I manage internet for a medium sized company. They have two mail servers, one is colocated, and the other is on their T1 in the office.
Neither one has a reverse DNS that matches forward DNS. They never have any trouble sending mail to Yahoo, Hotmail or AOL.
FYI they do not have SPF records, so that is another datapoint, but I wouldn't draw any conclusions from that.
MANY companies have non-matching forward and reverse DNS, so it would be stupid to block on that criteria. Maybe some diehard slashdot anti-spammers are doing it for the their personal email, but nobody real is (or they are only counting it as a small part of a spam score).
So I don't think your problem is due to a mismatched reverse DNS. More likely it is because it is a DSL address and people have been known to block on those.
I think that you and I are in a similiar situation. I run a company from home, and ideally I would have a local server. In my case I found my connection too unreliable so I plunked down money for a 1U colo in a nearby data center, and I run all my mail from that, no problem (again, forward and reverse DNS do not match).
I think that's probably your best bet if you can afford it.
BTW the amount of failed relaying attempts we get from DSL/Cable botnets is absolutely STAGGERING. Some of the bots are quite stupid and don't bother checking failure codes, so even rejecting those emails at connection time doesn't stop them from trying. I really don't blame the free providers for trashing emails from DSL/Cable addresses.
Re:FreeBSD is GREAT but ports have problems
on
Why FreeBSD
·
· Score: 1
Thanks for the info. It seems like FreeBSD changes so fast these days. It was only a year ago that we put the 5.2.1 box in service. Unfortunately the RAID controller wasn't supported by 4.x at the time so that was my only choice.
I probably will upgrade to 5.4 next month when we do a major application upgrade. But now that 6.0 is out, how long will it be until 5.4 is out of date?
All of our boxes are colo'd so of course it's a real pain to do OS upgrades (well it's not THAT hard, but if they don't come back up, I have to drive out there.).
BTW is it safe to enable the "background_fsck" feature again? I always turn it off first thing because it's caused me lots of problems (lockups and mangled filesystems). I assume they've gotten that straightened out by now?
FreeBSD is GREAT but ports have problems
on
Why FreeBSD
·
· Score: 1
I agree with you on most of that, and vastly prefer FreeBSD over any version of Linux. I love that the remotely exploitable security problems are few and far between, and they tend to only release pretty stable kernels. Back when I used Linux for everything the "kernel of the week" problem was eating up tons of my time.
I hate the way that the linux world feels compelled to constantly add useless (to me) features that only add to the bloat and breakage. If you want a linux desktop; fine; but PLEASE don't screw up the server functionality for the rest of us.
It's so bad that we have to depend on big commercial vendors to put together reliable Linux configurations for us. But it's an evil cycle; corporate vendors are always looking for a way to "value add" and "differentiate", which means more useless features and bugs.
But I've had horrible problems with ports -- on 4.9 and 4.10, large numbers of ports won't compile, and on both 4.x and 5.2.1, I'll try to compile a port and it will simply stop with a makefile error.
Also, they don't maintain separate ports trees for 4.x and 5.x, leading to inevitable incompatibilities (i.e port X depends on some v5.x feature or lib; many things depend on port X...)
portupgrade, and indeed the entire ports framework, is poorly documented with too many different ways of doing things.
Yes that stereotype will probably never go away. But every now
and then I see something advertised with an "AOL Keyword" that
I would like to know more about...
Maybe now I'll be able to check out some of that stuff without having to be a member.
Of course I have to wonder how bright some of these companies really are, restricting their advertising to the limited userbase of AOL, instead of just putting it up on a website.
Maybe AOL is offering free bandwidth in exchange for exclusivity...
New web comic: Jendini.com, home of Zillion Zombies Zone!
