A lot of GNU/Linux users share these feelings and everyone reasons for hating windows are similar here are mine: 1. I hate M$ it is a monopoly who have maintained their monopoly by using the worst tactics possible. They have bought out/destroyed every single competitor. Remember netscape even US courts ruled against M$ but it doesn't stop M$'s practices The so called Get the facts campaign. 2.Use of proprietary formats, when you are using M$ products you are locked into forced use of those products if someday M$ disappears all your work will too. 3.Restarting the computer everytime I do anything. Even for something as simple as changing the IP I have to restart. 4.Security, well need I say anything. 5.No control of our own computer. When you buy a copy of windows basically you have given every right to M$ and you have to play by thier rules whether you like it or not. 6.Lack of quality software. It may seem surprising but uite a large portion of windows software is badly written and bug ridden. MSIE is the first thing that comes to mind. Some things I don't hate about windows: 1. Its not free: well nothing in this world is free and since they developed the whole thing themselves I don't see why they shouldn't charge for thier software. Its a privilege we have of using a system like like Linux(Its estimated cost of development would be around $1.1 billion if developed by proprietary means and that was in year 2000) 2. Its proprietary: I don't have a problem with proprietary software as long as it plays nice and follows standards.
Read More......Thursday, August 31, 2006
Wednesday, August 30, 2006
Haha spam wins rather need for anti spam wins
I was really grumpy about my boss not wanting to set up a spam filter (see my last post) but something happened to change his thinking. Our main mail server's connection failed(The one which is spam filtered) and we had to change our MX record to the old one and retrieve it with POP(98.9%spam). He had setup thunderbird to do it. I go into the server room and almost faint 83000+ mails in the inbox, at the same time Im chuckling to myself. I go over to my boss and ask him to take a look he was almost in tears(Oh the most satisfying feeling). Can you do something about it? I answer you mean kmail and spamassassin? He says 'anything'. I set about doing the job it turns out that actually thunderbird had mistaken the number of emails(maybe because of the large mbox size and the fact we hadn't compacted it). Whatever I launch kmail and sort the emails by date turns out there were actually only around 6000 emails the rest were old mail which wasn't properly handled by thunderbird. Since our new ubuntu server was doing nothing(except downloading stuff for me and a socks proxy muahahah) I decided to install kmail and spamassassin on this server and reduce the load on the other server. But I hit one problem ubuntu doesn't have kde so I had to add kubuntu repos to apt sources.list and update it. Now Iam sitting here waiting for apt-get install kmail to finish. I decide why not test spamassasain I copy the mbox of trash and legitimate mails to my work machine(both are huge so a lot of test material). This was the result of the test(It doesn't include all of spamassassin tests though since I was behind a firewall and had to use a proxy to access internet which I don't think is configurable in spamassassin): Speed: A little slow but acceptable False positives: 2/923 False negatives: 100+ out of 33024 mails (Since a lot of checks couldn't be done, also it should get better with ham/spam training) Still its a lot of improvement if on average we get 2000 mails/day it should work quite well. Well I hope so.
Read More......Tuesday, August 29, 2006
Spam arghh
The place I am working has an old email account that is hosted somewhere else and we download the mail using POP, problem is we get 4000 emails daily and out of that around 3900 is SPAM.My boss deletes all the junk manually. I suggest to him these ways of reducing spam: Me: Sir, why don't we remove all the text email addresses from the website and put pictures instead so that spam bots won't read email. Him: We already are in most spammers database it would only be a waste of time editing the website. Duhh!! Me: Sir, why don't we forward all mail to gmail and setup a forward there to give us clean filtered mail here. Him: We might run into legal issues. I agree but still?? Me: Sir why don't we use our new mailserver setup(which is using spamassasin) to filter this too. Him: It has too much load. Duhh!! Me: Sir why don't we download mail on another machine with kmail and use spamassasin filtering(kmail has a wizard for spamassassin compatibility) and then forward it? Him: It isn't that important to devote resources for this. Duhhhhhhh! Its moments like this I want to bang my head against the wall. Iam thinking who made you the network admin? I don't know how many network admins like him are running rather wasting our time by not even employing proper spam filters even in cases where its the easiest to do.
Read More......My life atm
I am a student of computer science engineering and at the moment I am in Delhi doing my six months training as a system/network coadmin. Quite a BOFH I am but the job description's more like the PFY although I don't have pimples and I am much more sinister. My job keeps me busy from 8 am to 8 pm this includes 3 hours of travelling. I know it sucks. When I started it was great, so much stuff I had never seen but now its daily the same old routine. Hey its not so bad one would think I have sundays but for the fact they are much more boring. On the positive side I got access to tons of computing power powerful servers with gigs and gigs of RAM. Mostly this blog's gonna be about my experiences here and some more stuff.
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