Benj's tavern

On the use and abuse of logrotate to rotate spams

bdrieu@april.org — Tue Sep 27 2005 11:16

As for everybody, spam eventually became a major nuisance from quite a long time now. As my main email address is the same since 1996 and as it is apparent on the web, my daily spam volume is hundreds of spams (if not thousands). This makes too much junk to download in the morning when I start my computer and then to process via anti-spam filters. This is why I set up a basic filtering on my mail gateway and archive almost-certainly-spam in my $HOME there for further investigation in case ham is lost.

The problem is that my spam box eventually becomes too big and fills up the hard drive, causing frustration to other users. So I decided to use logrotate to archive my spam and set up the following in a crontab:

/home/benj/evil-spam {
	daily
	missingok
	rotate 7
	compress
	notifempty
}

So I can still harvest for recent ham if I need, and disk usage is kept low. This is really what I like with Unix, the possibility to use well-conceived tools in order to achieve something the programmer did not even imagined.

OK, nothing fancy there but I thought this perversion of logrotate might worth sharing. :-)

Naming machines

bdrieu@april.org — Mon Sep 19 2005 14:15

As I stumbled on my client's server, I could notice it was named after Mercury, and that there was a Hermes, a Vulcan and other mythology gods nearby. Besides that it is the quadrillionth time I log on a server named "mercury", I kept wonder how many naming schemes I met during my various business trips. So far, after ten year of consulting, I can count:

mythology gods
sci-fi authors
cities, countries, lakes
fishes, shells, flowers, sweets
drugs (yes, I once ssh'd to tetrahydrocannabinol)
chemical elements
fiction characters, like Asterix, LOTR, X-Men (good guys being Debian servers, magneto being the Windows server)
female first names
boring names like mailgw012

I wonder what else people use, if people know other naming schemes I'd be curious to hear them.

Vamos a la playa

bdrieu@april.org — Thu Sep 01 2005 15:03

Ce soir je serai parti pour une dizaine de jours au soleil de Cahors. Loin du clavier et de mes mails, donc ne me spammez pas trop en mon absence. :-)

Histoire de faire du pros�lytisme j'emporterai mon tee-shirt APRIL avec moi (celui avec le gnou fou). Je ne sais pas pour vous, mais hormis son c�t� super-hype qui garanti un succ�s assur� en soir�e (sisi, je le jure, surtout port� moulant), il ne se passe pas une journ�e o� je le porte sans que je ne me retrouve � parler d'informatique libre � des complets inconnus qui n'en avaient jamais entendu parler. Bref, c'est le pouvoir des images. :-)

Alors si toi aussi tu veux frimer sur les plages avec un beau tee-shirt APRIL et par la m�me occasion contribuer au logiciel libre, tu dois te procurer cet objet de convoitise !