I'd be glad to help with the mailing list and Web site. I've been with BALUG since the beginning, and am an experienced Mailman listadmin and Linux sysadmin.
(One thing I'm bad at, so please don't ask: Lining up speakers.)
I've taken out an account on the wiki, and joined this list and the new incarnation of balug-talk on the "lists.balug.org" host. I'm reading docs on Postnuke.
Some concerns:
1. balug-talk's archive has always been publicly accessible. Suddenly, the new one isn't. Problems: (1) It's not what the membership has always wanted and expected, and (more primarily because) (2) a big part of the point of answering questions publicly is to advance the state of collective knowledge, e.g., by people finding the questions & answers via Web search.
My 2 cents: This change really shoots BALUG in the foot. Please un-do it ASAP.
2. Host "lists.balug.org" doesn't accept mail to the postmaster account as required by RFC2821 and numerous other SMTP standards. (Specifically, it 550-rejects such mail with a "user unknown" message.) This ensures that mail from BALUG will be (needlessly and avoidably) discarded or rejected as probable spam, _and_ denies members of the public to use of a required administrative contact in case there's something wrong.
(If this is something "dreamhost" screws up globally and is not under Michael's control, please just say so.)
3. http://lists.balug.org/private.cgi/balug-talk-balug.org/2005-March/ has some mis-parsed entries in it, that appear to be fragments of prior years' mails to balug-talk. This is almost certainly fixable, but will require command-line access (to edit the mbox file) and ability to regenerate the Pipermail archive.
To see what I'm talking about, look at the 15 entries marked "No subject".
4 As always, CABAL appreciates the calendar link from the BALUG front page to CABAL events. However, there's no "Sat, March 26 2005" CABAL event. Because of the desire to help out SVLUG and to avoid Easter weekend, CABAL's second meeting of the month was this _past_ Saturday, the 19th.
5. Attempting to bring up the BALUG calendar (http://www.balug.org/index.php?module=PostCalendar&func=view&tplview...) shows this at the top of the page:
Warning: Smarty error: problem creating directory "modules/PostCalendar/pntemplates/cache/dad8523a2e18f1929871d45a6df8aac5/%%164/%%1643473877" in /home/.bluebellblender/miamlh1/balug.org/modules/PostCalendar/pnincludes/Smarty/Smarty.class.php on line 589
6. BALUG's "next meeting" information's out of date. I'd fix it if I had access! ;->
Excellent points! I was thinking of posting a "to do"/wish list for balug-admin-balug.org@lists.balug.org matters. Since there's probably at least a bit of overlap, let me (hopefully fairly briefly) mention what I was thinking of:
To do / wish list items (not necessarily a complete list): Mailing lists - get the "old(er)" publicly accessible list archives back on-line. Consistent URLs - seems the URLs of the archives have bounced about a lot - they should be consistent, so older links work (directly or via redirect), and all the archives for a given list (and its replacement, and its replacement's replacement, ...) should be reasonably findable under a common URL or URL scheme. One of the things I noticed with some Google searching and peeking at Google cache last time the list broke ... apparently this recent episode isn't the first time the list has been broken and set up with a different list name and a different archive location (/URLs) ... get it together (literally, at least). The latest round of *replacement* list names are significantly longer e-mail addresses (both local part and domain) - we should carefully consider what they should be for the "permanent" e-mail addresses used for each list, and carefully work to get to that goal (e.g. balug-talk-balug.org@lists.balug.org is rather long, not-so-user-friendly and relatively redundant e-mail address for a BALUG talk list) The list archives should be public unless "we", as a group, by consensus (or at least plurality) decide they shouldn't be "public" (see also Rick's fine comments :-)) I think most of my other key points (key content on main BALUG page, BALUG calendar and its links/data, etc.) have been covered earlier by myself and/or others so I'll try to avoid being redundant on those points (they should also be findable in relatively recent archives).
Quoting Rick Moen rick@linuxmafia.com:
I'd be glad to help with the mailing list and Web site. I've been with BALUG since the beginning, and am an experienced Mailman listadmin and Linux sysadmin.
(One thing I'm bad at, so please don't ask: Lining up speakers.)
I've taken out an account on the wiki, and joined this list and the new incarnation of balug-talk on the "lists.balug.org" host. I'm reading docs on Postnuke.
