The usual stuff
Scrolling through the log of the monthly clean-up job, there was one surprise. Though mail handling is as usual:
PMAS statistics for April
Total messages : 3042 = 100.0 o/o
DNS Blacklisted : 0 = .0 o/o (Files: 0)
Relay attempts : 36 = 1.1 o/o (Files: 30)
Accepted by PMAS : 3006 = 98.8 o/o (Files: 30)
Handled by explicit rule
Rejected : 2365 = 78.6 o/o (processed), 77.7 o/o (all)
Accepted : 112 = 3.7 o/o (processed), 3.6 o/o (all)
Handled by content
Discarded : 280 = 9.3 o/o (processed), 9.2 o/o (all)
Quarantained : 190 = 6.3 o/o (processed), 6.2 o/o (all)
Delivered : 59 = 1.9 o/o (processed), 1.9 o/o (all)
the big surprise is that the number of relay attempts is minimal; no file bigger than 4 blocks – which means they are not kept. Quite likely the entries in these files were the ones triggered by testmessages – like the one I see almost every day:
3-MAY-2019 07:56:32.78|R|51.219.139.153|spameri@tiscali.it|spameri@tiscali.it|550 5.7.1 Relaying not allowed: spameri@tiscali.it
and that’s Ok with me.
But there are a few other things – not on the VMS server, that doesn’t need it by design – but on the windows workstation.
Antivirus issues
On my normal workstation, I’m running Windows10 Pro (Why windows? Well, why not – if it works for me) and had McAfee Total Protection installed – used it for years. But the latest version caused the system to hang for a while, whenever I opened a new webpage, another program, document or image to process. I removed and reinstalled it several times but any time that ‘realTime protection’ was enabled, one process (Management Host process) suddenly took up over 14% CPU – everything stopped, even task manager, so that kept showing 14%, but all processes were stuck, so my assumption is that this process actually took all CPU resources on either one core, or stopped all others? Who knows…
I contacted McAfee and all they could offer was “Try reinstalling the product”.
Typical reaction of today’s “IT professionals” ?
Anyway, I got so fed up with this that I removed McAfee from this system, and revered to Microsoft Defender, and probably Malwarebytes. Words spread this is good enough for those that know what they are4 doing (the real professionals :))
Fact is that on one of my laptops – that hasn’t the latest version of windows10 pro because that fails to install – there is no problem. Nor on the systems that still run Windows 7. So it’s kept on these systems.
Solar power
The solar panels work fine, last moth about 300kWh have been produced – in just under half a month. Starting at 19th, about 16:00, it took up to the 20th 13:45 before statistics were fully available. Since then, you can trace the weather conditions in the production of power:
If you look to the graphics over a day, it is clear that cloud-cover limits the ability to generate electricity:
The first days were very sunny – no clouds, later in this week, some clouds got in the way:
and this continued. Except for April 30th – I don’t know why the outcome is so low:
It was cloudy, most of the day, but there were sunny spells as well..