Category: GAC IT

I made a few updates to SpamAssassin this morning. First I upgraded from version 2.61 to 2.63 which included a few bug fixes and some minor changes to the rules. Second, I enabled real time block list and DCC checking. That means SpamAssassin will query servers on the net to see if email matches a…

Yesterday we added a few plugins to our Packeteer that helps prioritize our internet usage. one of those plugins was called Apple iTunes 1.0.0. After installing this plugin I noticed that the iTunes Music Store became extremely slow and mostly unusable. One workaround was to set my system to use our proxy server. While it…

Spamassassin version 2.62 was just released. I am testing it on my mail account and if all goes well, I will upgrade the spamd server to 2.62 as well. Summary of major changes since 2.61 ———————————– – Fixed two bugs related to Received line generation and parsing. – Modified two rules to reduce false positives.…

It looks like our internet connection was overwhelemed with traffic last night for a few hours. From about 8:00pm-12:00am. We are not really sure what happened beyond that it looks like a lot of traffic came from Sorensen and headed off campus and saturating our connection. We have put in place some countermeasures so this…

It looks like there are a lot of people on campus that have dell computers with the Dell Alert software running on them. Each of those computers is trying to contact eservicesupport.us.dell.com a.k.a. eservicesupport.ins.dell.com a.k.a. 143.166.224.27. That by its self is not a problem. The problem is that the dell server is not responding to…

We have installed a nice new proxy server. We are currently running with both proxy servers is a round robin DNS configuration for the time being to see how well it works. The new proxy server is a dual AMD 2400 with 2GB of RAM and 2 90GB caches. Also the new proxy server has…

It seems like those pesky spammers are still at it, using infected windows machines to send spam via our mailservers. One machine tried to relay about 180,000 messages via our secondary mail server. That caused lots of email slowdowns that we are still trying to recover from. Ugh.

Not sure what happened yet, but something went wrong and we coulden’t really contact the outside world around 9:45am today. Hopefully we will learn more about that so it won’t happen again. UPDATE: Turns out hickorytech had a router failure today that caused the outage.

We have added more memory and disk space to our proxy server in the hopes that it will help at least a little bit with our ever increasing demand on our internet connection. It appears to have cached more than 8GB since Saturday. Hopefully saving us a few gigs of internet traffic.

Well, as most of you probably noticed, solen was down today for close to an hour. That meant that email and home directories were out of commission during that time. Also from about 5:15pm to 8:00pm draco was down. Draco’s most noticeble service is running spamd which checks incoming email to see if it is…