Category computers

After not receiving the shipping notification for something I received last night, I have decided to try disabling Postfix’s HELO validations on my server. This will likely lead to far more spam being delivered, but it should eliminate odd rejections from non-compliant servers.

I had smtpd_helo_restrictions = reject_invalid_hostname, reject_non_fqdn_hostname set, which can be referenced here. The problem was some sites wouldn’t send a proper HELO, leading to mail not being delivered as it should have been. Maybe it’d be best to have a SA rule which marks down improper HELOs instead of simply blocking them.

If spam levels get too high again, maybe I’ll go back to the old restrictions. They generally work fine.

Anyone else noticing a lot of SSH scanning going on?

There just seems to be a whole bunch more lately, with most of it happening overnight. That is, 9pm – 3am EDT, 12am – 7am EDT, etc.

Now that I finally got DenyHosts working properly things seem to be a bit better. (I’d stupidly bolted on to a default hosts.allow which had an ALL : ALL : allow up near the top in the comments, which I didn’t read.)

I’m up to 650-some blocked hosts, and I’m fairly sure there will be another 10 or so today.

So… 10.5.

To start: Finder no longer sucks. I’m copying 85,000 files (old maildir archive) and it’s behaving as one would expect.

I’m having some weirdness sending photos over from my phone via Bluetooth. Not sure what is to blame yet.

New Terminal is interesting. Not sure if I prefer it or iTerm more, but the concept of building profiles which affect everything the old terminal could do is great.

Mail.app 3.0 seems nice. We’ll see how it does incorporating my old mail.

Stacks are excellent, particularly when /Applications is added as one.

Uhm… More later. Right now I’m particularly waiting for my music library to start copying back so I have stuff to listen to.

So, I think with the install of OS X 10.5 and some potentially new-to-me 500GB hard disks I’m going to set things up as follows:

/Volumes/Alpha (320GB): Boot disk, OS, ~, iTunes Music, Apps, other normal stuffs.
/Volumes/Bravo (320GB): Photos, Misc Storage, 60GB (or so) partition for Bootcamp running XP, which will also be usable from VMware.
/Volumes/Charlie (500GB): Backups
/Volumes/Delta (500GB): Backups

Backups are things like sync’d copies of most of the home directories on rowla.nuxx.net, data from the other volumes in the machine, stuff from my work laptop, and various other things.

I’ll then have two external 320GB disks left over, and I think I’ll use those for offsite backups and backups of my parents machine and such.

The really nice thing about going to all internal disks is that there will be an overall power savings (no need to run external adapters), SMART stuff can be polled from all drives, there will be less noise, and I will (hopefully) avoid some of the external drive problems I’ve had with OS X in the past.

The VMware / Bootcamp thing should also be nice, because then I can have just one XP instance available virtualized for normal use (development work, Quicken, etc) or full speed, running natively if I want to play some games. With the VM essentially having its own spindle it should run quite quick as well.