Been looking into my spam situation again and noticed most of my spam come in from my secondary MX rather than primary. I imagine the spammers know that things like RBL’s and so forth will only be deployed on the primary servers. So I enabled some RBL checking and a hand made list of regex matches against hostnames on the machine and found the following:
Total Mail Handled by MX: 1221
Total Mail Marked as Spam: 861
Scary.
With the recent release of FreeBSD 4.10 I decided to upgrade my machine this weekend since I was still running a RC of 4.9.
I got the source, build the world and upgraded all the jails, it went perfect since I could slowly do the jails one by one as they kept working on just fine on the old 4.9 kernel, all the usual things that break like ps and so forth worked just fine.
When it came to upgrading the main host, it started going bad from the word go. First my serial console got itself corrupted and I could not type anything at all to the server, this means I could not do the installworld in single user mode. I shut everything down that I could essentially keeping the machine in multi user mode with just sshd running. Did the installworld and installkernel and rebooted.
I hoped at this point that the serial port would reset and things would be fine, but it seems now that the serial port was actually producing garbage to the console and ended up preventing the bootloader from choosing the right harddrive for the bootup.
I power cycled the machine with my remote power management and that was it, dead, no response at all.
After getting hold of the ISP and gaining access to the co-location facility I discovered the BIOS battery died at some point and when I power cycled the machine it forgot its BIOS settings, including the fact that it has to turn back on once it gets power ๐
A quick replacement of the battery solved it and now its all fine again, I also turned off the motherboards console redirection relying on FreeBSD’s. This way future console corruption won’t prevent a bootup since the FreeBSD console stuff only kicks in after the bootloader.
I found via boingboing a link to this site with photos of a deserted island (click on ‘thumbnail’ for the actual photos) off the coast of Japan, this reminded me of the town near Chernobyl that has been deserted, I have been interested in visiting that for years. There are tour groups that will take you to it now, I am very seriously considering going in the summer.
Off the westernmost coast of Japan, is an island called “Gunkanjima” that is hardly known even to the Japanese. Long ago, the island was nothing more than a small reef. Then in 1810, the chance discovery of coal drastically changed the fate of this reef. As reclamation began, people came to live here, and through coal mining the reef started to expand continuously. Befor long, the reef had grown into an artificial island of one kilometer (three quarters of a mile) in perimeter, with a population of 5300. Looming above the ocean, it appeared a concrete labyrinth of many-storied apartment houses and mining structures built closely together.
Eventually, the mines faced an end, and in 1974 the world’s once most densely populated island become totally deserted. The island, after all its inhabitants departed leaving behind their belongings, became an empty shell of a city where all its peopl disappeared overnight, as if by some mysterious act of God.
Ten years later, I returned to the island, equipped with food and drinking water. The island was devastated, with the smell of people gone. Inside the buildings, however, evidence of people’s lives remained strongly. The strange atmosphere led me to wonder if island had remained in sleep ever since all its inhabitants left.
After my recent purchase of the Nikkor 70-300mm lens – which was intended as a cheap way to find out if I would like a zoom lens – I now purchased an upgrade on this based on my experience with it – the Sigma 28-300 Hyperzoom.
The Nikkor is a good lens though it suffers from heavy Chromatic Aberrations, especially at 300mm and in high contrast areas. The problem with a 70-300mm lens is that it does not start wide enough for holiday or walk about type shots, I often found myself wanting to change lens to my 18-70mm to get certain objects in frame that was too close or too big.
The 28-300mm is a good middle ground lens, I used it a bit today and found that I was unable to produce any CA and that I was not tempted to swap to a wider lens ever. Lens swapping on DSLR’s are notorious for getting dust on the CCD which requires rather scary cleaning using expensive CO2 based systems or cleaning swabs. The 28-300mm gives the equivalent of a 10x magnification when quoted in the typical digital camera speak. The lens was a bit hard to find, but eventually I found a dealer with stock and paid £200 for it.
View the full entry for a photo of the lens, also my first attempt at a studio type shot using some black cloth and a desk lamp, will need to get some velvet.
Via Geek News Central I got a link to a very thorough side-by-side comparison of various blogging tools. If you are considering moving or even deciding for the first time on what tool to use then this will be very handy.