I wish more cartoonists would do "realistic" storylines without the sci-fi/fantasy copout of not being required to make any sense. I also like that the animals don't talk.:-)
Disclaimer the author is a friend, and I am actively attempting to spread the word about this new comic
What I want to know is what is going to happen to folks like us who bought multiple licenses of the huge expensive Macromedia all-in-one package of software, with the intent of taking advantage of the upgrade pricing for years to come. Is my investment totally down the drain?
And what about all those websites on Cold Fusion. Those folks are seriously out of luck. (We don't use it though, thankfully)
People who produce large numbers of CUSTOM CDs will love this. Right now the cheapest way to automate the production of such CDs and print the identifying information on them is to use a robotic contraption with 2 CDs and an expensive disk printer. Such a device costs $2500, minimum (excluding mickey-mouse versions that don't work well).
And at that price range, the ink is water-soluble and will smear if it gets wet.
I imagine that they will partner with a burning software company to make printing the labels easy. My handwriting is so bad that I would gladly pay a bit extra to be able to type in my CD labels without having to go to any extra effort.
And then there are people who do backups on CD, who constantly run the risk of mislabeling CDs as they come out of the burner.
IMHO, very few people care about pretty color graphics - they just want legible, permanent printing at the lowest possible cost
Actually I've had CISCO support reps in the Phillipines stay on the phone with me ALL NIGHT fixing our firewall problems. And these guys REALLY knew what they were doing.
And the commercial support that I've gotten from DELL was great when it came to advice, and staying on the phone until my RAID was back in one piece, even though I was using an unsupported OS (FreeBSD).
new web cartoon, now featuring Bitey, the pound cat: Jendini.com
A bigger problem is the lack of tax-sheltered savings for small companies. You cannot "save-up" money very efficiently, because at the end the year the tax man takes so much of your savings.
So you are forced to go begging for any capital you might need to expand. And small companies are forced to try to spend all profits by the end of the year to avoid taxation.
What we really need is something like an IRA for small companies, to save money tax-deferred, until there is a big enough pile to make the investments required to grow to the next level.
Delphi is my secret weapon
on
Delphi Renaissance
·
· Score: 3, Informative
I don't know (or care) about.NET, but if you are
writng a windows program Delphi is staggeringly more
efficient to develop in than C++. You can also use it to do Windows API stuff efficiently, meaning you can write most of your custom controls in delphi itself without have to resort to C++.
I just wish they could get their act together and
make better documentation.
I actually used C++ for many years before finding out about Delphi, but now that I've switched there is no way I would ever go back.
Of course, more efficient development is not in the best interests of most programmers, because they are motivated to drag out projects as long as
possible for job security reasons. But when you are doing fixed-bid contracts, or even if you just care about your reputation, Delphi is the way to go.
Servlets are Java programs that handle specific events (such as requests to a URL) and Tomcat is
an apache plugin that lets you run servlets from apache.
To answer your question about how/when perl is compiled, it depends on the situation:
Command line or simple CGI program - your perl program is compiled each time it is run. This operation is much quicker than you might expect, but it's a painful amount of overhead for sites with tons of hits
CGI with mod_perl, minivend, other Perl based app servers - The Perl code is compiled once, when the web- or app-server is started. Compiled chunks of code are cached for later use after their initial compile. This is not done by the language, but by the environment, which is usually written in Perl (but can be written in C).
As near as I can tell, PHP pages are compiled each and every time they are served, along with all the included code.
One of the articles mentioned a bot 6" round, 36" long. Another was 6 feet long and 8" around.
And they are intended to lay cable in pipes that are that small. So how do they go around corners?
I also wonder what happens when a fault develops in the line, in a inaccessible (can't dig it up) location. Do they rip it all out and put a new one in?
The real problem with fixing someone's PC is that they won't follow the two simple rules of a stable windows box:
1. Install what you need, then never install anything else. Especially not games!
2. Always shut down correctly before turning the power off.
I help the people that follow the rules. They have very stable windows machines that work well for *years* and stay fast with no registry bloat.
