Sometimes 'unsubscribing' does seem to reduce spam activity
There is one particular email sending place that has for some timebeen the most prolific source of sending attempts to some of my oldaddresses. I put them in IP-level blocks literally years ago (whichmeans that nothing they've sent me for years has been delivered)and ever since then I could count on their relatively small netblockto be either the very top blocked traffic source or at least oneof them. They have in the past been SBL-listed, although they maynot be right now,
What Python versions I can use (June 2014 edition)
Because I like depressing myself and being harsh on Python 3, andalso because Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and Red Hat Enterprise 7 were bothreleased relatively recently, I'm going to inventory what versionsof Python (both 2 and 3) are available to me on the various machinesthat I use and care about. Let's start with the two recently releasedmajor Linux distributions, because there's some terrible news forPython 3.
As I write this, the current versions of Python are 2
Some notes on Go's godoc and what it formats how
I spent part of today banging my head against Go 's godoc tool ,so here are some notes about what it formats how. In general godocis frustratingly under-documented and the available documentationis scattered around hither and yon.
As lots of things will tell you, you write documentation for anentire package by putting a comment block at the start of one filein the package. Like other documentation comments, this commentmust end right before the package line. If you accidentallyleave a blank line between the end
Would I be comfortable documenting our systems in some sort of public?
One of the questions that I wind up asking myself any time I thinkabout using wikis for sysadmin purposes is how comfortable I amhaving our system documentation sitting out in some sort of publicview. Around here there are effectively two or three levels ofpublic view we could have; it's easy enough to make it so that ourdocumentation could be visible to the world, to anyone at theuniversity, or only to people inside the department.
There are two broad problems that I see with any degree of exposure
My view: a wiki by itself will not solve your problems
Every so often a sysadmin is in an environment with a documentationproblem and they think 'I know what will fix this! We'll set up awiki'. It is my view that that sysadmin is often wrong, especiallyif they've framed their problem that way.
There are certainly problems that a wiki can help with. If theproblem is that people write documentation but then never updateit because the update process is such a pain, maybe a wiki willhelp. If the problem is that all
Weird spammer behavior: a non-relaying relay attempt
One of the the interesting things about running a sinkhole SMTPserver that accepts everything and basically serves as a spamtrapis that I get to see all sorts of odd and crazy spammer behavior.Take the following SMTP transaction log:
220 hisokusa.cs.toronto.edu go-smtpdHELO smelektronik.de250 hisokusa.cs.toronto.edu Hello 86.34.202.208MAIL FROM:250 Okay, I
The web is social, and thus minor features can matter a lot
For a very long time, DWiki (the software behind this blog )had a very primitive comment system. One of the ways that it wasprimitive is that it didn't have any explicit user-visible fieldfor your name. When you made a comment here it showed up with yourIP address at the time and it was up to you to explicitly sign thecomment in some way if you wanted to. I always knew that this wasrather low-rent, but it took me years to get around
I'm not very impressed with Ubuntu 14.04 LTS so far
For various reasons I've only recently gotten around to doinganything with Ubuntu 14.04. Specifically I've been working onbringing up our new iSCSI backends on Ubuntu 14.04 instead of12.04, since this obviously more desirable for machines thatwe expect to run for four or five years. As a result and to beblunt, I'm not particularly happy with Ubuntu 14.04 right now.
The most serious failure is that Ubuntu 14
Undoing an errant 'git commit --amend'
Suppose, not entirely hypothetically, that late some evening youcommit a change and somewhat later that evening notice that youleft something out of it. Sleepily confident that you haven't pushedyour first commit you fix the omission with '
git commit --amend',start updating your copy of the repo at work only to have it throwyou into a merge, and discover that not only did you propagate thefirst commit, you pushed it to the public Github repo . Oops. Now you need toreverse or
An init system has two jobs
Ever since System V init came on the scene, it's been clear that aUnix init system really has not one but two jobs. I don't quitemean this in the sense of init's historical roles but in a more high level sense of what people want from their init.
The first job is to be init, PID 1, with everything that that implies.Init starts things on boot, supervises processes, does things onshutdown, doesn't crash, and so on. This
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