Weekly spam summary on March 10th, 2007
This week, we:
- got 14,862 messages from 263 different IP addresses.
- handled 21,019 sessions from 1,246 different IP addresses.
- received 197,155 connections from at least 66,752 different IPaddresses.
- hit a highwater of 11 connections being checked at once.
Volume is definitely down from last week ,although the session volume is up slightly. The per day numbers havesome significant fluctuations:
| Day | Connections |
What a sysadmin's machine should be able to do
What a sysadmin's machine should be able to do has been on my mindrecently, because my group is working on getting everyone upgraded fromrandom creaky old hardware to modern PCs. (It's a somewhat contentiousissue in many quarters, because it's not obvious to a lot of people thatsysadmins need much more than a (graphical) terminal.)
At a high level, I feel that a sysadmin's machine should be able to burnDVDs, drive dual displays, and run fully virtualized
Why hashcash schemes for email will never be adopted
Hashcash schemes are anattempt to slow down the rate that spammers can send email by makingthem burn CPU time on some non-trivial calculation. This soundssuperficially attractive (and has ever since 1997), but will neverbe adopted; in fact, the idea is dead on arrival.
To see why, we only need to observe that hashcash has a disproportionateeffect on the heaviest senders of email; in fact, this is exactly whatit is designed to do. Now think of what this does
A belated set of more power consumption numbers
Following up on previous numbers , here area few more (mixed in with some repeated from last time, foreasier comparison):
| Samsung SyncMaster 900NF 19" CRT displaying stuff | 83 watts |
| Dell 1907FP LCD displaying stuff | 26 watts |
Clearly, switching to LCDs can pay off. Bearing in mind that mycomputers seem to idle at around 75 to 90 watts, using a 19" CRT isroughly the equivalent of having a second one running.
Here's
A bad popup dialog
Imagine this: you click a directory folder in the desktop browser toopen it up, and a popup dialog appears that says:
Opening 'Something'.You can cancel this operationby clicking cancel.(The
is a dialog button, the only one in the dialog.) Quick! What happens when you click the cancel button? Are you cancelingthe annoying popup, or the operation that you wanted to actually do?What is the safe thing to do? Really, I have
A gripe about sun.com
Sun's sun.com website makes a truly terrible advertisement for theirhardware and software. And I'm not talking about things like theirunderwhelming search functionality, or how many pages you have to gothrough to get things; I'm talking about how slow and flaky it is. Idon't want to add up how much time I've already spent trying to get acurrent Solaris 10 x86_64 DVD image from Sun; it's depressing.
(Also,
Why I don't like USB keyboards
Our problem with USB keyboards on Dell 2950s neatly illustrates why I remain deeply dubious about USB keyboards.It isn't that something broke; it's that it illustrates how complexUSB is.
Specifically, USB keyboards require a pile of sometimes fragile code tobring them up natively, or trusting a large amount of magic BIOS codebeing run behind your back. However, I really want my console keyboardto be simple ; the simpler it is, the less likely it is for somethinggoing wrong
Some useful new Linux software RAID features
Courtesy of a pointer from the linux-kernel mailing list to the Gentoowiki entry ,here's two useful (relatively) new software RAID features:
- Normally, if a RAID array goes out of sync the kernel assumes everythingon the out of date drive(s) has to be rewritten. With write-intent bitmapsthe kernel keeps track of what areas actually got written to and onlyresyncs them.
(This brings Linux up to more or less parity with an equivalent SolarisDiskSuite feature.)
- 'data scrubbing
Handling lines with something-separated fields for Python
As a system administrator, I spend a bunch of my time dealing withfiles made up of lines that are composed of fields separated by somecharacter. A classical example is
/etc/passwd, with colon-separatedfields. These file formats are ordered lists with named fields, whichshould sound familiar , but they don't showup as Python lists, they show up as lines of text and they want tobe output as text; that we use lists to represent them is just animplementation detail.This
Weekly spam summary on March 3rd, 2007
This machine had a planned twelve hour power outage today, so many ofthese statistics are really only for six days. Having said that, thisweek we:
- got 16,376 messages from 272 different IP addresses.
- handled 20,396 sessions from 1,270 different IP addresses.
- received at least 212,857 connections from at least 63943different IP addresses.
- hit a highwater of 5 connections being checked at once.
This
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