Has NPU pulled www.pipers.ie or did it just die out of neglect?
NPU site works for me. Perhaps their server or network connection went down temporarily. Its seems to have been restored.
djm
You’re right I get something now
though most links from the mainpage tell me
this is called
tracepolls'. .SH RETRIEVAL FAILURE MODES The protocols \fIfetchmail\fR uses to talk to mailservers are next to bulletproof. In normal operation forwarding to port 25, no message is ever deleted (or even marked for deletion) on the host until the SMTP listener on the client side has acknowledged to \fIfetchmail\fR that the message has been either accepted for delivery or rejected due to a spam block. .PP When forwarding to an MDA, however, there is more possibility of error. Some MDAs aresafe’ and reliably return a nonzero status on any delivery error, even one due to temporary resource limits. The well-known .IR procmail (1) program is like this; so are most programs designed as mail transport agents, such as .IR sendmail (1), and .IR exim (1). These programs give back a reliable positive acknowledgement and can be used with the mda option with no risk of mail loss. Unsafe MDAs, though, may return 0 even on delivery failure. If this happens, you will lose mail. .PP The normal mode of \fIfetchmail\fR is to try to download onlynew' messages, leaving untouched (and undeleted) messages you have already read directly on the server (or fetched with a previous \fIfetchmail --keep\fR). But you may find that messages you've already read on the server are being fetched (and deleted) even when you don't specify --all. There are several reasons this can happen. .PP One could be that you're using POP2. The POP2 protocol includes no representation ofnew’ orold' state in messages, so \fIfetchmail\fR must treat all messages as new all the time. But POP2 is obsolete, so this is unlikely. .PP Under POP3, blame RFC1725. That version of the POP3 protocol specification removed the LAST command, and some POP servers follow it (you can verify this by invoking \fIfetchmail -v\fR to the mailserver and watching the response to LAST early in the query). The \fIfetchmail\fR code tries to compensate by using POP3's UID feature, storing the identifiers of messages seen in each session until the next session, in the \fI.fetchids\fR file. But this doesn't track messages seen with other clients, or read directly with a mailer on the host but not deleted afterward. A better solution would be to switch to IMAP. .PP Another potential POP3 problem might be servers that insert messages in the middle of mailboxes (some VMS implementations of mail are rumored to do this). The \fIfetchmail\fR code assumes that new messages are appended to the end of the mailbox; when this is not true it may treat some old messages as new and vice versa. The only real fix for this problem is to switch to IMAP. .PP Yet another POP3 problem is that if they can't make tempfiles in the user's home directory, some POP3 servers will hand back an undocumented response that causes fetchmail to spuriously report "No mail". .PP The IMAP code uses the presence or absence of the server flag \eSeen to decide whether or not a message is new. Under Unix, it counts on your IMAP server to notice the BSD-style Status flags set by mail user agents and set the \eSeen flag from them when appropriate. All Unix IMAP servers we know of do this, though it's not specified by the IMAP RFCs. If you ever trip over a server that doesn't, the symptom will be that messages you have already read on your host will look new to the server. In this (unlikely) case, only messages you fetched with \fIfetchmail --keep\fR will be both undeleted and marked old. .PP In ETRN and ODMR modes, \fIfetchmail\fR does not actually retrieve messages; instead, it asks the server's SMTP listener to start a queue flush to the client via SMTP. Therefore it sends only undelivered messages. .SH SPAM FILTERING Many SMTP listeners allow administrators to set upspam filters’ that block unsolicited email from specified domains. A MAIL FROM or DATA line that triggers this feature will elicit an SMTP response which (unfortunately) varies according to the listener. .PP Newer versions of .I sendmail return an error code of 571. This return value is blessed by RFC1893 as “Delivery not authorized, message refused”. .PP According to RFC2821, the correct thing to return in this situation is 550 “Requested action not taken: mailbox unavailable” (the draft adds “[E.g., mailbox not found, no access, or command rejected for policy reasons].”). .PP Older versions of the .I exim MTA return 501 “Syntax error in parameters or arguments”. .PP The .I postfix MTA runs 554 as an antispam response. .PP Return codes which .I fetchmail treats as antispam responses and discards