Some concerns:
- balug-talk's archive has always been publicly accessible. Suddenly,
the new one isn't. Problems: (1) It's not what the membership has always wanted and expected, and (more primarily because) (2) a big part of the point of answering questions publicly is to advance the state of collective knowledge, e.g., by people finding the questions & answers via Web search.
My 2 cents: This change really shoots BALUG in the foot. Please un-do it ASAP.
- Host "lists.balug.org" doesn't accept mail to the postmaster account
as required by RFC2821 and numerous other SMTP standards. (Specifically, it 550-rejects such mail with a "user unknown" message.) This ensures that mail from BALUG will be (needlessly and avoidably) discarded or rejected as probable spam, _and_ denies members of the public to use of a required administrative contact in case there's something wrong.
(If this is something "dreamhost" screws up globally and is not under Michael's control, please just say so.)
has some mis-parsed entries in it, that appear to be fragments of prior years' mails to balug-talk. This is almost certainly fixable, but will require command-line access (to edit the mbox file) and ability to regenerate the Pipermail archive.
To see what I'm talking about, look at the 15 entries marked "No subject".
4 As always, CABAL appreciates the calendar link from the BALUG front page to CABAL events. However, there's no "Sat, March 26 2005" CABAL event. Because of the desire to help out SVLUG and to avoid Easter weekend, CABAL's second meeting of the month was this _past_ Saturday, the 19th.
- Attempting to bring up the BALUG calendar
(http://www.balug.org/index.php?module=PostCalendar&func=view&tplview...)
shows this at the top of the page:
Warning: Smarty error: problem creating directory
"modules/PostCalendar/pntemplates/cache/dad8523a2e18f1929871d45a6df8aac5/%%164/%%1643473877"
in
/home/.bluebellblender/miamlh1/balug.org/modules/PostCalendar/pnincludes/Smarty/Smarty.class.php
on line 589
- BALUG's "next meeting" information's out of date. I'd fix it if I
had access! ;->
Michael Paoli wrote:
To do / wish list items (not necessarily a complete list): Mailing lists - get the "old(er)" publicly accessible list archives back on-line.
Both balug-talk and balug-announce are public now. Balug-admin is private. Apparently the default option was private... I didn't notice it.
Consistent URLs - seems the URLs of the archives have bounced about a lot - they should be consistent, so older links work (directly or via redirect), and all the archives for a given list (and its replacement, and its replacement's replacement, ...) should be reasonably findable under a common URL or URL scheme. One of the things I noticed with some Google searching and peeking at Google cache last time the list broke ... apparently this recent episode isn't the first time the list has been broken and set up with a different list name and a different archive location (/URLs) ... get it together (literally, at least). The latest round of *replacement* list names are significantly longer e-mail addresses (both local part and domain) - we should carefully consider what they should be for the "permanent" e-mail addresses used for each list, and carefully work to get to that goal (e.g. balug-talk-balug.org@lists.balug.org is rather long, not-so-user-friendly and relatively redundant e-mail address for a BALUG talk list)
This is a "dreamhost" issue. Because I don't have direct access or control of their mailman setup, when I chose to setup the mailing lists there, I didn't realize that they would append balug-talk with all that other garbage. This probably can't be changed unless the mailing lists are hosted elsewhere (someone else would need to take that on).
If anyone feels like taking this on, I will GLADLY give full access (as much as I have) to the site/mailing list data, etc.
Quoting Rick Moen rick@linuxmafia.com:
I'd be glad to help with the mailing list and Web site. I've been with BALUG since the beginning, and am an experienced Mailman listadmin and Linux sysadmin.
Great, hopefully Dick/Larry will get in touch with you about this (to see if they agree). I will GLADLY help get you access to all the data for the big move.
- balug-talk's archive has always been publicly accessible. Suddenly,
the new one isn't. Problems: (1) It's not what the membership has always wanted and expected, and (more primarily because) (2) a big part of the point of answering questions publicly is to advance the state of collective knowledge, e.g., by people finding the questions & answers via Web search.
Fixed... see above.
My 2 cents: This change really shoots BALUG in the foot. Please un-do it ASAP.
- Host "lists.balug.org" doesn't accept mail to the postmaster account
as required by RFC2821 and numerous other SMTP standards. (Specifically, it 550-rejects such mail with a "user unknown" message.) This ensures that mail from BALUG will be (needlessly and avoidably) discarded or rejected as probable spam, _and_ denies members of the public to use of a required administrative contact in case there's something wrong.
