Many of the things that you refer to, such as the sound and the touchpad are due to the 2.6 kernel, not SUSE.
I recommend that you re-read what I wrote.
Let me quote myself: "I suspected this was do to flaky update mechanisms, " [..] "The reinstall worked flawlessly. Most things was installed the right way," [..] "except acpi"
The touchpad works fine after a reinstall. Sound works fine after a reinstall There was no general badness after a reinstall
As I said - the update routine sucked, and made lots of thing fail to work. The _install_ routine on the other hand, made things work perfectly.
First off, let me say that I quite simply love SuSE, it's my favorite distribution. Furthermore, I use the packaged version, not the FTP version.
However, my first experience with 9.1 was not impressive. I tried to update my laptop, instead of reinstalling. The result was far from good.
- The touchpad stopped working
- Sound stopped working
- Outdated daemons still started, and prevented other daemons from starting afterwards (acpid started instead of powersaved, among other things).
- And loads of general badness.
In short, it quite simply sucked.
I suspected this was do to flaky update mechanisms, which also turned out the be correct. As a good user, I have/home on its own partition, so a fresh reinstall are a piece of cake without touching my actual data.
The reinstall worked flawlessly. Most things was installed the right way, and worked as it should at once. With one exception.
That xception was that acpi was loaded instead of apm - and acpi is buggy on my laptop. I edited/boot/grub/menu.lst and added acpi=off - then I edited/etc/powersave.conf and enabled user-suspend or whatever it was called. Worked like a charm.
In other words, I think the 'update' routine sucks, while 'install' works like a charm.
Normally I don't like AOL! -messages, but I really want to echo what you say. I used to love qmail back in '98, and love the rest of djb's software too.
After working with his software for some years, I've come to senses. His software is excellent, but he don't maintain it. He maintains that you have to apply a host of third party patches. You cannot modify the sources and redistribute them.
In the long run, it sucks.
Postfix and Exim are my current favorite MTA's. BIND is just the standard dns server. I've considered looking into djbdns - but I'm afraid that I'll burn myself if I try it. I don't trust DJB and his software at all - after watching how qmail has detoriated through non-updates during the last 6 years.
This may be a stupid question, but I'll ask it anyways.
The big question for me is.. how is these pebbles powered? They have to be powered by battery, but are they turned on/off with certain interval, doing measurements, then turned off? Or are they continously online? In either case, how does one make batteries last this long? How long has they already been deployed? The article mentiones 1988, but I really, really doubt that the batteries have been active in those tiny pebbles since that long ago... when were they put into the ice?
Without exact knowledge, I would think most norwegian mobile phone carriers has towers in that regions - just as most of the rest of norway is covered by the mobile phone carriers.
We're talking about norway here, not the uS.;-) Norawy has _very_ good mobile phone coverage.
Uhm. It's a stratum 1 server. That is what is wrong. You should never abuse stratum 1 servers unless you're a selfish bastard.
Unless you want time to get really unreliable, you should use stratum 2 or stratum 3 servers, as the stratum 1 servers cannot keep up if everybody uses them.
Personally I sync my local stratum 3 timeserver against two stratum two servers -- and about 50 computers sync against my one stratum 3 server.
Real men configure systems in vi on serial consoles or in ssh sessions.
Real men, of course, find that vi is a symlink to vim, which is a horrible hack of vi. Furthermore, they hate emacs, and they find that 'ed' is left out of the distro for some stupid reason.
I know this is flamebait material, but I'll do it anyways - as it's a good question.
The linux distros I've personally used are: Slackware, Debian, RedHat, SuSE, Turbolinux, Storm Linux and Mandrake. I've also fiddled a bit with Gentoo, but not much.
Slackware, for me, was a bitch. I was new to linux, and that was the first distro I tried. It was hell. No good documentation at the time, and nothing worked out of the box. I fiddled with it for about two weeks, then gave up. Forget that one.
Debian. Great system for servers. Used it for four years on various boxes. Only had a few problems with it, namely a single box when I updated from slink to potato, and a box where I attempted to upgrade mysql from 3.22 to 3.23 by using unstable on a few binaries/libraries. This was before potato was out, if I remember correctly. I've always thought that Debian sucks for workstations, but quite a few people disagree. It's neither very easy to install nor very easy to configure. When you've got it up and running it's extremely easy to maintain.