the message can be set with the `antispam’ option. This is one of the .I only three circumstance under which fetchmail ever discards mail (the others are the 552 and 553 errors described below, and the suppression of multidropped messages with a message-ID already seen). .PP If .I fetchmail is fetching from an IMAP server, the antispam response will be detected and the message rejected immediately after the headers have been fetched, without reading the message body. Thus, you won’t pay for downloading spam message bodies. .PP By default, the list of antispam responses is empty. .PP If the \fIspambounce\fR option is on, mail that is spam-blocked triggers an RFC1892 bounce message informing the originator that we do not accept mail from it. .SH SMTP/ESMTP ERROR HANDLING Besides the spam-blocking described above, fetchmail takes special actions on the following SMTP/ESMTP error responses .TP 5 452 (insufficient system storage) Leave the message in the server mailbox for later retrieval. .TP 5 552 (message exceeds fixed maximum message size) Delete the message from the server. Send bounce-mail to the originator. .TP 5 553 (invalid sending domain) Delete the message from the server. Don’t even try to send bounce-mail to the originator. .PP Other errors trigger bounce mail back to the originator. .SH THE RUN CONTROL FILE The preferred way to set up fetchmail is to write a &\fI.fetchmailrc\fR file in your home directory (you may do this directly, with a text editor, or indirectly via \fIfetchmailconf\fR). When there is a conflict between the command-line arguments and the arguments in this file, the command-line arguments take precedence. .PP To protect the security of your passwords, when --version is not on your \fI~/.fetchmailrc\fR may not have more than 0600 (u=rw,g=,o=) permissions; .I fetchmail will complain and exit otherwise. .PP You may read the \fI.fetchmailrc\fR file as a list of commands to be executed when .I fetchmail is called with no arguments. .SS Run Control Syntax .PP Comments begin with a ‘#’ and exten
The main page comes up, and some menu items, but there’s something seriously screwed or corrupted.
Kevin Krell
The full site comes up and renders just fine for me. I’m using Firefox as my browser - from http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/.
So am i so that wasn’t it
Peter I hope ye read it all word for word mind!! 
Slán
Liam
Hi Guys, the problem may be due to a virus, they were giving
warnings on the TV news last week, this virus courses your PC
to crash and do all kinds of strange things but in the long term no
serious damage,it may take them a few days to correct the problem.
Unlikely, as according to Netcraft, it runs on Lasso on MacOS. Don’t think Sasser runs on MacOS, but I could be wrong (it happened once before, when I was seventeen).
I get redirected to http://www.pipers.ie/en/default.lasso using Mozilla, Phoenix, Opera and Galeon (all except Opera is based on the mozilla code).
What internet browser are you using? Internet Explorer doesn’t render according to established web standards and catches viruses and worms with their still unfixed security holes. Never use the back button in IE as it still has a security hole that Microsoft cannot manage to fix.
I just tried it, and got the “Default/Lasso” page as well, but then the menu bar didn’t work, and asked me to “Click here”, which rendered this page:
Website Compatibility
The Na Píobairí Uilleann website uses JavaScript to create a set of pop-up menus for navigation. The fact that you are reading this page implies that your browser is incompatible with this feature.
We would like to apologise for this inconvenience and are surrently working on a version of the site that will allow you to explore our site in full.
Meanwhile, we would appreciate your feedback and ask you to send an email to webmaster@pipers.ie, stating your Operating System (Windows version or MacOS version) and the type of browser you’re using (Internet Explorer, Netscape etc).
Thank you for your help!
It happened to me earlier today (the menu didn’t show), also I couldn’t log in as the page kept timing out. I just went back later and it worked fine. I think maybe they are having server problems, as it seemed to work after a few refreshes.
I think the screen your talking about ( how they are asking for compatibility feedback) is just the default screen if you don’t have java script enabled. I have the same thing on my site. I also got that once today and when I refreshed the menu appeared.
It is working fine right now for me, I just rechecked. I am using IE 6 with a crappy 28.8 connection.
NPU site revived.
For a long time laoding menu’s did not work with my ZoneAlarmPro. Sinds the change it works correctly. Had something to do with Javascript programs.
