, like I said it was a t-junction). The screeching wasn’t them, it was that the woman still had the power on but also had the brakes on, so the brakes were screeching. She fell over (not sure if intentionally) which prevented her from plowing into us full power. I’d like to suggest that the EU is correct to require e-bikes to only have pedal assist, and not have a throttle.

The trail was mostly smooth, but with occasional wet spots. A couple of swallowtails showed up to come along with us. A couple of places we smelled something very close to the smell of horse poop. We figured it was probably moose or deer, until I actually saw one of the poops, and it was definitely bear. I figured I was safe, because if I couldn’t outrun the bear on my bike, I could at least out run Vicki.

During our time at Algonquin, one of my former class mates texted me out of the blue, saying he’d seen from a facebook post that we were in the Huntsville area and would we want to come spend some time at his cottage. Our next stop after Algonquin was supposed to be two nights in Parry Sound, so we thought maybe we’d shorten that to one night and spend one night with John and his wife.

But after the bike ride, both Vicki and I decided that we wanted another day in Algonquin. So we cancelled both days in Parry Sound, booked another night in Pog Lake (which involved moving to another campsite), and then going direct from there to John’s cottage. Unfortunately the new campsite was just overrun by swarms of mosquitos and blackflies and then it started to rain. But I’d rather spend a day in Algonquin with the screens open listening to the rain and the loons and smelling the fresh air than spending two days driving up to Parry Sound and back.

It was great catching up with John, and his wife is very nice as well. John was always the great organizer even back at uni, so I’m not surprised he was in touch with a great many former classmates as well and they have frequent get togethers. I’d like to get in on some of that action myself.

Starlink, star blink, first star I see tonight…

This is part 3 of 5 of our long North-ish Ontario trip:

We bought Starlink specifically for this trip. In case you’ve been living in a cave for the past couple of years, Starlink is a small antenna that gives you internet connections based on a fleet of satellites launched by the Space Nazi himself. Evidently Starlink is the only part of SpaceX which is currently profitable.

We’ve set it up and tried to use it at just about every campsite, and so far the score isn’t great. Shady sights with lots of tree cover, like I tend to prefer for aesthetic reasons, do not get you sufficient space for the Starlink signal to get through. As a matter of fact, the only place we’ve had decent service this whole trip is the place I hated the most, Carol’s near Sudbury. And mostly for the same reasons – no trees.

Providence Bay should have been a decent connection but it kept telling me I was too obstructed. There was a solid line of trees behind me in that picture in my last post. The instructions that came with the Starlink devices say that the antenna has a 110 degree field of view, so in line with that and the line of trees, I attempted to get the best field of view by tilting the antenna down so that it was 60 or so degrees off the horizontal. I asked for help from facebook group for RV Starlink users, but just about every single one of them ignored the whole business about the 110 degree field of view and the tall trees, and said I needed to have the antenna perfectly flat. Only one of the dozens of respondents told me something useful, which is that you need to clear the obstruction map every time you move it. Unfortunately I didn’t get that info until after we’d left Providence Bay.

I already wrote about our arrival at Carol’s. The next morning, we went to Science North. It made me nostalgic for The Ontario Science Center. The architecture was really excellent, especially the way they incorporated the natural rock into the design and the learning. It was mostly set up for kids, of course, but Vicki and I were entertained and impressed. We also bought tickets for the IMAX show. It was, as to be expected, gorgeous and very informative. On the way home, we stopped for a few things – so much easier to do that when you don’t have the trailer.

Carol’s was the only place where we managed to watch streaming YouTubes without buffering or stuttering.

The next day, we “reluctantly” said goodbye to Carol’s and headed off to Arrowhead Provincial Park. Another beautiful drive. If it hadn’t been for that tourism brochure I linked to in my last post, we probably wouldn’t have bothered and just booked an extra day in Algonquin Park. But honestly, it was probably a life saver because the last couple of miles I was having trouble keeping my eyes open.

Arrowhead is a gorgeous park, with tall red pines and a lovely lake. The campsites were far apart for lots of privacy. Just like I remembered it when Mum and me camped there 40-odd years ago. I don’t recall why we camped there, but I can think of two possible reasons – either there was an orienteering event near by, or it was coming home from our canoe trip in the north end of Algonquin.

But the tall trees meant our Starlink was useful enough to download a web page to read it (as long as you didn’t mind hitting refresh and waiting a bit, then repeating 3 or 4 times), but you wouldn’t want to watch even a Facebook short video on it.