(If this is something "dreamhost" screws up globally and is not under Michael's control, please just say so.)
This is a dreamhost thing, not my doing. Yet another wonderful reason for someone to take over the site / mailing lists. :)
has some mis-parsed entries in it, that appear to be fragments of prior years' mails to balug-talk. This is almost certainly fixable, but will require command-line access (to edit the mbox file) and ability to regenerate the Pipermail archive.
To see what I'm talking about, look at the 15 entries marked "No subject".
I doubt we would be able to fix this ourselves while the mailing lists are hosted with dreamhost... though I could submit a ticket for them to fix it. Maybe this could wait until the mailing lists move again...
- Attempting to bring up the BALUG calendar
(http://www.balug.org/index.php?module=PostCalendar&func=view&tplview...)
shows this at the top of the page:
Warning: Smarty error: problem creating directory
"modules/PostCalendar/pntemplates/cache/dad8523a2e18f1929871d45a6df8aac5/%%164/%%1643473877"
in
/home/.bluebellblender/miamlh1/balug.org/modules/PostCalendar/pnincludes/Smarty/Smarty.class.php
on line 589
This is a known (to postnuke/postcalendar users) issue. Any admin can clear the "smarty" cache to fix this.
- BALUG's "next meeting" information's out of date. I'd fix it if I
had access! ;->
I've just added xavier and rick to the admin group on the site. Just log in as usual and you will see another group of links, including the ever important "administration" link. This is where you will find all the controls for the site. Feel free to poke around and clean up/fix whatever you want!!!
Lastly - I've just (literally) moved into my new house today, and the movers will be moving everything in tomorrow, so I will be a bit busy over the next couple days.
Luckily a neighbor has an open access point (that I'm using now), so I'm not totally disconnected.
Regards,
Michael
On Tue, 22 Mar 2005, Michael Hubbard wrote:
Date: Tue, 22 Mar 2005 04:57:19 -0600 From: Michael Hubbard michael@offroadgeek.com To: balug-admin-balug.org@lists.balug.org Subject: Re: [Balug-admin] I'd like to help
Michael Paoli wrote:
To do / wish list items (not necessarily a complete list): Mailing lists - get the "old(er)" publicly accessible list archives back on-line.
Both balug-talk and balug-announce are public now. Balug-admin is private. Apparently the default option was private... I didn't notice it.
Consistent URLs - seems the URLs of the archives have bounced about a lot - they should be consistent, so older links work (directly or via redirect), and all the archives for a given list (and its replacement, and its replacement's replacement, ...) should be reasonably findable under a common URL or URL scheme. One of the things I noticed with some Google searching and peeking at Google cache last time the list broke ... apparently this recent episode isn't the first time the list has been broken and set up with a different list name and a different archive location (/URLs) ... get it together (literally, at least). The latest round of *replacement* list names are significantly longer e-mail addresses (both local part and domain) - we should carefully consider what they should be for the "permanent" e-mail addresses used for each list, and carefully work to get to that goal (e.g. balug-talk-balug.org@lists.balug.org is rather long, not-so-user-friendly and relatively redundant e-mail address for a BALUG talk list)
This is a "dreamhost" issue. Because I don't have direct access or control of their mailman setup, when I chose to setup the mailing lists there, I didn't realize that they would append balug-talk with all that other garbage. This probably can't be changed unless the mailing lists are hosted elsewhere (someone else would need to take that on).
If anyone feels like taking this on, I will GLADLY give full access (as much as I have) to the site/mailing list data, etc.
Quoting Rick Moen rick@linuxmafia.com:
I'd be glad to help with the mailing list and Web site. I've been with BALUG since the beginning, and am an experienced Mailman listadmin and Linux sysadmin.
Great, hopefully Dick/Larry will get in touch with you about this (to see if they agree). I will GLADLY help get you access to all the data for the big move.
Dick will try to call Rick Tuesday early night, so he said last night when he & I talked. I think will agree but want Dick to speak with Rick first.
- balug-talk's archive has always been publicly accessible. Suddenly,
the new one isn't. Problems: (1) It's not what the membership has always wanted and expected, and (more primarily because) (2) a big part of the point of answering questions publicly is to advance the state of collective knowledge, e.g., by people finding the questions & answers via Web search.
Fixed... see above.
Glad fixed.
My 2 cents: This change really shoots BALUG in the foot. Please un-do it ASAP.