RedHat. Used it for a few servers, and use it regularly as a workstation at the University. To be quite frank - I think it sucks as both. I really don't think it's any good at anything. Neither the installer, up2date, nor default configuration works as it should. And this is "the" mainstream linux? Blargh!
Mandrake. I used to use Mandrake, but they fscked up a lot of things between 8.1 and 8.2 , and I've not used it seriously afterwards. I used to be a paying member of mandrakeclub - but really didn't renew the payment after the 9.0 release which stunk just as much as 8.2 for me. The problem was quite simply that 8.1 just 'worked' on my computers, while 8.2 and 9.0 was riddled with lockups, various flaws and lots of other stuff. It's a very NICE distro though, it's easy to install, shiny, and so forth.
I'll drop commenting on TurboLinux and Storm, as it's several years since I tried them out, and they never did impress me.
Now onto the distro that I really, really like.
SUSE!
SuSE both installs easily, and is slick, shiny and well built. It's obvious that a lot of work has gone into making things work out of the box, especially if you're a KDE user (and you should be). YaST is a really wonderfull tool when it comes to installing and updating stuff, it works wonderfully on my HP Omnibook 6100, it works wonderfully on my servers, my desktops, and all my works desktop computers.. we've also bought SuSE OpenExchange, which works like a charm.
In short, I've got nothing wrong to say about SuSE, and I've been using it for about two years now, after using nothing but Linux the last 5 years. No other distro has shown me such ease of installation, such ease of installing other programs, such ease of security updates, such ease of maintainance, and so forth.
A single negative and important note about SuSE though - it uses ReiserFS as default. Change it to ext3 or something else - ReiserFS is notorious for corrupting data. I've had three systems where ReiserFS has fucked up my data badly. I don't trust that filesystem. Steer away from it like a pest. It sucks. It's bad for you. It destroys your data.
First off, let me say that I quite simply love SuSE, it's my favorite distribution.
However, my first experience with 9.1 was not impressive. I tried to update my laptop, instead of reinstalling. The result was far from good.
- The touchpad stopped working
- Sound stopped working
- Outdated daemons still started, and prevented other daemons from starting afterwards (acpid started instead of powersaved, among other things).
- And loads of general badness.
In short, it quite simply sucked.
Luckily, I have/home on its own partition, so I just reinstalled from scratch without touching/home - and that worked flawlessly. Allmost everything was installed the right way, and worked right away.
The only exception was that acpi was loaded instead of apm - and acpi is buggy on my laptop. I edited/boot/grub/menu.lst and added acpi=off - then I edited/etc/powersave.conf and enabled user-suspend or whatever it was called. Worked like a charm.
In other words, I think the 'update' routine sucks, while 'install' works like a charm.
I agree completely. If I ever see such a tracking system in the woods, I'll smash it in a heartbeat. When I'm in the woods, I'm there because I _want_ to get away. If I want to be findable I will carry equipment that allows me to be found.
Now, you will not hear me say that you should not use ReiserFS, for a desktop it is probably the best choice, but for servers, please think again.
It's only the best choice if used by computer literate people.
I've had to travel 500km one time too much to fix a reiserfs-using-desktop-computer that didn't want to boot due to ReiserFS spitting out strange error messages and waiting for input.
Not having heard the messages before, nor managing to discern them over the phone, I finally had to travel far too long just to fix the damn computer.
I've been experimenting by using ReiserFS on and off for the last 3 years or so. I've always shied away after a few failures.
My scorebook so far:
- Laptop/home partition went to hell twice, at power failure.
- Two various machines at previous work got open files in/home partition smothered at power failure, had to rm -rf.kde for the system to get up'n running again.
- Mums computer. Had to travel 500km to fix a reiserfs fuckup due to repeated power failures.
- Dad's laptop got a partition trashed by reiserfs when he forgot to put in his power cord and the battery time were used up.
The data loss always occurs when I'm having a power loss. ReiserFS for some reason is MUCH worse at coping with a powerloss than any other filesystem I've been playing around with.
I've never had a single machine with a ReiserFS partition where there hasn't been some sort of failure on ReiserFS part.