Our Arrowhead Sky

We unfortunately only had one night in Arrowhead, but I was eager to get to Algonquin. Well, I say “eager”, but we didn’t leave Arrowhead until nearly 2pm. So we had some walking around time there, even if we didn’t have bike riding or paddling time.

We hit Algonquin and even the road in was bringing back so many memories. I don’t think I’ve been here in 40 years, and some things have changed a bit. There’s obviously been some tourism money in those years because the lodges and restaurants in the park have gone very upscale (except Lake of Two Rivers Store, which looks like a tourist dive from Lake Placid). There are several new interpretive trails, but all the old faves are there. The park museum has moved from where it used to be, which is now the Algonquin Art Centre, up to not very far from where we are camping. They’ve also added some cycling infrastructure, including a long trail along the abandoned railway line, and another trail that looks like it has real mountain biking potential.

Arrival day got cloudy soon after we arrived, and got rainy later. Today was our first real day here, and it was pretty rainy. We took the time to do some laundry (which involved a trip into town to hit an ATM and get some change, because Canada is so into tap-to-pay that we’ve been here 10 days and this is the first time I’ve wanted cash. I was actually a little surprised that the park laundromats didn’t have tap-to-pay. Can you imagine some beat up old washing machine that looks like it survived two wars, with a shiny new tap-to-pay device on the top?) After the laundry, we went to the Algonquin Visitor’s Center/Museum. Amusingly enough, we arrived just as about 10 or so uniformed park employees were leaving, which made us worry we got there just as it was closing, but nobody said anything and it turned out it didn’t close for an hour.

Other than disclosing that I’m not as good at recognizing birds (or at least shop-worn taxidermied birds) as I used to be, the exhibits were very well laid out and explained. And an hour is just about the right amount of time.

Tomorrow I’m hoping the weather is better and we can get up and out for an early morning paddle or bike ride. Our time is limited, especially since we tend to consider a travel day a nothing-but-travel day.

Speaking of which, a friend from college noticed I’d posted something from Arrowhead, and said he’s at his cottage, not too far away and do we want to come by for a day or two. Well, don’t want to cut short our Algonquin time, but maybe trim the 2 night Parry Sound stay down to one and try to flog ourselves into doing something touristy on a travel day.

But all this is hard to arrange because once again, we’re in a beautiful sun dappled campsite which means Starlink can’t find shit.

I believe there might be a Starlink satellite coming by soon
Some campsite, eh?

I finally caved and bought a Canadian data e-Sim to at least be able to do some amended route planning and stuff like that, that is if Vicki doesn’t use it all watching cow hoof trimming videos.

Further updates coming eventually. Hopefully I’ll catch a satellite soon to upload this.

To Sauble Falls, and beyond!

This is part 2 of 5 of our long North-ish Ontario trip:

Setting up in Sauble Falls, we discovered that there are a lot of mosquitos around. There hadn’t been any at the previous two nights, but we should have expected it. Good thing we’d brought both Deep Woods Off and Coleman 100% Deet. The second one is harking back to my backpacking days, when Muskol was the only thing that really worked.

We had two nights at Sauble, and the first one was basically set up and go to bed early. The friendly campers in the spot next to us played Corn Hole and sat around their fire until all hours of the night, so we kept the windows shut on that side of the camper.

Early the next morning, the camp host stopped by and gave us a paper copy of that map, and a news letter about local day trips. I’d originally thought we’d spend our day touring the local lighthouses. But after taking the dogs for a walk up to see the falls, we just sort of vegged out around the trailer, Vicki mostly inside, and me and the dogs outside in our new camp chairs. Vicki doesn’t like to cover herself with Deet the way I do, so I was perfectly comfortable out there in the mosquitos.

On our walk around, we got to talking to one of the other campers and found out that the ferry to Manitoulin Island, the Chi-Cheemaun, can be very picky about the lengths of your combined truck and trailer. And I thought back to when I’d booked the ferry ticket I’d just sort of guestimated the full length. I dug out my way too short tape measure and figured that based on kicking lines in the dirt at each tape measure length, we were actually 50 feet long instead of the 46 feet I’d booked.

I tried calling the ferry company but it was after hours, and so I left a message on their voice mail and sent an email. And I worried all night. Early the next morning, I got a call back from them, and it the person on the phone said that the ferry was fully booked, and there was a good chance we wouldn’t be allowed to board. Ok, now I’m really worried. I decided we needed to get there as early as we could, so we packed up early and headed to Tobermory.

