Given the proliferation of spam on just about every vaguely workable platform these days it seems sheer insanity to attempt to run your own mail server.  If it's out there, it's ripe for abuse in one way in another.  And yet, e-mail is still probably one of the best ways to get status reports from your machines every day (my SMTP bridge notwithstanding).  It is thus that the default configuration for mail servers these days defaults to "no way in hell will I relay a message for you," which is a net good for the the Internet as a whole …

I have no idea how long I've been in quarantine.  I've stopped counting because the numbers were just making me twitchy.  Life is going about as well as one could reasonably expect.  We're all save and sound in northern California, as much as we can be during a pandemic.  Working from home is working from home.  To minimize risk we're getting as much stuff delivered as we can, modulo periodic trips to the local pharmacy to pick up filled prescriptions and suchlike. I wish I could say the same of things back home in Pennsylvania, but I'd be lying and …

Yes, this is part of The Internet Archive.

Part of my DNA. Sort of.

I don't ordinarily write much about work, mostly because it's not that interesting but also because it's a bad habit to get into, lest I let something critical slip and get in trouble. However, the last two days were sufficiently rough (and strange) that I feel that I have to write something about it, if only to give my fellow BOFHes something to go on if they find themselves in the same particular position I was. The past two days have been by far the strangest problem I've ever run into working in IT or information security.

Let's set …