Because ReiserFS is a pile of dung, designed to make sure you lose data, make your computer unreliable, and make people scratch their heads and swear of linux in general. Here's my scorebook with reiserfs so far:
- Laptop/home partition went to hell twice, at power failure.
- Two various machines at previous work got open files in/home partition smothered at power failure, had to rm -rf.kde for the system to get up'n running again.
- Mums computer. Had to travel 500km to fix a reiserfs fuckup due to repeated power failures.
- Dad's laptop got a partition trashed by reiserfs when he forgot to put in his power cord and the battery time were used up.
I've tried using ReiserFS on and off quite a bit during the last 3 years. I don't think I'll ever do so again, unless rumors says it's stable in 5 consecutive years or something like that. I've had no other filesystems cause me as much grief as ReiserFS. It's a pile of dung. I'm not grateful that the developers developed it. If I knew how shitty it was I would never have put data on it. I don't have time to travel 500km just to reinstall a linux distribution every two months, due to ReiserFS fucking things up badly.
The reason some distributions doesn't move to ReiserFS is quite simply that they've realized that ReiserFS is one unstable piece of horse dung.
My personal peeve with ReiserFS is, though, that I've had the main ReiserFS partition on my Laptop completely destroyed by a simple power failure once.
I've been experimenting by using ReiserFS on and off for the last 3 years or so. I've always shied away after a few failures.
My scorebook so far:
- Laptop/home partition went to hell twice, at power failure.
- Two various machines at previous work got open files in/home partition smothered at power failure, had to rm -rf.kde for the system to get up'n running again.
- Mums computer. Had to travel 500km to fix a reiserfs fuckup due to repeated power failures.
- Dad's laptop got a partition trashed by reiserfs when he forgot to put in his power cord and the battery time were used up.
Reiserfs is the single most unstable piece of shit of a filesystem I've ever had to deal with. No, I'll not be using it again anytime soon.
The file/usr/local/bin/checkWeb.sh could contain: #!/usr/bin/bash
wget http://your.host.name/stolenweb.html
if grep "It is stolen" stolenweb.html ; then
[generatereports and send it off] fi
rm stolenweb.html
It's a really rather simple setup that checks the webpage once each hour. If the webpage contains "It is stolen", then you do the reports-generating and whatever.
I'm sorry, I wish I could agree with you, but I don't.
The next player would be the sysadmin who failed to run windows update on his known vulnerable system (A windows system is always deemed vulnerable. Thus, "not having heard of" the worm is no defense). And he would be the final player who tossed that ball through the window.
You cannot blame the one that installed a window that will shatter if you throw a stone into it, for the death of the injury of the old lady.
To be quite frank - give me .txt
on
CSS for the LDP?
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I used to love Linux howtos and faq's. They were great - a charm to read, just like RFCs.
Then they began to htmlize them, and I couldn't just less then any more. Which, quite frankly sucked.
Then they began to come in "chapters" instead of one giant file. Which, quite frankly, sucked even more.
I'm sure there's an option to get all the howtos and documentation in good old ascii out there _somewhere_, by the gods the LDP has made those more difficult to find.
And not, this is not an attempt to troll. It's an honest frustration. You cannot search a html document which contain 20 different html-files (one for each chapter) like youc an search a single.txt file.
One of the basic principles of democracies is that people should be able to cast their vote in secret. Of course, they can still cast their vote in secret, but now they cannot both support their candidate and vote for him in secret.
It also makes it much easier for spammers. Spammers know how to forge IP's. So now they know that if they make it seem like it's from.mail, people will automatically accept it, and they won't have to worry about spam filters... they now how to forge IP's? The only way I can see that happening is by first getting access to and then violating the BGP-network. Spammers doing this would hopefully lose their access to BGP kinda quickly.
Especially if they started announcing other peoples prefixes.
Now, to forge a TCP connection which a mail server requires is quite another task. If you can show us how to do that in a simple way - I think many people would cheer and start patching. The problem is, I don't think you'll be able to blindspoof most modern TCP implementations.
Yes, it would be a good idea to filter packets which doesn't originate from your network.
It is a horrible idea to filter any ports. Port 25 should be open by default, Netbios should be open by default, and so forth. It's NOT part of the ISP's job to make the Internet more idiot-proof. It's the users responsibility to secure his own computer.