People who don't follow the rule quickly get crashy, unreliable systems - and frequently try to make me feel responsible for their problems, because I'm the last person who mucked with the settings.
My uncle is a bit older and taught me this lesson early. See he's an electrical engineer and learned how to fix TV's in the sixties. When word got out that he could fix TV's, he spent all his time fixing TV's for friends, and then got blamed when they eventually died anyway.
It uses unused CPU time - it's supposed to occupy CPU cycles that you aren't using.
The fact that it only snags 50% CPU when everything else is turned off means that it must be single threaded - it's only using 1 of your Mac's two processors.
You can't use process viewer to determine how much it is stealing - the real test is to run another higher priority CPU intensive program and see how close Folding@home gets to zero.
Here's a CPU intensive program for your review (I assume you're running OS X).
Thanks to Opera Software for recognizing this need. I've requested a FreeBSD port via their web form and am thrilled to see that they listen to their customers.
Now, everybody go buy a license to support this excellent work.
I suggest a portable biofeedback monitor. My GF uses one for muscle problems. They have a light, relatively small sensor that can be taped to the skin. When the muscle underneath is tensed, the alarm goes off - and the trigger level is widely adjustable.
The device she uses is walkman sized and cost about $500 from a company in Canada. The brand name is Myotrac.
Any working muscle will do and the thing is very sensitive, with gain as well as level controls. And very easy to use. Google turns up lots of hits, here's the manufacturers URL: http://www.thoughttechnology.com/myotrac.htm
As a bonus, the engineers answer the phone and will gladly discuss your intended use.
This is already being done, especially with test crops, or valuable strains. However, cross-pollenization is still a problem - normal crops can get tainted with engineered genes just by being planted nearby.
Slashdot Mirror
I manage internet for a medium sized company. They have two mail servers, one is colocated, and the other is on their T1 in the office.
Neither one has a reverse DNS that matches forward DNS. They never have any trouble sending mail to Yahoo, Hotmail or AOL.
FYI they do not have SPF records, so that is another datapoint, but I wouldn't draw any conclusions from that.
MANY companies have non-matching forward and reverse DNS, so it would be stupid to block on that criteria. Maybe some diehard slashdot anti-spammers are doing it for the their personal email, but nobody real is (or they are only counting it as a small part of a spam score).
So I don't think your problem is due to a mismatched reverse DNS. More likely it is because it is a DSL address and people have been known to block on those.
I think that you and I are in a similiar situation. I run a company from home, and ideally I would have a local server. In my case I found my connection too unreliable so I plunked down money for a 1U colo in a nearby data center, and I run all my mail from that, no problem (again, forward and reverse DNS do not match).
I think that's probably your best bet if you can afford it.
BTW the amount of failed relaying attempts we get from DSL/Cable botnets is absolutely STAGGERING. Some of the bots are quite stupid and don't bother checking failure codes, so even rejecting those emails at connection time doesn't stop them from trying. I really don't blame the free providers for trashing emails from DSL/Cable addresses.
Thanks for the info. It seems like FreeBSD changes so fast these days. It was only a year ago that we put the 5.2.1 box in service. Unfortunately the RAID controller wasn't supported by 4.x at the time so that was my only choice.
I probably will upgrade to 5.4 next month when we do a major application upgrade. But now that 6.0 is out, how long will it be until 5.4 is out of date?
All of our boxes are colo'd so of course it's a real pain to do OS upgrades (well it's not THAT hard, but if they don't come back up, I have to drive out there.).
BTW is it safe to enable the "background_fsck" feature again? I always turn it off first thing because it's caused me lots of problems (lockups and mangled filesystems). I assume they've gotten that straightened out by now?
I agree with you on most of that, and vastly prefer FreeBSD over any version of Linux. I love that the remotely exploitable security problems are few and far between, and they tend to only release pretty stable kernels. Back when I used Linux for everything the "kernel of the week" problem was eating up tons of my time.
