The Random Ramblings of a Sysadmin

One of the latest crazes in the open source world is planets, not your regular space-bourne lump of rock surrounded by an odd assortment of gasses, but the blog-related kind of planet. Latest might be a wrong word to use now, but it was correct when I started thinking about writing this entry. Work just happened to get in the way of any actual writing for quite a few months. Among the more interesting planets, you'll find the linux distribution-related ones, such as planet.debian.org and planet.gentoo.org.

Or maybe not, but at least the end of contact forms with CC-options and no captcha or login has finally arrived. Over the last few weeks I've seen a remarkable increase in the bot-driven abuse of contact-forms to send spam, and have spent inordinate amounts of time tracking down perpetrators and helping clients fix their sites. We've managed to plug most, if not all, holes in client sites, but it serves to illustrate the ever increasing ingenuity of the spamming community.

Why oh why is the IT business full of incompetent idiot savages? Why do I have to explain the concept of TTL at least once a week, when the people I explain it to are supposed to be technically competent employees at internet-based businesses?

Well, yes - and no... Basically using blogging software enables me to update my site faster, which in turn means that I'll actually update it every now and then. Why English, I've been asked. Well, as most of what I'll be ranting about will be related to my line of work, and thus to Open Source software, it'll be a bit more helpful to people outside of Scandinavia. That's just about the only excuse I've got, and I'm sticking with it.