I'm one of those that prefer to host my own domains, so I can't recommend a specific hosting company - however - I can offer some advice on what to do when you decide to switch hosts.
First, check out the suggestions by others, see if the allowed bandwidth-quotas are okay, what kind of platform they are running on, try to find out how many others are hosted at the same servers, what kind of software you may run on the server, and so forth. This is obvious stuff.
Then, and this is important in my opinion, check whether the hosting provider is blacklisted anywhere. Take a look at spamhaus.org, to see whether they are blackhat or whitehat.. also, do search through net.admin.net-abuse.email through google groups - to see whether there are spam reports about the provider. See how they resolved it - and if they resolved it. You really don't want to be stuck with an email provider that is blackholed by half the world.. not to mention that you _Really_ don't want to give money to spam supporters.
This is, imho, one of the most important things to check.
I'm not sure if this is a good solution for 500+ usres, but at the company I work for, we use SuSE OpenExchange in combination with Antivir (www.antivir.de) . We've only got about 25-30 users, though.
SuSE OpenExchange's default spamassassin rules are really, really good. I had to make a minor adjustment to one of the rules - and after that it has had zero false positives in addition to taking care of over 99% of the spam we receive. The last month it has blocked about 1500 spam messages to me alone - and not let a single one through. With *zero* false positives. Other employees have the same experience.
I'm not sure if I would recomend using qmail anymore. I tended to love qmail, and has set up qmail based solutions for five different companies. qmail doensn't reject mail to invalid addresses in-smtp-session though (at least not by default), and insteads returns the message afterwards. With all the spoofed mail from:'s, with guessed mail to:'s -- this creates far too many bounce messages in todays virus-ladden environment.
Slashdot Mirror
Many of the things that you refer to, such as the sound and the touchpad are due to the 2.6 kernel, not SUSE.
I recommend that you re-read what I wrote.
Let me quote myself:
"I suspected this was do to flaky update mechanisms, " [..] "The reinstall worked flawlessly. Most things was installed the right way," [..] "except acpi"
The touchpad works fine after a reinstall.
Sound works fine after a reinstall
There was no general badness after a reinstall
As I said - the update routine sucked, and made lots of thing fail to work. The _install_ routine on the other hand, made things work perfectly.
First off, let me say that I quite simply love SuSE, it's my favorite distribution. Furthermore, I use the packaged version, not the FTP version.
/home on its own partition, so a fresh reinstall are a piece of cake without touching my actual data.
/boot/grub/menu.lst and added acpi=off - then I edited /etc/powersave.conf and enabled user-suspend or whatever it was called. Worked like a charm.
However, my first experience with 9.1 was not impressive. I tried to update my laptop, instead of reinstalling. The result was far from good.
- The touchpad stopped working
- Sound stopped working
- Outdated daemons still started, and prevented other daemons from starting afterwards (acpid started instead of powersaved, among other things).
- And loads of general badness.
In short, it quite simply sucked.
I suspected this was do to flaky update mechanisms, which also turned out the be correct. As a good user, I have
The reinstall worked flawlessly. Most things was installed the right way, and worked as it should at once. With one exception.
That xception was that acpi was loaded instead of apm - and acpi is buggy on my laptop. I edited
In other words, I think the 'update' routine sucks, while 'install' works like a charm.
Normally I don't like AOL! -messages, but I really want to echo what you say. I used to love qmail back in '98, and love the rest of djb's software too.
After working with his software for some years, I've come to senses. His software is excellent, but he don't maintain it. He maintains that you have to apply a host of third party patches. You cannot modify the sources and redistribute them.
In the long run, it sucks.
Postfix and Exim are my current favorite MTA's. BIND is just the standard dns server. I've considered looking into djbdns - but I'm afraid that I'll burn myself if I try it. I don't trust DJB and his software at all - after watching how qmail has detoriated through non-updates during the last 6 years.
This may be a stupid question, but I'll ask it anyways.
.. how is these pebbles powered? They have to be powered by battery, but are they turned on/off with certain interval, doing measurements, then turned off? Or are they continously online? In either case, how does one make batteries last this long? How long has they already been deployed? The article mentiones 1988, but I really, really doubt that the batteries have been active in those tiny pebbles since that long ago ... when were they put into the ice?