I hate the way that the linux world feels compelled to constantly add useless (to me) features that only add to the bloat and breakage. If you want a linux desktop; fine; but PLEASE don't screw up the server functionality for the rest of us.
It's so bad that we have to depend on big commercial vendors to put together reliable Linux configurations for us. But it's an evil cycle; corporate vendors are always looking for a way to "value add" and "differentiate", which means more useless features and bugs.
But I've had horrible problems with ports -- on 4.9 and 4.10, large numbers of ports won't compile, and on both 4.x and 5.2.1, I'll try to compile a port and it will simply stop with a makefile error.
Also, they don't maintain separate ports trees for 4.x and 5.x, leading to inevitable incompatibilities (i.e port X depends on some v5.x feature or lib; many things depend on port X...)
portupgrade, and indeed the entire ports framework, is poorly documented with too many different ways of doing things.
Yes that stereotype will probably never go away. But every now and then I see something advertised with an "AOL Keyword" that I would like to know more about...
Maybe now I'll be able to check out some of that stuff without having to be a member.
Of course I have to wonder how bright some of these companies really are, restricting their advertising to the limited userbase of AOL, instead of just putting it up on a website.
Maybe AOL is offering free bandwidth in exchange for exclusivity...
New web comic: Jendini.com , home of Zillion Zombies Zone!
Respect your viewpoint, but I think the song is perfect for the show.
It's a folksy show, with a folksy theme song. And a very well done song at that, being both melancholy and hopeful at the same time.
And that is one very funky fiddle player.
OK, that made my day. :) somebody mod parent "funny" please, even you don't get it...
Funny and NOT trying to be userfriendly:
Jendini.com
I wish more cartoonists would do "realistic" storylines without the sci-fi/fantasy copout of not being required to make any sense. I also like that the animals don't talk. :-)
Disclaimer the author is a friend, and I am actively attempting to spread the word about this new comic
The user ID was pure chance when I signed up; I can't figure out what you mean about the username.
I don't know the distances offhand but it's possible he (or rather they) have a microwave link to somewhere south america.
I thought satellite internet was downlink only, with the uplink being provided by a phone modem. What is this guy using that is bi-directional?
What I want to know is what is going to happen to folks like us who bought multiple licenses of the huge expensive Macromedia all-in-one package of software, with the intent of taking advantage of the upgrade pricing for years to come. Is my investment totally down the drain?
And what about all those websites on Cold Fusion. Those folks
are seriously out of luck. (We don't use it though, thankfully)
People who produce large numbers of CUSTOM CDs will love this. Right now the cheapest way to automate the production of such CDs and print the identifying information on them is to use a robotic contraption with 2 CDs and an expensive disk printer. Such a device costs $2500, minimum (excluding mickey-mouse versions that don't work well).
And at that price range, the ink is water-soluble and will smear if it gets wet.
I imagine that they will partner with a burning software company to make printing the labels easy. My handwriting is so bad that I would gladly pay a bit extra to be able to type in my CD labels without having to go to any extra effort.
And then there are people who do backups on CD, who constantly run the risk of mislabeling CDs as they come out of the burner.
IMHO, very few people care about pretty color graphics - they just want legible, permanent printing at the lowest possible cost
New Web Cartoon: Jendini.com
It's always nice to have worked on things that people have not only heard of, but that actually makes their lives easier.
Do you know why the machines won't let you insure your package? It seems like they can handle every other service the PO offers.
That's the only thing keeping me from using them on a regular basis.
New Web Cartoon: Jendini.com
Actually I've had CISCO support reps in the Phillipines stay on the phone with me ALL NIGHT fixing our firewall problems. And these guys REALLY knew what they were doing.
And the commercial support that I've gotten from DELL was great when it came to advice, and staying on the phone until my RAID was back in one piece, even though I was using an unsupported OS (FreeBSD).
new web cartoon, now featuring Bitey, the pound cat: Jendini.com
A bigger problem is the lack of tax-sheltered savings for small companies. You cannot "save-up" money very efficiently, because at the end the year the tax man takes so much of your savings.
