Year: 2004

At around 11:00pm last night our mailserver stopped delivering email. It was still accepting messages and storing them to be delivered later. I restarted that process this morning just before 8:00am and now it is trying to catch up and deliver the more than 16,000 messages it has waiting. So if anyone is wondering why…

Last week we had some issues with AOL rejecting email from our mailserver due to us allowing too many spam messages to be sent from student computers. On Tuesday we were able to get on AOL’s whitelist. Here is what their email says: Work has been completed on your Whitelist request and should become effective…

The performance of our email server has been anything but great the past few weeks. To help speed things up we ordered some nice new 15000 RPM disks a few weeks ago. Well, we finally got them and were able to install them today. Initial results look promising. Hopefully email performance will be great from…

Last week it appears that AOL put us on their blacklist. That means that any email sent from Gustavus via our default mail server was being rejected by AOL. The reason they are rejecting us is because a number of student machines have been sending out spam. Most likely these machines were infected with one…

Sunday evening something happened in Norelius that pretty much brought down the entire network. We are not sure exactly what it was. It was still causing problems around 7:30am this morning but by 8:00am whatever was causing the problem has disappeared.

Most of you at GAC have probably noticed that this week email has gotten particularly slow. There appears to be a few reasons for this. The biggest reason is that people are collecting more and more email in their inboxes these days. If you feel that your email performance is slow, the best thing you…

In an effort to help protect our self from joe jobs, spam, viruses, etc. we have begun publishing SPF TXT records in our DNS for gac.edu and gustavus.edu. If you want to know more about SPF, take a look at spf.pobox.com

It seems like almost every Windows computer on campus is infected these days. Ok, well maybe not every one, but some times it sure feels like it. Anyway one of the things I am seeing a lot these days is macines trying to connect to irc servers and listening for commands. I think that is…

It appears as though some machine(s) on campus is trying to take out an IRCd server. There are literally thousands of spoofed TCP SYN packets heading for a specific machine each second. The packets are pretending to be coming from what appears to be random IP addresses not on our network. So tracing this back…