The big question for me is
Without exact knowledge, I would think most norwegian mobile phone carriers has towers in that regions - just as most of the rest of norway is covered by the mobile phone carriers.
;-) Norawy has _very_ good mobile phone coverage.
We're talking about norway here, not the uS.
(NB: I'm a norwegian).
Uhm. It's a stratum 1 server. That is what is wrong. You should never abuse stratum 1 servers unless you're a selfish bastard.
Unless you want time to get really unreliable, you should use stratum 2 or stratum 3 servers, as the stratum 1 servers cannot keep up if everybody uses them.
Personally I sync my local stratum 3 timeserver against two stratum two servers -- and about 50 computers sync against my one stratum 3 server.
Real men configure systems in vi on serial consoles or in ssh sessions.
Real men, of course, find that vi is a symlink to vim, which is a horrible hack of vi. Furthermore, they hate emacs, and they find that 'ed' is left out of the distro for some stupid reason.
Thus, they resolve to sed -i
*Shudder*
I know this is flamebait material, but I'll do it anyways - as it's a good question.
The linux distros I've personally used are: Slackware, Debian, RedHat, SuSE, Turbolinux, Storm Linux and Mandrake. I've also fiddled a bit with Gentoo, but not much.
Slackware, for me, was a bitch. I was new to linux, and that was the first distro I tried. It was hell. No good documentation at the time, and nothing worked out of the box. I fiddled with it for about two weeks, then gave up. Forget that one.
Debian. Great system for servers. Used it for four years on various boxes. Only had a few problems with it, namely a single box when I updated from slink to potato, and a box where I attempted to upgrade mysql from 3.22 to 3.23 by using unstable on a few binaries/libraries. This was before potato was out, if I remember correctly. I've always thought that Debian sucks for workstations, but quite a few people disagree. It's neither very easy to install nor very easy to configure. When you've got it up and running it's extremely easy to maintain.
RedHat. Used it for a few servers, and use it regularly as a workstation at the University. To be quite frank - I think it sucks as both. I really don't think it's any good at anything. Neither the installer, up2date, nor default configuration works as it should. And this is "the" mainstream linux? Blargh!
Mandrake. I used to use Mandrake, but they fscked up a lot of things between 8.1 and 8.2 , and I've not used it seriously afterwards. I used to be a paying member of mandrakeclub - but really didn't renew the payment after the 9.0 release which stunk just as much as 8.2 for me. The problem was quite simply that 8.1 just 'worked' on my computers, while 8.2 and 9.0 was riddled with lockups, various flaws and lots of other stuff. It's a very NICE distro though, it's easy to install, shiny, and so forth.
I'll drop commenting on TurboLinux and Storm, as it's several years since I tried them out, and they never did impress me.
Now onto the distro that I really, really like.
SUSE!
SuSE both installs easily, and is slick, shiny and well built. It's obvious that a lot of work has gone into making things work out of the box, especially if you're a KDE user (and you should be). YaST is a really wonderfull tool when it comes to installing and updating stuff, it works wonderfully on my HP Omnibook 6100, it works wonderfully on my servers, my desktops, and all my works desktop computers.. we've also bought SuSE OpenExchange, which works like a charm.
In short, I've got nothing wrong to say about SuSE, and I've been using it for about two years now, after using nothing but Linux the last 5 years. No other distro has shown me such ease of installation, such ease of installing other programs, such ease of security updates, such ease of maintainance, and so forth.
A single negative and important note about SuSE though - it uses ReiserFS as default. Change it to ext3 or something else - ReiserFS is notorious for corrupting data. I've had three systems where ReiserFS has fucked up my data badly. I don't trust that filesystem. Steer away from it like a pest. It sucks. It's bad for you. It destroys your data.
*phew*.
First off, let me say that I quite simply love SuSE, it's my favorite distribution.
/home on its own partition, so I just reinstalled from scratch without touching /home - and that worked flawlessly. Allmost everything was installed the right way, and worked right away.
/boot/grub/menu.lst and added acpi=off - then I edited /etc/powersave.conf and enabled user-suspend or whatever it was called. Worked like a charm.
However, my first experience with 9.1 was not impressive. I tried to update my laptop, instead of reinstalling. The result was far from good.