And just because it’d been too long since our last disaster, we discovered that the running lights on the trailer weren’t lit. Fortunately the important stuff (brake lights, turn signals, trailer brakes) were all working. The rear camera on the trailer was cutting in and out, but that had happened last time we’d travelled with kayaks and bikes in the bed of the truck so I don’t know if that means it wasn’t getting any power, or if the wireless signal was being attenuated by the bikes and boats.

When we got to the ferry terminal, the guy there just measured our rig (I think they just had marking on the ground, rather than pulling out a tape measure) and said it was 51 feet long. He made us pay another couple of bucks, and directed us to the correct line. He also noticed my two-four of Molson Export in the bed of the truck, and jokingly said he’d have to confiscate that. I said there were cold ones in the fridge if he wants a couple of them. He laughed and said they weren’t allowed to.

Ok, now we had some time to kill before the ferry, so I spent a lot of time diagnosing the problem with the running lights. Or at least I tried to. When we first bought the truck and the trailer, we got all the way home from the RV place (which had involved some thruway traffic) before we discovered that we didn’t have *most* of the functions from the 7 pin hitch plug – no electric brakes, no brake signals, I think one of the turn signals was working, but also no running lights. I used my pathetic skills with a multimeter to determine that there was no power coming from the truck on those pins. After taking it back to the dealership twice, both times which they said it was working fine, we finally put our foot down and demanded they fix it, the morning we were supposed to leave for our first trip. It turns out that each time we’d taken the truck back to the dealer, they’d hooked it up to their own flatbed trailer (not a RV trailer) WITH THE 4 PIN HITCH PLUG, and pronounced it working. This time the owner of the used truck dealer took it to a guy he knew who worked at a muffler shop, and that guy determined the problem was some blown fuses. I pretty much decided that the truck dealer didn’t know what they were talking about and tried to avoid using them for maintenance.

But anyway, based on that, I bought two boxes of assorted fuses, but somehow I didn’t get the ones that Ram uses. I mean, the Ram uses a bunch of different types of fuses, even using 3 different styles of fuse for the same amperage. I have no idea why they’d do that other than shear bloody mindedness. And the 3 fuses that seem like were most related to my problem were not the standard blade type fuses. So trying to replace fuses to see if it helped was out. Instead I just pulled those three fuses and reseated them. I was going to pull out the multimeter and test if there was any power coming on the various pins of the 7 pin hitch plug, but that’s when the ferry showed up and it was time to get ready to load up.

We’d been dealing with mist off and on when we left Sauble, although it was quite sunny while waiting for the ferry. But before we left the dock, it started to get misty again and by half way through the ride we could barely see the islands around us. Otherwise the ferry ride was uneventful, although the food they served was about half as good as what we got on BC Ferries. Also, when you leave the car deck, there are signs showing you which level and sector you’re on, but when you come down the stairs to the car deck, there are no signs! You have to open the door and look at the sign on the other side. Fortunately there are only two car decks, and we were second from front, so it wasn’t that hard to find.

By the time we got off the ferry, we were going in and out of rain. The private park we were booked (Providence Bay) into wasn’t anything special, but it wasn’t bad either. The Starlink was complaining about how obscured the antenna was.

Spot the obstructions

We set up as quickly as we could between rain showers, and eventually it stopped. That allowed us to take the boys for a walk along the boardwalk on the beach across the road. But it continued to rain off and on so we mostly had an evening in the camper.

Next day it was still raining off and on, and we packed up when we got a break in the weather. We drove off Manitoulin Island to the north, and drove through some of the prettiest scenery I’ve ever seen. Just gorgeous. It rained off and on, but the hardest it rained was when we arrived at our second private campground, Carol’s. Like the previous one, this one was recommended by this tourism pamphlet thing we used as the basis for planning this trip. When we pulled in, we almost pulled right out. It looks like the epitome of one of those check-by-jowl campsites where you can’t look out any window without seeing a bunch of people a few feet away. It also immediately started pouring rain. I was tired because of dog troubles last night, and the driving, so I said we’re staying at least one night, maybe we’ll pull up stakes and find somebody better tomorrow. We unpacked as well as we could in the pouring rain, but we didn’t unhitch, didn’t hook up the sewer hoses, and didn’t unpack the Blackstone. A hour or two later, the rain seemed like it was well and truly gone, and with a nice view of the lake and blue skies, it didn’t look so bad. Maybe we will stay two nights. At least it’s got full hookups. I think tomorrow we’d like to go see Science North and maybe the Big Nickel.

It’s only 6:30 pm, but I’ve had enough writing today. Tune in for the next installment.