Month: September 2008

Babelfish’ed Spam
“Medicine” and casino spam has, for a long time, been sent in English of some kind. Obfuscated, of course, to fool spam filters that just look at the subject (some do). But these filters have improved and are now too strict for most and their messages get blocked.
Luckily (think the spammers) there is an online translators like Yahoo’s Babelfish or similar services, so the subject can now be written in the language of the domain it’s sent to. But Babelfish is not perfect and you get all kinds of rubbish. Clearly not sent by a native. It may only circumvent the filter (for a while).
Similarly, the sender name is translated as well. Mostly it’s rather straight, but at times it’s hilarious.

Not that it offers them an extra entrance at thios domain. These messages are still blocked – by their content aside sender and contained URL’s – and I see them only if I want to. IF they arrive at all.

(I haven’t tested it yet – but would a combination of “http” and “.exe” within a hyperlink now be blocked? I did make that suggestion)

PMAS 3.1 Final release installed
PMAS 3.1 has been released today. The final kit addresses two issues I found. It contains PMAS_SHUTDOWN.COM that will not just stop the processes but will also remove the installed images. And PTMSP_SHUTDOWN.COM will now locate lower-case directory names – the reason that this previously didn’t stop the PMAS processes was cause by the fact that my PMAS_ROOT logical refers to directory [pmas031]; the procedures searches “PMAS” – in uppercase, and “pmas” isn’t found…

I logged into Diana from my hotel room, downloaded the kit, installed it and ran PMAS_STARTUP.COM to restart the product. And it did – without a problem. Works like a charm.
Update
Some minor issues have been discovered so Hunter has re-released an new kit hours after I downloaded it. But since I didn’t encounter any of these (I’m not using the features where it happens) I’ll keep it for another occasion to install it – if at all.

PMAS 3.1 RC1 installed
Process.com sent a message that the final release of PMAS 3.1 is at hand – the release candidate was available for download all testers have been asked to install it. So i downloaded the kit, installed it and restarted the package – with the same result as before: It didn’t start because PTSMTP – the controller – and PTSMTPnnnn – the workhorses – were still up-and-running. So I checked the procedure that shuts down these processes.
And found the problem.
PMAS is installed in SYS$SYSDEVICE:[pmas031]. Mind the lowercase name. It’s important.
The shutdown procedure scans the processes on the system, gets the full imagespec and retrieves the path. If it contains “PMAS” it’s a PMAS process and so it needs to be stopped.
But due to the fact that I set my environment to have /PARSE_STYLE=EXTENDED, these processes will never be found. “pmas” is something else than “PMAS”…
The solution is simple: if you get the image specification, turn it all into uppercase. That did the trick. Process has been informed.
No patches yet
no time last weekend to install the latest patches. but since UPDATE 7 is available, I think that will be all to be installed. Makes life a bit easier.
WordPress 2.6.2
I donwloaded and tested it – on VMS since on XP there is a problem since SP3: Files that were installed by unzipping a container, are now blocked for execution. You can unblock them, but you have to do it file by file. I sent a request to Microsoft to complain and ask for a solution but didn’t get a reply yet. I should get one within 24 hours. It’s over 3 days now.
Or Microsoft counts more than 24 hours in a day ?

Holiday pictures done
Last night and very early this morning, I finished the 2008 holiday pictures, created my album, added a page for the tracking data (I used the old index page and the album index pages as a base) and uploaded it all.
It’s accessable by the entry in “Trips, Tracks and Travels”.

Moree to come. I have the last tracking and some photographs of the GroeneHart path, and from the Rheinsteig that needs to be processed.

The missing bits
I counted the number of messages that are not counted in PMAS’s statistics, are all received between 01-Sep-2008 and the moment I installed the new software on 09-Sep-2008 19:30: 134 found “quarantained” and 231 “discarded”, so 365 all together. Since the period is about a quarter of the month, a rather big number; but in general, over a longer period, it won’t matter that much; the delivered messages aren’t counted either. Given the statistics, that would have been about 36. That makes sense.
Plans for the weekend
I plan to do some major updates this weekend: Install a number of VMS patches, upgrade the blog software to the latest version (and create a script to cope with the newly introduced incomptability, since the WordPress sources are not likely to be changed to accomodate OpenVMS out-of-the-box), and migrate the blogs tho the new version. Of course. I’ll have a backup if something fails.