So you are forced to go begging for any capital you might need to expand. And small companies are forced to try to spend all profits by the end of the year to avoid taxation.
What we really need is something like an IRA for small companies, to save money tax-deferred, until there is a big enough pile to make the investments required to grow to the next level.
New Web Cartoon: Jendini.com
I don't know (or care) about .NET, but if you are
writng a windows program Delphi is staggeringly more
efficient to develop in than C++. You can also use it to do Windows API stuff efficiently, meaning you can write most of your custom controls in delphi itself without have to resort to C++.
I just wish they could get their act together and make better documentation.
I actually used C++ for many years before finding out about Delphi, but now that I've switched there is no way I would ever go back.
Of course, more efficient development is not in the best interests of most programmers, because they are motivated to drag out projects as long as possible for job security reasons. But when you are doing fixed-bid contracts, or even if you just care about your reputation, Delphi is the way to go.
New web cartoon: Jendini.com
Servlets are Java programs that handle specific events (such as requests to a URL) and Tomcat is an apache plugin that lets you run servlets from apache.
New web cartoon: Jendini.com
To answer your question about how/when perl is compiled, it depends on the situation:
As near as I can tell, PHP pages are compiled each and every time they are served, along with all the included code.
One of the articles mentioned a bot 6" round, 36" long. Another was 6 feet long and 8" around.
And they are intended to lay cable in pipes that are that small. So how do they go around corners?
I also wonder what happens when a fault develops in the line, in a inaccessible (can't dig it up) location. Do they rip it all out and put a new one in?
I use mine as virtual post-its for passwords, logins, funky UNIX command usage info, etc.
;)
I also use the address book feature for phone numbers.
Of course with all that sensitive info in it, it never leaves the house.
The real problem with fixing someone's PC is that they won't follow the two simple rules of a stable windows box:
1. Install what you need, then never install anything else. Especially not games!
2. Always shut down correctly before turning the power off.
I help the people that follow the rules. They have very stable windows machines that work well for *years* and stay fast with no registry bloat.
People who don't follow the rule quickly get crashy, unreliable systems - and frequently try to make me feel responsible for their problems, because I'm the last person who mucked with the settings.
My uncle is a bit older and taught me this lesson early. See he's an electrical engineer and learned how to fix TV's in the sixties. When word got out that he could fix TV's, he spent all his time fixing TV's for friends, and then got blamed when they eventually died anyway.
It uses unused CPU time - it's supposed to occupy CPU cycles that you aren't using.
The fact that it only snags 50% CPU when everything else is turned off means that it must be single threaded - it's only using 1 of your Mac's two processors.
You can't use process viewer to determine how much it is stealing - the real test is to run another higher priority CPU intensive program and see how close Folding@home gets to zero.
Here's a CPU intensive program for your review (I assume you're running OS X).
Thanks to Opera Software for recognizing this need. I've requested a FreeBSD port via their web form and am thrilled to see that they listen to their customers.
Now, everybody go buy a license to support this excellent work.
I suggest a portable biofeedback monitor. My GF uses one for muscle problems. They have a light, relatively small sensor that can be taped to the skin. When the muscle underneath is tensed, the alarm goes off - and the trigger level is widely adjustable.
The device she uses is walkman sized and cost about $500 from a company in Canada. The brand name is Myotrac.
Any working muscle will do and the thing is very sensitive, with gain as well as level controls. And very easy to use. Google turns up lots of hits, here's the manufacturers URL: http://www.thoughttechnology.com/myotrac.htm
As a bonus, the engineers answer the phone and will gladly discuss your intended use.
This is already being done, especially with test crops, or valuable strains. However, cross-pollenization is still a problem - normal crops can get tainted with engineered genes just by being planted nearby.