- The touchpad stopped working
- Sound stopped working
- Outdated daemons still started, and prevented other daemons from starting afterwards (acpid started instead of powersaved, among other things).
- And loads of general badness.
In short, it quite simply sucked.
Luckily, I have
The only exception was that acpi was loaded instead of apm - and acpi is buggy on my laptop. I edited
In other words, I think the 'update' routine sucks, while 'install' works like a charm.
I agree completely. If I ever see such a tracking system in the woods, I'll smash it in a heartbeat. When I'm in the woods, I'm there because I _want_ to get away. If I want to be findable I will carry equipment that allows me to be found.
Now, you will not hear me say that you should not use ReiserFS, for a desktop it is probably the best choice, but for servers, please think again.
It's only the best choice if used by computer literate people.
I've had to travel 500km one time too much to fix a reiserfs-using-desktop-computer that didn't want to boot due to ReiserFS spitting out strange error messages and waiting for input.
Not having heard the messages before, nor managing to discern them over the phone, I finally had to travel far too long just to fix the damn computer.
I've been experimenting by using ReiserFS on and off for the last 3 years or so. I've always shied away after a few failures.
/home partition went to hell twice, at power failure. /home partition smothered at power failure, had to rm -rf .kde for the system to get up'n running again.
My scorebook so far:
- Laptop
- Two various machines at previous work got open files in
- Mums computer. Had to travel 500km to fix a reiserfs fuckup due to repeated power failures.
- Dad's laptop got a partition trashed by reiserfs when he forgot to put in his power cord and the battery time were used up.
The data loss always occurs when I'm having a power loss. ReiserFS for some reason is MUCH worse at coping with a powerloss than any other filesystem I've been playing around with.
I've never had a single machine with a ReiserFS partition where there hasn't been some sort of failure on ReiserFS part.
Because ReiserFS is a pile of dung, designed to make sure you lose data, make your computer unreliable, and make people scratch their heads and swear of linux in general. Here's my scorebook with reiserfs so far:
/home partition went to hell twice, at power failure. /home partition smothered at power failure, had to rm -rf .kde for the system to get up'n running again.
- Laptop
- Two various machines at previous work got open files in
- Mums computer. Had to travel 500km to fix a reiserfs fuckup due to repeated power failures.
- Dad's laptop got a partition trashed by reiserfs when he forgot to put in his power cord and the battery time were used up.
I've tried using ReiserFS on and off quite a bit during the last 3 years. I don't think I'll ever do so again, unless rumors says it's stable in 5 consecutive years or something like that. I've had no other filesystems cause me as much grief as ReiserFS. It's a pile of dung. I'm not grateful that the developers developed it. If I knew how shitty it was I would never have put data on it. I don't have time to travel 500km just to reinstall a linux distribution every two months, due to ReiserFS fucking things up badly.
The reason some distributions doesn't move to ReiserFS is quite simply that they've realized that ReiserFS is one unstable piece of horse dung.
My personal peeve with ReiserFS is, though, that I've had the main ReiserFS partition on my Laptop completely destroyed by a simple power failure once.
/home partition went to hell twice, at power failure. /home partition smothered at power failure, had to rm -rf .kde for the system to get up'n running again.
I've been experimenting by using ReiserFS on and off for the last 3 years or so. I've always shied away after a few failures.
My scorebook so far:
- Laptop
- Two various machines at previous work got open files in
- Mums computer. Had to travel 500km to fix a reiserfs fuckup due to repeated power failures.
- Dad's laptop got a partition trashed by reiserfs when he forgot to put in his power cord and the battery time were used up.
Reiserfs is the single most unstable piece of shit of a filesystem I've ever had to deal with. No, I'll not be using it again anytime soon.
The only way I can see the perp getting access to your email is if you're so bloody studpid that you let the computer "remember" your password.
In that case, you are a loser. You should not to that. Never. Ever. If you do, you're one of the wankers that causes insecurity.
Create a cronjob for root:
/usr/local/bin/checkWeb.sh
/usr/local/bin/checkWeb.sh could contain:
crontab -e
0 * * * *
The file
#!/usr/bin/bash
wget http://your.host.name/stolenweb.html
if grep "It is stolen" stolenweb.html ; then
[generatereports and send it off]
fi
rm stolenweb.html
It's a really rather simple setup that checks the webpage once each hour. If the webpage contains "It is stolen", then you do the reports-generating and whatever.
