Every so often I get curious about crazy spam-relatedstatistics. Today's curiosity started out as a simple question: giventhat spammers generally forge the original addresses on their messages,do they like picking on some domains or do they distribute them randomlyaround? As it happens, identifying messages that have forged sendersis a little bit too much work for a blog entry, so I am answering theclosely related question of what are the most popular domains to appearas the sending domain on spam.

My data comes

Back in AutomationDownside I discussed how one downside of automationwas that either you had to spend time learning all of the extra layersit introduced or you'd become a push-button monkey. There's a consequenceof this that I didn't mention back in the entry.

This push-button monkey status is the silent downside of the futuredeath of system administration that I sketched out recently . All of those sysadmin-less developers doingtheir own deployments from canned recipes aren't going to know what'

On modern Unix systems, there are four different IPv6 environments:

• Some systems do not have IPv6 enabled at all. These systems willreject attempts to create IPv6 sockets and then your code can stopworrying about the rest of this.

• Some systems have dual binding permanently disabled (the example I know of is OpenBSD). Thesesystems will reject attempts to turn the IPV6_V6ONLY socketoption off.

• Some systems support dual binding but have it turned off by default.
• Some systems support dual binding

One of the somewhat obscure things that LVM can do is mirroring. If youmention this, most people will probably ask why on earth you'd wantto use it; mirroring is what software RAID is for, and then you canstack LVM on top if you want to. Well, yes (and I agree with them ingeneral). But I have an unusual situation that makes LVM mirroring verytempting right now.

The background is that I'm in the process of migrating my officeworkstation from a

Right now in the sysadmin world it probably qualifies as heresy to saybad things about the idea of automating your work. But unfortunately forus, there actually are downsides to doing so even if we don't noticethem a lot of the time.

The one I'm going to talk about today is that when you automatesomething, you increase the number of things that people in yourteam need to know. Suppose that you get tired of maintaining yourApache configuration files by hand, so now you put them

In FreeBSD and release engineering ,Nathan Willis summarizes one of John Kozubik's suggestions for FreeBSD releaseengineering:

[...] Second, the project should focus on just one production releaseat a time, and commit to a definite support schedule (Kozubik suggestsfive years as a production release, followed by five years as a"legacy" release). [...]

My reaction is that this is completely infeasible in any open sourceproject that developers will actually want to work on. As I mentioned

Now that I've transitioned to using modern fonts in xterm , I'vedecided to move into the 00s by changing to a UTF-8 based text encoding( I've considered this some time , but onlyonce I had more or less Unicode-enabled fonts did it become activelytempting). Making this shift provoked a small pile of complaints fromFVWM about my bitmap fonts not having all of the font charsets thata true Unicode environment wants, which caused me to start switchingvarious other fonts

Every so often I make an epic mistake, where I drastically misunderstandsomething. A discussion with one of the people behind FVWM in responseto yesterday's entry on selecting terminal windows from the keyboard revealed that I had made one of them about an FVWMfeature called (window) 'States'; a correct understanding of the featureleads to a better version of the FVWM code from my last entry.

What FVWM States are is effectively user-controlled tags for windows,given numbers from 0 through 31 instead of

As part of reorganizing my work desktop to deal with big screens , I decided that I wanted a way toselect terminal windows by name from the keyboard, with some form ofautocompletion for speed. The goal was to give me a faster way to get aparticular terminal window than sweeping my mouse all the way to mytaskbar for terminals and finding thespecific window I wanted. FVWM doesn't have any native features for this,so I had to bolt something together for this out of pieces.

(To make