Hi All,
Seeing all your posts on the subject of the NPU sites makes me feel obliged to offer a quick explanation.
This website was developed a number of years ago and technology has moved on. NPU is in urgent need of a revamp, moving the backend to mysql, etc. Because of the scale of the site, this has been postponed a number of times, but now the issue has arisen that the server that the site lives on, is dying. 
A decision is about to be made to redo the entire website, and your suggestions are more than welcome. Work will start early next week, all going well, and a lot of issues that have arisen in the past will be addresses.
In the meantime, I would not entirely trust the workings of the site, as a number of format files have become corrupted, and I’m still working on a fix - however, because of the imminent upgrade, some files may never be fixed.
Hope this information is of some use to you all.
Regards,
Pier Kuipers
Webmaster
Na Piobairi Uilleann
Pier, thanks very much for the update. If you will be involved in the new site design, I would like to ask for a few things:
1). no invasive cookies - in this day and age of tightening security there is no room for these
2). make sure merchandise orders have some sort of tracking numbers - this gets really important for overseas orders where stuff can sometimes disappear en route
3). add a feature to merchandise ordering where the customer can specify the shipping method.
Thx,
djm
Pier,
I don’t think we’ve ever met, but welcome to the wonderful world of C&F.
As a long-time member of and believer in NPU, I appreciate what you have done in relation to the NPU website, so any criticisms which I make should be taken in the constructive spirit in which they are meant.
My biggest problem with the existing site is that it appears rather esoteric, and rather microsoft-minded in its lack of intuitive ease of use. I stumbled across C&F pretty much by accident, but immediately felt at home here, whereas if I try to put myself in the position of an interested outsider, I find that the NPU site is not very attractive. The sort of home page that one encounters on C&F - even without Dale’s idiosyncratic humour - which describes what it’s about and offers hot links to relevant parts of the site, is much more easy to use than the menu-driven approach of the existing NPU site, which like most Microsoft menus rely on the searcher knowing where to look - and I say this as someone who has relied entirely on MS both in work and for private use, so I’m not an Apple fundamentalist.
I would like to feel as at home on the NPU site as I do here, but I just don’t - the mere fact of having to dig out a password to log on to the discussion forum is a sufficient disincentive, and the software on which the NPU forum is based is infinitely less conducive to an evolving discussion than that on which C&F is based.
There are undoubted differences which influence the house cultures of both - one a private venture where the ground rules are entirely at Dale’s discretion, the other bordering on the position of a public-service site where you have to be rather more careful. If you look back on recent threads here, you will note that there have been several discussions of the merits of certain pipemakers which cause discomfort here, and which would be even more problematic for NPU to be associated with.
Yet NPU’s forum really ought to be the premier location for people looking for reliable information on the pipes.
I don’t know to what extent the technology supports an editorial policy which would not only prohibit “offensive posting” but also enable it to be filtered out without tying up undue staff resources, but I would certainly like to see the forum on the NPU being opened to interested non-members: ideally the site should be a source of potential new members. And if the software on which the C&F discussion forums are based is affordable, I would strongly recommend it or something similar. The existing NPU site threads just take too much time and too many manipulations.
If you haven’t already done so, I suggest that you do a word search on “NPU” on this forum and that will give you some feedback - not all of it pleasing, but it does reflect the perception of people who are used to a certain standard of service on the www, even if they underestimate the challenges of running an organisation which relies to a considerable extent on voluntary commitment and in which the combination of voluntary and paid staff may cause some difficulties.
Hi pier long time no see. 
As Roger said, having to go looking for passwords is not conductive for using some features of the site a lot..
Another feature I always found extremely irritating is the News section on the home page, generally when you click ‘more’ you are re-directed to a page which gives exactly the same info. Either you give the full blurb on the home page and leave out the link or you give a headline with a link to the full item.
What I would like to see is a searchable catalogue for items held in the archive, not like the picture gallery a fairly randon selection of stuff but a full catalogue that can be used as a research tool, accessible on-line with the guarantee that items can actually be found if you turn up at 15 Henrietta st to have a look at them [or listen to them as the case may be].
These bloody Dutchmen are taking over the show 