ImperialViolet

It's been a Bad Server Weekend (tm).

Firstly, hawk's outgoing SMTP relay started refusing to relay because hawk got listed as a dialup IP and the relay has spam blacklisting. (hawk is Freenet's server for stuff like mailing lists). Now, I'm not going to rant about spam blacklisting here because I'm not going to change anyone's mind about it. I can only suggest you look at alternatives like SpamAssassin and the new breed of Bayesian filters.

Anyway, as a bodge I just set hawk to send email directly which worked for some people until Ian found another relay. However, since some of the lists which were blacklisting hawk gave contact details I tried emailing them:

It's our understanding that all of 4.46.0.0 - 4.46.119.255
is dynamic IP Verizon DSL.  As dynamic IP space, it's appropriate for it to be
in our list.

BTW...the addition of this space was prompted by abuse of this IP space by a
professional spammer that has been spamming from a Verizon DSL account with
dynamic IPs moving around this range for the past few months.

I emailed back and the guy basically refused. But from a difference blacklist admin...

Fixed in the next update. Thanks.

So they aren't all bad.

And once hawk was running again ... metis (this server) promptly died. I still don't know what happened as I haven't phoned since it came back online. It wasn't a power cut (the UPS didn't kick in if it was) and I hope it wasn't another rat pissing in the power supply. Anyway, it's running again but I really am going to move it to IC soon.

And I was this close to 100 days uptime. (it was about 98 days when it died).

Mozilla 1.2 really works well. It doesn't crash. It's pretty fast. Copy and paste has started working again after 1.0. Nice.

Also, Straw is a good GTK feedreader. I'm using it for the moment.

Last night I went to see Mark Thomas at the SoHo theatre last night. For those who don't know of him (most of you) he's sort of a stand up comedian with a strong political bent. Basically, he makes you laugh talking about stuff like campaigning against the War on Iraq. If you ever get the chance to see him I strongly suggest you jump at it like a rabid ferret.

As a side note, he's in court today trying to get an order to prevent the government going to war with Iraq without a new UN resolution. I donated to the legal fees and here's hoping he wins.