Being an inveterate domain-name registerer, I've got a lot of domains sitting around doing nothing. I've only recently stumbled across Bruce Perens's Open Source Parking site. It's a clever idea -- transferring those parked domains on GoDaddy and other registrars to a page with ads for FOSS projects.
tags: bruce perens open source parking domain registration godaddy
Adieu John
Our friend John Usher bugged out to Banff today. He's off to the Banff Centre to finish up the research he did on his Ph.D. and do some more work on goofy, crazy audio projects in the healthsome mountain air. According to John, it's really nice at the Centre, but if you go outside you have to clap all the time to keep grizzly bears away. I'm not sure if that's for real or just a prank that the locals play on visiting scientists.
John's been here a few weeks -- it was really good to have him. Our apartment is just a bit too big, and I've enjoyed the space most when we have a friend or relative staying in the guest bedroom. I think in the year or so that we've lived here it's been occupied about 30-40% of the time.
I know Amita June will miss having Mononc John around. They get along really well, and I was hoping that AJ would pick up some UK turns of phrase like "tickety-boo" and "manky". I'm particularly charmed by the English use of the word "cheers", which seems to be analogous to the way like Hawaiians use "aloha"; it means hello, good bye, thank you, and Mmmm! Beer!. A fine word used by fine people.
tags: john usher cheers visitors banff centre
Postfix fix
Over the last few days I've been tightening down on the amount of spam I get in my Inbox by trying to cut it off at the MTA (mail server) level. I have a lot of different email addresses, and I use a mix of mail forwarding and multiple IMAP or POP3 inboxes to bring everything together into one nice little bundle. I do some Bayesian filtering on the client side, and I have a call to use Vipul's Razor in my .procmailrc files, but it's great to filter this stuff further up the data path, too.
Fortunately the three servers that get me the most mail all run Postfix. Postfix has some nice common-sense features that cut down on spam right out of the box. First, I made sure all three servers used DNSBL lists to block open relay servers. Second, I added some checks for validity on sender address domain and domain in the HELO command.
Finally, I added a filter to check the Sender Policy Framework to see if the connecting server is authorized to send mail for the sending address's domain. Of the three changes, I've found that the basic checks -- making sure that sender address domains and HELO hostnames are valid -- are blocking the most mail. But the other two kinds of checks help, too.
This all came not a moment too soon, as the wikitravel.org mail server seems to be under another DDOS attack. Check out the numbers on the mail that's queued versus what's getting rejected!
evan@antipater:~$ sudo grep NOQUEUE /var/log/mail.log.0 | wc -l 119150 evan@antipater:~$ sudo grep qmgr.*removed /var/log/mail.log.0 | wc -l 590
Gee, three orders of magnitude difference... I'm getting about 50-50% on other servers. This is over the last 24 hours or so -- what a huge waste of time.