Last week's Referer spammers have changedwhat they're shilling for and mutated their methods. Currently theyseem to be shilling for online poker, although instead of clickthroughpayments they seem to be angling for 'affiliate' payouts when they getpeople to sign up at places like pacificpoker.com, fairpoker.com,partypoker.com, and 888.com (which seem unrelated to each other).

All of the websites being Referer-spammed for are still at the IPaddress 64.4

The overall SMTP connection rate has dropped from last week , down to 140,000 SMTP connectionsfrom at least 36,000 different IP addresses. The SMTP frontend hit ahigh-water of 16 simultaneous connections, I believe relatively earlyin the week, so I suspect we saw the spillover from last week'straffic burst last Sunday and maybe Monday and then a normal rest ofthe week.

Kernel level IP rejections:

Host/Mask           Packets   Bytes207.2

The problem with working on automatic installers is that testing themis such a slow and tedious process. These days, it takes about 30minutes to reinstall Fedora Core 4, with patches and local changes, onmy test machine. (Then when something looks like it works, I have todo three tests instead of just one: upgrade from Fedora Core 2 (withan extra reinstall to get back to FC2), reinstall Fedora Core 4, andinstall from a USB memory stick.)

Because of this