- Host "lists.balug.org" doesn't accept mail to the postmaster account
as required by RFC2821 and numerous other SMTP standards. (Specifically, it 550-rejects such mail with a "user unknown" message.) This ensures that mail from BALUG will be (needlessly and avoidably) discarded or rejected as probable spam, _and_ denies members of the public to use of a required administrative contact in case there's something wrong.
(If this is something "dreamhost" screws up globally and is not under Michael's control, please just say so.)
This is a dreamhost thing, not my doing. Yet another wonderful reason for someone to take over the site / mailing lists. :)
has some mis-parsed entries in it, that appear to be fragments of prior years' mails to balug-talk. This is almost certainly fixable, but will require command-line access (to edit the mbox file) and ability to regenerate the Pipermail archive.
To see what I'm talking about, look at the 15 entries marked "No subject".
I doubt we would be able to fix this ourselves while the mailing lists are hosted with dreamhost... though I could submit a ticket for them to fix it. Maybe this could wait until the mailing lists move again...
- Attempting to bring up the BALUG calendar
(http://www.balug.org/index.php?module=PostCalendar&func=view&tplview...)
shows this at the top of the page:
Warning: Smarty error: problem creating directory
"modules/PostCalendar/pntemplates/cache/dad8523a2e18f1929871d45a6df8aac5/%%164/%%1643473877"
in
/home/.bluebellblender/miamlh1/balug.org/modules/PostCalendar/pnincludes/Smarty/Smarty.class.php
on line 589
This is a known (to postnuke/postcalendar users) issue. Any admin can clear the "smarty" cache to fix this.
If I have permission I do not know how.
- BALUG's "next meeting" information's out of date. I'd fix it if I
had access! ;->
I've just added xavier and rick to the admin group on the site. Just log in as usual and you will see another group of links, including the ever important "administration" link. This is where you will find all the controls for the site. Feel free to poke around and clean up/fix whatever you want!!!
I have updated to say next meeting is April 19th. But we still have no speaker lined for meeting.
Lastly - I've just (literally) moved into my new house today, and the movers will be moving everything in tomorrow, so I will be a bit busy over the next couple days.
Glad the sale has closed and you can move in! You will busy and tired for a while!
Luckily a neighbor has an open access point (that I'm using now), so I'm not totally disconnected.
Yes, That was very lucky for all of us!
Regards,
Michael _______________________________________________ Balug-admin-balug.org mailing list Balug-admin-balug.org@lists.balug.org http://lists.balug.org/listinfo.cgi/balug-admin-balug.org
As a comment to why I have not been active over the weekend; 1. Thursday morning started a four day weekend as usuall then she works for ten days. 2. My wife (Sandy) have been in two car accidents over the weekend, not any major damage to our car or us, just our nerves shot, I have not been able to sleep good since!
Has taken real effort to drive the car and then be able to do tasks that were needing to be done! I will do things as I can for balug.
I do appreciate Michael Hubbard's work for Balug! I for one sorry have not told Michael more often!
It will be good to have the tasks be spread around, it will be less work for anyone person to do.
Take care one and all!
Larry Platzek larryp@inow.com
Quoting Larry Platzek (larryp@inow.com):
Dick will try to call Rick Tuesday early night, so he said last night when he & I talked. I think will agree but want Dick to speak with Rick first.
Dick, if I'm not home yet when you call, please feel free to call my cellular #, which I'll send in private mail.
Larry, do look after Sandy, and yourself! ;->
Quoting Michael Paoli (mp@rawbw.com):
To do / wish list items (not necessarily a complete list):
Mailing lists - get the "old(er)" publicly accessible list archives back on-line.
I'm wondering if maybe Michael didn't get the old mbox file from David Sifry, and then either he or dreamhost.net/dreamhost.com attempted to regenerate the pipermail archive from there. The reason I speculate that is that the "March 2005" HTML archive appears to have fragments of really old, prior years' posts that I recognise among the fifteen "No subject" entries.
I hope Michael will clarify. If he has the mbox files, then we're in good shape for the long term, and it's just a matter of cleanup. (I'd like to get a copy of the cumulative mbox file, in fact.)
Consistent URLs - seems the URLs of the archives have bounced about The latest round of *replacement* list names are significantly longer e-mail addresses (both local part and domain) - we should carefully consider what they should be for the "permanent" e-mail addresses used for each list, and carefully work to get to that goal (e.g. balug-talk-balug.org@lists.balug.org is rather long, not-so-user-friendly and relatively redundant e-mail address for a BALUG talk list)
I would suggest, IMVAO, that the recent change combines good with bad. Thanks to Michael's kind explanation, the "balug-talk-balug.org" part is explained as a dreamhost-ism. Bad (to be corrected later).
