Archive for December, 2006
Well I think I may disappear today, granted its coming up on 5am, and I am awake, but I think today I may venture out, and take the camera with me to get some shots, its a nice day thus far, weather outside is nice, good breeze, very clear sky - saw the rents off a minute ago, they are on their way to LALA Land for my dad’s dentist appointment (he gets free gold teeth work for being a test subject) - so been outside a little already.
But a photo day may be in the cards for me today, just not sure, considering packing up now, and do a day of shooting - not sure, as with most days anymore, I go to take a day “easy” and the emails pile up, already had 2 things this morning - 1 reported to me, and 1 I found, so things cleared up a bit, scary stuff, but contained.
Spam front - in the 12-02-06, this domain and a few others have had spam filtering turned on, in that time for this domain alone, 238 pieces of spam have been blocked - simply, awesome - other sites who have a tad more active email, have seen thousands in the last 6 days, one in particular we brought back to life because we KNEW things would be bad on it, its a now dead dial-up ISP from here in Bakersfield - for 2 years the domain has been inactive, we brought it back thinking “oh it’ll get barely any….” well as of checking just now, it has blocked 11,552 pieces of spam, 235 viruses/harmful emails. Wowza! Quite a catch of junk!
So what’s next on my plate? Well moving offices, shutting down the 19th street location, just getting … well run down some, and issues with the heat/cooling of the room, and quite frankly, got a better offer 
so going to try to be out before the first of the year, so good stuff, but this leads into the spam filter going into stage 2, some hardware upgrades, some software tweaks, and a second node on a different line to help increase the robustness of mail contact - which for some customers will be a blessing, as it’ll give their mail 2-3 places to come in around the US when things are done - but still working out pricing - BUT if your a customer of FH/TN or even a friend account and use your POP3/IMAP and want to get in on the final leg of testing, drop me an email, let me know, and I can get you setup and online to start filtering your mail.
Anywhoo - 5am is now 6 minutes away, I think I am going to go see what my camera is doing, and maybe pack up the car and go for a drive. Have a Good Friday All!
The last 2 weeks there has been an increasing number of blocks on servers I work on, AOL, Yahoo, Hotmail are all on some kick to simply block domains, IP’s, whoever the feel like.
In a email trouble ticket I had open with Hotmail, I asked to see an example of the Spam I was apparently sending out, but they could not produce anything, and as I bounced around their techs I even had one say “Your not blocked!” and then suddenly 5 test mails I had sent from Hotmail showed up in my inbox on my server, and I could magically send to Hotmail again.
It’s getting old, because MY customers are getting angry at me for something I have no control over, granted when it comes down to the IP owner, and the server administrator who needs to contact AOL/Yahoo/Hotmail - that is me, folks are getting very frustrated with me and other companies admins who I work with on their systems. Some would say “Well it’s your problem!” well as much as I wish it was, it’s not. If it was my issue, trust me, I’d be awake for a week working on things to get it ironed out, but in these cases I have no control which sucks - and it’s not a automated process for removal, it’s not “Fill out this form with the domain/IP and we’ll send a confirmation” - it’s a human process, and while I am not saying that that their staff are jerks, its just pulling teeth to get information, but thankfully some folks have been very helpful in helping us comply with new “requirements” for SPF/SenderID/DomainKeys from the various providers, but that kindness is not across the board.
So I guess for now until some of the spam volume comes down, it will continue to be my fault, but I wish it wasn’t, as I’d really like mail to once again just work.
How bad is spam lately? Well in the testing of the new spam filter for clients, here’s in the last few days graphed:
Around 80% spam for 5 domains. That’s a lot of spam! But the filter is catching most of it, I have noticed only about 3 get through on this domain, in which Thunderbird picked up the slack - so all in all, it’s a pretty nice setup!
This is not yet prime-time - but its pretty nice, more on it through-out the week.
The friend’s server is done mostly setup, still working out the kinks in making sure mail/etc. all have proper external IP addresses so when the server talks to the outside world, it’s not with the internal 10.x.x.x IP address, but also have to snag a few software licenses - so maybe middle of next week for sure, just want to make sure it’s setup nice and secure & working nicely.
Anywhoo - its nearly 2am, which is becoming my norm, but I think I am going to head to my freshly made bed, and mess up the covers Night all.
This does not feel like the weekend, I feel like I am just coming off a LONG Monday, and it’s about time to goto bed - but all in all a productive week, the spam testing has gone well, it’s first full day 3000 messages processed for 5 domains, and 2800 mails tagged as spam, 60 as viruses, twas crazy nuts, but a promising start - once this filter goes production, it’s going to be awesome!
Got the friend server installed tonight, and it’s looking good - came out of my building to find a fight just breaking up, and the police coming in to find out what happened - kinda crazy/scary - but thats the joys of downtown - but all in all things got done, even setup some of the basic firewall rules for the server, so pretty awesome!
I am exhausted in every sense of the word, physically, mentally, emotionally, you name it, I am it. Just been some crazy highs and lows with all of this server stuff, I have some ideas for the current servers I want to put into place, and with a small boost to the budget, I am going to probably move forward and do it here soon, but its all good - dad is doing better (thanks for the prayers) and since I am really scatter brained, I am going to end on that note, maybe more tomorrow… who knows - night folks, have a good weekend.
Been a whirlwind week, seems like I haven’t really got a ton of sleep, just a lot on my mind honestly - mainly work related, but some personal stuff mixed in there somewhere 
I have been working the last 3 days though in testing this new spam appliance, and I must say - results are a little mixed, but still no false-positives, so I can cut the amount of traffic to servers and have the system actually create a Quarantine like your anti-virus program would.
So needless to say, I am pretty happy, I put this domain up for testing, the results were fair, 36 emails in thus far, out of that only 1 piece of spam made it though - 33 were spam, and the others were tests I sent from 2 networks to see if the new MX records had taken hold - but it’s working! So I am going to let it ride for the weekend, and go from there, but hopefully I can unleash 2 setups:
- Basic Filtering - All customers can get this, it helps two fold on my end as it increases effectiveness of spam filtering, but also removes load from SpamAssassin from running on the servers! Less load, more speed, less space, higher efficiency.
- Advanced Filtering - This one will offer a full blown access to a quarantine which customers can login to and manage if they got a message tagged as spam, but will also offer some fail-over on mail, as it will help store mail if the host is down (rare, but it could happen).
So pretty excited, looking at maybe $10 a month for a domain with 50 or less email addresses for the Advanced filtering, and $30 for 50 or more - but the pricing isn’t set in stone, but the next goal is to re-build the appliance a bit, bigger primary drive and swap the current primary to secondary and throw on a bit more ram, so pretty exciting!
But that’s been my week, some minor fun in there - was on the news, had lunch with some friends, dinner with some friends, so I am not completely a work-a-holic, but I could definitely use a nap :) Well back to it! Another 5 hours then it’s off to build the friend server!
