Yay! Donna now has her own IMDB page as both screenwriter and appearing as herself in documentaries!
Category Archives: Internet
How To Kill All ADSL In Victoria
An organisation was doing their annual generator load test, when this happened:
It appears our upsteam ADSL telco has had a failure of an Ethernet switch. This has dropped ALL adsl circuits in Victora. (sic)
Just under an hour later it became obvious why:
It appears that the switch in question had not been connected to the essential power circuit. The telco’s switch had its power restored when the generator test was completed. We will working with the telco to get the switch transferred from mains to essential power on Monday.
Their summary of the testing:
Besides losing all ADSL in Victora, the generator power test went fine. (sic)
Oddly enough I didn’t notice anything that day with our home ADSL, so somebody likes me..
LUV Server Down – Colocation Power Work Again!
It appears that Eftel have took the power down again at the colocation facility in Collins Street, but unlike last time it would appear that the server isn’t back up yet. This could be because the outage is still going on (it’s still listed as current on their site as I write even though it was scheduled for just Saturday) or it could be that there’s a problem with the box.
The LUV sysadmin has tried to get permission to go and investigate today (Sunday), but it appears it won’t be possible until Monday.
Buggy Virus Checker Deletes Windows O/S File
This is almost a program falling for the SULFNBK.EXE hoax.
From ZDNet:
Some Windows 2003 users have been experiencing problems with the operating system after CA antivirus software wrongly detected part of the operating system as malicious software last week.
I could beg to differ with about detecting Windoze as malicious software being wrong..
CA could spin this in one of two ways, either the eTrust virus checker signature for Win32/Lassrv.B had an unfortunate bug that caused unwanted side effects, or, the virus checker was taking extreme proactive measures to protect the rest of us from Windows systems being used as spam sources and denial of service zombie botnets. 🙂
Linux Users Victoria – Webserver Down – Electrical Work at CoLo
For those wondering (as I was) about why you can no longer get to the LUV website or mailing lists, it’s because the colocation facility (EFTel, who provide free hosting to us for which we are very grateful) are having major electrical work done at the Melbourne CoLo. The ticket (#8705) says:
8705 Scheduled maintenance 26-Aug-2006 14:30:00 27-Aug-2006 00:00:00 MAJOR ELECTRICAL SHUTDOWN – 530 Collins St: Affecting ALL Victorian Services
Update: Back up again..
Open Source Data Center Management
Was reading PLOA and found a blog post by Jon Oxer about setting up Xen systems for hosting and what he saw at the SLES/SLED 10 launch today. I think he should take a look at something else I stumbled over today – OpenQRM – which claims to be an open source data center management/provisioning tool.
Currently they support RPM based distros but their source build docs include destructions for Debian/Ubuntu and Gentoo as well. Certainly I think they’d be very happy to get assistance to have Ubuntu and Debian as tested distros as well…
They have a live CD to play with too..
Odd Comment About Spam
I was very puzzled to see Russell Coker write:
Therefore the only acceptable method of dealing with spam is to reject it at the SMTP protocol level. Currently I am not aware of any software that supports Bayesian filtering while the message is being received so that it can be rejected if it appears to be spam, it would be possible to do this (I could write the code myself if I had enough spare time) but AFAIK no-one has done it.
I’ve been doing exactly this with Postfix, amavisd-new and SpamAssassin for many years now with great success, rejecting spams at the SMTP level via Postfix’s pre-queue content_filter mechanism using SpamAssassins Baysian filtering, anti-spam rules and blacklist support.
Unfortunately because Russell is using Blogger and requiring people to register I can’t leave a comment for him (as I’ve no desire to sign up for an account with them just to leave a comment).
Update: Corrected link to point to the actual post on Russells blog that I’m talking about!
Google To Warn About Pages With Malware
The BBC is reporting that Google will try and warn people about pages they return that may contain malware.
Initially the warnings seen via the search site will be generic and simply alert people to the fact that a site has been flagged as dangerous. Eventually the warnings will become more detailed as Stop Badware researchers visit harmful sites and analyse how they try to subvert users’ machines.
I had a play with one example that the BBC quotes:
A research report released in May 2006 looked at the safety of the results returned by a search and found that, on average, 4-6% of the sites had harmful content on them. For some keywords, such as “free screensavers” the number of potentially dangerous sites leapt to 64%.
But I couldn’t get it to warn me – perhaps it’s because Google knows I’m not running Windows ? 🙂
StarDust@Home Launches
Just reading the Planetary Society blog and saw a posting saying that the Stardust@Home project which I’ve written about previously has launched!
Go forth and find cool stuff.
Upgraded to WP 2.0.4
I’ve just upgraded to WordPress 2.0.4 and, unfortunately, had to disable the Did You Pass Math plugin because it seems to interact badly with WP-Cache. 🙁
Any problems then please let me know!