Posted on

11-Nov-2009

Athene revived
11-11 – Fool’s day? You might think so. This old (2001 or so) has been pimped a bit. XP was still on it but I brought it fully up-to-date, and re-installed McAfee. The reason: the system will be used by a friend while I’m doing the maintenance on his ordinary system. He blew a thing or to, by (accidently) hitting “Install” on a piece of malware: it claims to be “Windows Enterprise Defender” and pops up a window showing “infections”. And I’m pretty sure what is shown, is bogus. However, McAfee doesn’t run anymore, even fails to re-install, and Task Manager doesn’t run either. There surely is something rotten here.
Worst case I’ll need to re-install the system, problem: I don’t have a Dutch Windows2000 CD – and the one on his system (pre0installed…) cannot be trusted to be clean or complete. He should have a CD, but Dell didn’t supply it. Perhaps there is some software to re-install the system, but ‘that remains to be seen.

Development
Got so far as reading the (sequential) configuration file, now splitting reads into keyword and valuem but I got stuch in IF-THEN-ELSEIF-THEN-ELSE-ENDIF trouble. But I’ll manage – one day. I’ve a pretty good picture on the storage of the stuff in memory; details of syntax and restrictions (and to get around them) is getting fixed as well.
The idea has shifted a bit: create a blog-server, capable of handling multiple blogs, caching waht’s possible, and have that running (on any system) and access it over webserver-controlled clients, on ANY system. It’s more efficient, I think, and easier to code 🙂

Posted on

01-Nov-2009

Mail statistics
PMAS statistics for Oct
Total messages    : 2985 = 100.0 o/o
DNS Blacklisted   : 1897 =  63.5 o/o (Files: 31)
Relay attempts    :   90 =   3.0 o/o (Files: 31)
Processed by PMAS :  998 =  33.4 o/o (Files: 31)
        Discarded :  206 =  20.6 o/o (processed),   6.9 o/o (all)
     Quarantained :  208 =  20.8 o/o (processed),   6.9 o/o (all)
        Delivered :  584 =  58.5 o/o (processed),  19.5 o/o (all)

Compared the numbers with those of half a year ago (4-May-2009) the numbers tell a story: the total amount of messages has dropped by 2000 – almost half; the percentages are fairly equal – except for the percentage of DNS-blacklisted messages that is significant lower. But since the number of accepted messages is more or less the same as before, the percentage has doubled.

I’m not sure what caused this trend, there can be many reasons: blockage of spamming domains and open relayes, less infected systems connected (some Dutch ISV’s do).

PHP et al
No news on this front, just that WP 2.8.5 has been released, plus that I don’t think my troubles are over with that version. I tend to forget about PHP alltogether. There are more issues than I want to handle. So….

Blogging program
I started the development of this program. It will be a daemon that can handle multiple blogs concurrently, so that means a one-time reading of the configuration and keep it in memory, and it gives me the ability to cache files (index pages come to mind, rebuilding the indexes is only needed when a page is added or removed).

But since I’m not yet familiar with C, it will take some time…