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Richy's Random Ramblings

Work: Updated to BIND 9

After a bit of prompting via this slashdot story (also on The Register) about the UNIX DNS server BIND having a vulnerability, I decided to upgrade from BIND 8.3.3 to BIND 9. Apart from having to re-build the named.conf configuration file, it needed very little work to get running again. I also took to opportunity to start using ACL (Access Control Lists) in the configuration file to make things easier to read and to cut down and repetition.

Blogging: totalxsive’s Blog

Neil, aka fellow dmoz editor totalxsive has linked to me here in his own blog!

🙂

And, yep, I’ve met Neil (and, believe me, that isn’t an experience I’m likely to forget!) – but I’m not sure about what he means by “he posts so many comments”. I’m only posting around 5 a day, just because I’ve got a lot to say on various subjects (mainly about spam at the moment unfortently 🙁 ), doesn’t make me a bad person does it? 🙂

Cheers Neil!

Spam: Nigerian Jerry Duruibe: Day 2

I decided to respond to the Nigerian spam I received yesterday. Don’t worry, to ensure the spammer can’t confirm he had a real email address, I set up a brand new one on HotMail and changed a few words of my reply. The entire text of my reply is below.

Oh, he sent 3 copies of the spam to my Yahoo! mail boxs, and 3 copies to an old email address (ie hasn’t been used in 3 years) on one of my main domain. Text and headers of the emails are the same (except there is a tiny variance in the Subject: header).

And I got a reply!!!

Personal: Mortgage Increase

This morning I had a letter from my mortgage company Abbey National informing me that due to change of “rate of interest applicable to your standard variable rate loans”, I will now be paying more for my mortgage. How much more? Erm, 1p per month! (That’s $0.02 USD or 0.02Euros). This is in a letter sent to me by first class post at 27p (around 0.42 USD/Euros: I’ll just call them “euro-dollars from now on, it’ll probably be easier 🙂 ).

Ok, since the Abbey are a big user of the postal service they probably have a bulk-users discount – but if we assume 24p: it still means that for the next two years I’ll be paying them that little bit of extra money just for the letter. I should really write to them and say “Next time, don’t bother telling me – and take the amount you saved off my mortgage”. 🙂 The mind boggles sometimes….