I'm sorry, I wish I could agree with you, but I don't.
The next player would be the sysadmin who failed to run windows update on his known vulnerable system (A windows system is always deemed vulnerable. Thus, "not having heard of" the worm is no defense). And he would be the final player who tossed that ball through the window.
You cannot blame the one that installed a window that will shatter if you throw a stone into it, for the death of the injury of the old lady.
I used to love Linux howtos and faq's. They were great - a charm to read, just like RFCs.
.txt file.
Then they began to htmlize them, and I couldn't just less then any more. Which, quite frankly sucked.
Then they began to come in "chapters" instead of one giant file. Which, quite frankly, sucked even more.
I'm sure there's an option to get all the howtos and documentation in good old ascii out there _somewhere_, by the gods the LDP has made those more difficult to find.
And not, this is not an attempt to troll. It's an honest frustration. You cannot search a html document which contain 20 different html-files (one for each chapter) like youc an search a single
One of the basic principles of democracies is that people should be able to cast their vote in secret. Of course, they can still cast their vote in secret, but now they cannot both support their candidate and vote for him in secret.
I think this system is flawed.
It also makes it much easier for spammers. Spammers know how to forge IP's. So now they know that if they make it seem like it's from .mail, people will automatically accept it, and they won't have to worry about spam filters. .. they now how to forge IP's? The only way I can see that happening is by first getting access to and then violating the BGP-network. Spammers doing this would hopefully lose their access to BGP kinda quickly.
Especially if they started announcing other peoples prefixes.
Now, to forge a TCP connection which a mail server requires is quite another task. If you can show us how to do that in a simple way - I think many people would cheer and start patching. The problem is, I don't think you'll be able to blindspoof most modern TCP implementations.
You are an idiot.
Yes, it would be a good idea to filter packets which doesn't originate from your network.
It is a horrible idea to filter any ports. Port 25 should be open by default, Netbios should be open by default, and so forth. It's NOT part of the ISP's job to make the Internet more idiot-proof. It's the users responsibility to secure his own computer.
I'm one of those that prefer to host my own domains, so I can't recommend a specific hosting company - however - I can offer some advice on what to do when you decide to switch hosts.
First, check out the suggestions by others, see if the allowed bandwidth-quotas are okay, what kind of platform they are running on, try to find out how many others are hosted at the same servers, what kind of software you may run on the server, and so forth. This is obvious stuff.
Then, and this is important in my opinion, check whether the hosting provider is blacklisted anywhere. Take a look at spamhaus.org, to see whether they are blackhat or whitehat.. also, do search through net.admin.net-abuse.email through google groups - to see whether there are spam reports about the provider. See how they resolved it - and if they resolved it. You really don't want to be stuck with an email provider that is blackholed by half the world.. not to mention that you _Really_ don't want to give money to spam supporters.
This is, imho, one of the most important things to check.
Or, simpler, just open an xterm and type "whois ipaddress" , should work with most newer versions of whois .. or just query the whois-server manually.
No need to use a webbrowser for such a simple query.
I'm not sure if this is a good solution for 500+ usres, but at the company I work for, we use SuSE OpenExchange in combination with Antivir (www.antivir.de) . We've only got about 25-30 users, though.
SuSE OpenExchange's default spamassassin rules are really, really good. I had to make a minor adjustment to one of the rules - and after that it has had zero false positives in addition to taking care of over 99% of the spam we receive. The last month it has blocked about 1500 spam messages to me alone - and not let a single one through. With *zero* false positives. Other employees have the same experience.
I'm not sure if I would recomend using qmail anymore. I tended to love qmail, and has set up qmail based solutions for five different companies. qmail doensn't reject mail to invalid addresses in-smtp-session though (at least not by default), and insteads returns the message afterwards. With all the spoofed mail from:'s, with guessed mail to:'s -- this creates far too many bounce messages in todays virus-ladden environment.
I know this isn't the answer you're looking for, but when such bone-headed manuevers are done - there really isn't much left to work for.
Personally I would've quitted the company the minute the message arrived. I would've taken the change as my termination letter.