Why am I doing this?

For some odd reason, I decided to make some instructional videos for RV owners. I even make a new YouTube channel for it, https://www.youtube.com/@Cougar22MLS

I’ve made 2 videos so far, one about black and grey (or gray) tanks and how to drain them, treat them, etc. The second one is about winterizing. And now that our trailer is winterized, there probably will be a bit of pause before the next one (which will probably be about de-winterizing).

I hope people like them. It’s not like I’m the only one out there making these sorts of videos, but I’m hoping my approach to the topics will appeal to people. And besides, it’s a bit of fun for me since I don’t make kayak racing videos any more.

Today’s little mystery

I use the Google Search Console on this blog, because it’s self hosted and I want to make sure it gets indexed correctly. Last night I got an alert (or rather I saw the mail – I don’t log into gmail all that often) that said that one of my pages wasn’t being indexed any more because it came up as 404 status (with is httpd code for “not found”).

Now the url tells you pretty much everything you need to know, that it was published on the 28th of April 2025 and it was titled “The Rest of the Time At Cowan’s Gap”. I distinctly remember writing that post. But it’s not there on my blog. I have two posts from that time about our trip to Cowan’s Gap and the first couple of days there, so it stands to reason that there needed to be a post about the rest of it. But it’s not there. I thought maybe it got deleted in the last update of WordPress which happened a few days ago, so I had a look in the Wayback Machine and it’s not there, not last week and not in 2025. It’s not unpublished or in the drafts folder either on my site or on the WordPress app which I often use to compose blog posts off-line and upload them when I’m on-line.

I can’t even find what’s linking to it. Google Search Console says it’s being linked to from my own blog, but it doesn’t specify which page of the blog, and the blog’s own search isn’t helping.

So there’s actually a couple of mysteries:

  • Did I write it or did I just imagine it?
  • If I wrote it, where is it?
  • And why did Google only decide this week that it’s missing?

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.