2011 is about to become an interesting year for us.

The two main ISPs of the American hoster McColo pulled the plug of his internet connection. Based in California McColo supposably gave refuge for master servers of several spam bot nets. The Washington Post covered this story as well. According to IronPort, spam levels fell by 66% in this night.

It’s a pity for all reputable customers of McColo’s – sorry, but I welcome this action. I hope you’ll quickly find a new hoster.

Some months ago I set up mailgraph on my server. Mailgraph is nice mail log analyser and visualiser. It watches Postfix or Sendmail log files and creates daily, weekly, monthly and yearly graphs. I regularly check these graphs. So I discovered the unusual low mail reject rates Tuesday night already. And even days later the spam levels stay at that level. Here is my weekly graph two days after McColo went offline:

Mailgraph two days later

But I wanted to have my own numbers. So I quickly did some calculations and compared the first McColo-offline-day (Wednesday) numbers with the former average:

• overall connections to my mailserver dropped to 48%
• overall rejects as well are at 48%
• rejects because of invalid helo hostname even are at 44%
• mail rejects from known spam sources are down to 38%
• rejects because of invalid recipient fell to 50%

Now it even got more interesting monitoring the statistics to find out when the spam rates start to rise again. Somehow I doubt that the bot net creators will fail to even get parts of their system back under control.

Karl Ranseier

Worlds most unsuccessful blogger all-time, already in his childhood posted all of his friends. At school he became maverick. He wanted to get the star role in the homonymous hollywood movie and became an actor. As he went for the casting he picked the wrong door and was appointed supernumerary in a comercial where he got at least a bog roll. After an occupational retraining he worked as a second-rate b-logger for the saw mill of his uncle.

At the age of 42 Ranseier founded a microchip factory, designed and built worlds biggest microchips and vainly tried to sell them. Two years later he was up to his neck in debt and for 5 years went to jail where he learned to code. In recent years he worked freelance as an executive webapplication developer of enterprise business management systems for several IT companies.

Ranseier died yesterday when he confused his second-life with his real-life account and did a logout.

Well, so here it is, my third first posting. It’s in English as announced over two years ago (kind of embarrassing). But now I am changing my just-discovered hobby and make this blog the default site of my domain jdsn.de.

jdsn.de-1.0

With this I finally say goodbye to my old site. It was an old site still using a frameset and java script magic to animate menu buttons. This year it had its ninth birthday – if I remember correctly – quite a long time for a web site. But even the content was old and I did not change anything on that site for years – so rest in pieces jdsn.de-1.0 – welcome jdsn.de-2.0.

By dropping the old site and switching to a new system I will from now on keep my site more current and regularly blog about interesting and other topics.

Yet I did not decide what to blog about exaclty – I think I just need to get used to dump my thoughts to the public. Most likely it will be related to software development, linux, openSUSE, music, singing, the city of Nürnberg and lots of other stuff I now can’t think of ever blogging about. Just as a side note: I also blog about things I do for openSUSE on lizards.opensuse.org – its a technical only blog.

Gute Nacht …