I'd maintain that the "lists.balug.org" part is good, and is what should have been done originally. That is, one should ideally use "role" CNAME records (or A records, where SMTP is involved) for each distinct major public function that a host will serve. This level of indirect addressing lets you reassign individual roles when necessary to different underlying hosts, smoothly transitioning them just by editing DNS records (and then waiting a while for caches to time out).
So, I'd urge _not_ simplifying back to "balug.org", for the list addresses.
Rick Moen wrote:
Quoting Michael Paoli (mp@rawbw.com):
balug-talk-balug.org@lists.balug.org is rather long, not-so-user-friendly and relatively redundant e-mail address for a BALUG talk list)
I'd maintain that the "lists.balug.org" part is good, and is what should have been done originally. That is, one should ideally use "role" CNAME records (or A records, where SMTP is involved) for each distinct major public function that a host will serve. This level of indirect addressing lets you reassign individual roles when necessary to different underlying hosts, smoothly transitioning them just by editing DNS records (and then waiting a while for caches to time out).
Further, with decent control over DNS, the timeouts can be decreased a day or two before the transition, which would nearly make future transitions smooth.
So, I'd urge _not_ simplifying back to "balug.org", for the list addresses.
I agree.
List addresses like: admin@lists.balug.org announcement@lists.balug.org talk@lists.balug.org ..are almost delightful to read IMHO.
Quoting Xavier (balug-talk@xav.to):
Further, with decent control over DNS, the timeouts can be decreased a day or two before the transition, which would nearly make future transitions smooth.
It helps, but (just in case you didn't know) there is an annoyingly large amount of caching DNS out on the Net that ignores TTL. Plan for some laggards to take up to about 3 days to catch up, even if you reduce TTL well in advance.
List addresses like: admin@lists.balug.org announcement@lists.balug.org
announce@lists.balug.org
talk@lists.balug.org ..are almost delightful to read IMHO.
Beware of namespace collisions with site-administrative addresses that exist for other purposes. Thus, "admin@" is often already spoken for.
Xavier wrote:
Rick Moen wrote:
Quoting Michael Paoli (mp@rawbw.com):
balug-talk-balug.org@lists.balug.org is rather long, not-so-user-friendly and relatively redundant e-mail address for a BALUG talk list)
I'd maintain that the "lists.balug.org" part is good, and is what should have been done originally. That is, one should ideally use "role" CNAME records (or A records, where SMTP is involved) for each distinct major public function that a host will serve. This level of indirect addressing lets you reassign individual roles when necessary to different underlying hosts, smoothly transitioning them just by editing DNS records (and then waiting a while for caches to time out).
Further, with decent control over DNS, the timeouts can be decreased a day or two before the transition, which would nearly make future transitions smooth.
Somehow you don't understand what a "hosting provider" actually provides. They usually only offer simplified control over things like DNS.
Michael Hubbard wrote:
Xavier wrote:
Further, with decent control over DNS, the timeouts can be decreased a day or two before the transition, which would nearly make future transitions smooth.
Somehow you don't understand what a "hosting provider" actually provides. They usually only offer simplified control over things like DNS.
Usually, yes. However my current provider does offer what I mention.
Therefore it didn't seem as unreasonable as you make it out to be. (I don't assume "dreamhost" will be around forever, and I don't assume DNS service cannot be moved if enough interest is there to)
BTW, good points all around Moen! (I got caught up in the fantasy when I mentioned admin@)
Well, I could potentially do it at a later date, but why don't you pencil me in for a presentation on LVM at the 2005-05-17 BALUG meeting, if we don't have or come up with something we'd prefer to do or have presented at that meeting. I'd likely be able to confirm for the 2005-05-17 BALUG meeting by the end of the 2005-04-19 BALUG meeting.
I've got laptop, and would need whatever we might need available to have it hooked up to the media/video projector. I'd also want to test the hook-up at least once prior to presentation (perhaps a brief check-out at the 2005-04-19 BALUG meeting). I'd want to well match video output to native or optimal capabilities of the media/video projector - otherwise the video quality tends to suffer significantly (most projectors typically scale up or down in such cases, but the output is much less crisp / more fuzzy in such circumstances). So far I've spent very little time with my laptop driving any external video (less than 90 minutes total to date), so again, reasons to do a bit of testing of that ahead of time (make sure the video output will work as I expect, and optimize for media/video projector resolution - and know what optimal resolution to design for before I put together the visuals for such a presentation).
