Its good to know that its not just my non user-friendly tendencies that makes me want to correct MPD’s irritating faults and dispose of his body down the well in the gardens of the Insane Asylum.
One of the fellow inmates here “Stylee” has been dealing with the guy all day so far, and it looks like the other inmates should start a book on which one of us flips out and kills him first.
It should be interesting the next time he makes it into the Asylum for a meeting.
CN
King of the Lab!
As those of you who have to deal with the world of emils know BT Yahoo have recently upped their fight against Spam in a rather Draconian Manner. and SysAdmins round the world have learnt to dread the influx of the following in their logs :-
2009-04-23 07:34:28 1LwsVq-00055A-NE SMTP error from remote mail server
after initial connection: host xxx.xxxl.yahoo.com
[195.50.106.135]: 421 4.7.0 [TS01] Messages from xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx temporarily
deferred due to user complaints – 4.16.55.1; see
http://postmaster.yahoo.com/421-ts01.html
For those of you Un-Email Tech Savvy I’ll explain in simple terms their new greylistsing email policy, I will explain in the form of a conversation between Bill “a poor yahoo sysad” and Ben “a Manager aka a suit” .
Ben: “We have a problem with our servers, I keep having emails trying to sell me Viagra, and telling me A great uncle is dead and left me some money!”
Bill: “Yes, everyone gets them, its called SPAM!… Err you didn’t give out your bank account details again did you?”
Ben: “Yes, but its Ok this time Mr. Yakamatza has heard of me, and trusts me to look after his 50million Yen while he’s audited, He said I could keep all the interest I make, and he’ll pay me 1 million”
Bill: *sigh*
Ben: “Anyway I’ve come up with a way to stop it! What we do is refuse to accept any emails, we’ll send it back saying its blocked due to user complaints”
Bill: “But no one will get their emails then?”
Ben: “No, here’s the clever bit, we’ll refuse the first half dozen times they send the email, then let the 7th attempt in. Spammers will get bored and give up before sending the same email 7 times?”
Bill: “Great, thats not going to annoy most the world. Where the Computer Weekly with the job adverts!”
I’m sure it went something like that. And because of that we at the Insane Asylum have been fighting rising mail queues and upset customers for the last few months. Our team tried everything to relieve the bottleneck, different IP’s, Domain Keys, filling in the webforms, the works…Nothing……
So at the start of this week I got annoyed that the inmates here were getting hassle again over customers not being able to evil people with BT email addresses. So I filled in the online help form (which so far had resulted in nothing). I filled it in using the style of a very annoyed person, used my name with all its letters at the end to impress whoever read it. And by the next day there was an email from them asking for more details. Send off giving them all the emails they asked for and viola! a nice email back saying our servers have been added into their database and that should sort out the problems. And it has, no bounce backs or failed emails today.
CN
As my Dear Readers you may be aware (If you recall back to the Jibber Jabber posts) We at the Insane Asylum have switched to a uniform IM system that we now all use for inter communication between padded cells. Which is much simpler that the days when some were on MSN, some Skype, and the old skool ones still on ICQ.
Now one of the reasons we switched was because the Asylums Governor liked the throw away joke suggestion of putting all our servers onto IM, so we could talk to them, and they could let us know when they experienced problems. And our Support droids could access basic Linux commands while using their preferred Micro$oft OS’s. That will teach me to watch what i say in jest. ([GN]Edit: No it won’t )
So, I now have to make this happen. Well it beats working on Phone systems for a change. And I feel I need a challenge every now and again, or my Mind starts wandering into dangerous areas. And since I have this blog I figured where better to log my progress, so I can read where I am up to when I get distracted with another project.
Phase 1:
I have a basic IM bot running on one of our servers to use for testing. It has rudimentary commands so far, basically traceroute, host, nslookup, and several ones that result in it insulting the person talking to it ;0)
Phase 2:
I want to get some basic help commands on there, so people can work out how to use it better, Its one thing adding fancy commands to its list if people can not work the simple ones out. So help commands, and a simple config file I can use so I only have one small thing to change depending on what server its running on. (humm. Get it to load file based on hostname then one file will do all)
Right. Off to work.
CN
Last thing yesterday I finished doing all the updates to my Work Desktop, So this morning as I was in the Insane Asylum a few minutes early I figured I’d restart X to kick the new version in. System restarts fine, only No Mouse. “No Mouse = No Problem” Well I’d done the same updates on my Home box the night before.
emerge -va xf86-input-mouse
OK, Restart X… Humm.. Why is my screen just black, why is my terminal screen also just black? No problems, turn off machine and reboot. So I turn off the Desktop, only for the box itself to keep going “click ~ click ~ click ~ click ~ click ~ click ~ click ~ click” Thats not right?
No problems, Since its powerd down, just take the side off and have a nose inside, power it up…. Nothing.. ok try again….. Nothing.. ARSE!!!!
Broken Computer
Now in the old days of the Insane Asylum we had hardware engineers who you could throw your broken hardware at, and they would return it to you all fixed and like new. After all I am the CodeNinja. Not the HardwareNinja. Only now, even though there are three memebers of Support Staff at the Asylum, I had to sort it out myself.
“Easier said than done!”
Considering we do computer repair, our build room is poorly stocked, and i ended up having to take the power supply out of a random computer that had been left unatended in the build room. Of course, the power supply was for a basic sized desktop, and my work machine is a larger tower, so the cables did not reach.
Ok, Rip out all the insides, throw floppy dirve away “After all who still uses floppies?” rea rrange everything at the top of the case, utilising brown tape to fill in the holes where devices used to live, and hey presto, the cables reach!
OK. Power up Computer, and everything works~ish. I’m a hard drive down since my IDE controller is on the fritz and now only accepts it can see one drive. I beleive my machine is running on borrowed time. Poor Gawain may need to be replaced really soon.
And sod’s law states it will happen when I am really really busy and snowed under with deadlines.
CN
In the velvet darkness, of the blackest sky
All morning the skies above the Insane Asylum have been dark & brooding as we are sat under a Thunder Storm. Now this is not necessary a bad thing, OK. So my dogs are outside getting drenched, OK I will spend longer driving home at the end of the day, OK parents with their kids off school will be cursing the weather, and other Bad things I can understand.
But there is a light in the darkness of everybody’s life..
What is that positive light I hear you ask. Yes I heard you, thanks to a flashplayer plugin on this site it recorded your statement, and emailed it to me over to my iPhone. No! I will not go do that to myself. Behave!!!
Well to answer your none-rude question, The positive light is ;- I work for an ISP, which means computer, technology, things that need power to work, and since the storm keeps taking out either our electricity or our Internet connection, it means I get to spend the day sitting back, playing on the Internet via my iPhone. ;o)
Life Is Good!
CN.
I am considering hiring a HitMan.
MPD has Just phone me up, disturbing my afternoon nap to ask “That functionality you said in your email that the site had. err How do I get it to work?”
So I start explaining it to him for the 6Th time, while just looking at his code to see if there’s a problem preventing the functionality working, and I spot a small problem, THE TOTAL LACK OF MY CODE.
He’s only gone and overwritten all my work with old copies of the files again!
Vent over, but seriously, If you know any good assassins? Let me Know
CN
