Found 'Em

Discovered a lovely log on the server today while trying to tighten up e-mail a little. One of those strange coincidences whereby attempting to fix one problem led to an interesting discovery of another. Made for some fascinating reading.

Apparently "Administrator" attempted to access the server about once every second in the wee hours of February 14, and for several days prior. This is strange as I have no recollection of being awake in the wee hours, and I'm nearly certain that I was not being not awake in India. And, when "Administrator" was taking it easy, it looks like all twelve apostles attempted to get access (well, at least "peter," "andrew," and "paul," the latter of which is only an apostle late-born).

So now another port in the firewall (no, I'm not saying which) is disabled, and, unless I am grossly mistaken, I would expect that the issue of us being continually listed at spamhaus is nearing its end.

Little buggers.

Less Interesting, More Troubling

Merrily was I traveling over to lunch today, planning on a quick pit stop to assist someone with accessing their e-mail remotely, when just in passing that person mentioned that they had received a delivery failure on a message they had just sent.

*heart sinking*

Uh-oh. About, nay, precisely, two weeks ago we found ourselves listed on spamhaus.org. At the time, acting on a tip, I made an assumption that the problem was originating from a student computer. So I began a series of treks over to the apartments to sit myself physically at each computer and run a spyware scan. Subsequently I disabled automatic e-mail forwarding (what comes to the student server stays there unless a student manually forwards a message), tightened the firewall to allow only traffic from a legit server through, and added some logging to the firewall so I could see from whence rejected packets came. Surely, thought I, this should greatly reduce our chances of sending spam. So by Monday last (Feb 5) I had petitioned to have us removed from spamhaus.org. Yea and verily, all seemed well. Until ...

Apparently we were re-listed this morning at 7:15AM (+/- 30 minutes). At this point I know that wherever the spam is coming from, it is being sent via a legitimate server. It struck me about mid-afternoon that today is Tuesday. January 30 was also a Tuesday. Hmmm...

So now I think it likely that the culprit computer likely belongs to a commuter who arrives on campus perhaps as early as Monday evening, connects to the network, fires up the bugger, and proceeds to send spam. Presumably unawares. Feh.

Seems like tomorrow may be another looooooooooong day. Or perhaps the problem will magically resolve itself overnight. Until next Tuesday, perhaps.

Yawn

My alarm goes off at 5:30. Why? It used to be a bit earlier, so I could make it to work by 6:00. Now I'm not so sure, though on my good days I make an effort to prevent a little of the German I learned last semester from disappearing altogether (like my Spanish, Greek, and Hebrew seem to have done, in roughly that order). Besides which, this is my third attempt at learning enough German to be able to read it and I figured I should do something to make it stick.

So I've translated the "Aufgabenstellung" portion of this, most of this (though the last half or so is particularly sloppy), and am working a little on Über Gewissheit (Wittgenstein).

You thought it was so I could blog? Ha. But that's sure a fine way to avoid German, as it turns out.

Oh, and I also shoveled the walks.

Six (Seven?) Words

Wired Magazine (14.11) had a series of "short stories" (sci-fi) of six words each. Since I'd been contemplating the patriarchs, I was inspired:

I don't wrestle with God, anymore.

Yes, that seems more like the first or last line of a much longer story than a complete story in itself. So did many of those in Wired.