Anyway, LVM - Logical Volume Manager - I've been using various forms of logical volume managers for about 9 years now, LINUX for almost 7 years now, and LVM on LINUX quite extensively for almost 2 years now. Presentation-wise I could give a fair introduction to LINUX's LVM, including presentation materials and live demo.
Michael Paoli wrote:
I've got laptop, and would need whatever we might need available to have it hooked up to the media/video projector.
I don't recall the specifics on who has what handy there...
I'd want to well match video output to native or optimal capabilities of the media/video projector - otherwise the video quality tends to suffer significantly (most projectors typically scale up or down in such cases, but the output is much less crisp / more fuzzy in such circumstances).
Well, I've seen nothing but awful from the projector.
I suggest keeping high contrast and pretending your display will be 320x200 {might be slightly better than that).
On Mar 25, 2005, at 7:58 PM, Xavier wrote:
Michael Paoli wrote:
I've got laptop, and would need whatever we might need available to have it hooked up to the media/video projector.
I don't recall the specifics on who has what handy there...
Dick and Larry usually bring the projector...
On Fri, 25 Mar 2005, Michael Hubbard wrote:
Date: Fri, 25 Mar 2005 21:10:20 -0600 From: Michael Hubbard michael@offroadgeek.com To: balug-admin-balug.org@lists.balug.org Subject: Re: [Balug-admin] BALUG presentation(s)/speakers (2005-05-17 - LVM?)
On Mar 25, 2005, at 7:58 PM, Xavier wrote:
Michael Paoli wrote:
I've got laptop, and would need whatever we might need available to have it hooked up to the media/video projector.
I don't recall the specifics on who has what handy there...
Dick and Larry usually bring the projector...
Yes, Dick has the projector.
May I suggest that you make a few sample slides to check what works, at the April meeting?
So we can tell any speaker what will work best?
Larry Platzek larryp@inow.com
Rick Moen wrote:
Quoting Michael Paoli (mp@rawbw.com):
To do / wish list items (not necessarily a complete list):
Mailing lists - get the "old(er)" publicly accessible list archives back on-line.
I'm wondering if maybe Michael didn't get the old mbox file from David Sifry, and then either he or dreamhost.net/dreamhost.com attempted to regenerate the pipermail archive from there. The reason I speculate that is that the "March 2005" HTML archive appears to have fragments of really old, prior years' posts that I recognise among the fifteen "No subject" entries.
I hope Michael will clarify. If he has the mbox files, then we're in good shape for the long term, and it's just a matter of cleanup. (I'd like to get a copy of the cumulative mbox file, in fact.)
You're wondering wrong here. The files I got from David were complete... but that was more than a year and a half ago!
The mbox files that I sent to dreamhost customer service was from the hacked server (a slackware box where it was just previously hosted).
It was probably just an import problem. I don't have the time right now to figure that out. If someone wants to, by all means... just let me know and I'll set you up with an account under my dreamhost account.
Consistent URLs - seems the URLs of the archives have bounced about The latest round of *replacement* list names are significantly longer e-mail addresses (both local part and domain) - we should carefully consider what they should be for the "permanent" e-mail addresses used for each list, and carefully work to get to that goal (e.g. balug-talk-balug.org@lists.balug.org is rather long, not-so-user-friendly and relatively redundant e-mail address for a BALUG talk list)
I would suggest, IMVAO, that the recent change combines good with bad. Thanks to Michael's kind explanation, the "balug-talk-balug.org" part is explained as a dreamhost-ism. Bad (to be corrected later).
I'd maintain that the "lists.balug.org" part is good, and is what should have been done originally. That is, one should ideally use "role" CNAME records (or A records, where SMTP is involved) for each distinct major public function that a host will serve. This level of indirect addressing lets you reassign individual roles when necessary to different underlying hosts, smoothly transitioning them just by editing DNS records (and then waiting a while for caches to time out).
So, I'd urge _not_ simplifying back to "balug.org", for the list addresses.
Like I said before... this is the way it stays unless someone else offers to take over the mailing lists and host them. It's nice to have full control of your own box and setup... but that's not something I can offer now (or anymore).
Michael