Erin Hughes.com

"The best thing about my family is my wife. She is a great first lady. I know that sounds not very objective, but that's how I feel. And she's also patient. Putting up with me requires a lot of patience." --George W. Bush, Tipp City, Ohio, April 19, 2007 Well yes it takes allot to put up with me as well. But George, the rest of us lost our patience in the first 4 years, how she has hung in there that long is anyones guess. E./

So I tried to send a mail to a contact about hosting at his ISP. Yes at his ISP. I received this message in return. : host mail.annexa.net[72.35.81.122] said: 550-Email blocked by SORBS - to unblock see 550 http://www.hostpc.com/emailnotdelivered.php (in reply to RCPT TO command) Strange I would say I do not think I am blocked by SORBS heck I can even send mail to AOL and my mail to places like Hotmail, Yahoo & Google goes right to the inbox no mucking around in spam folders for me. So I decided to visit hostpc.com and see whats up. I clicked on the URL above and found this gem. Funny the IP was even wrong. Well it was not incorrect it was my workstation IP not my mail server. Sad but there was this text. "If you believe this report is in error, submit a whitelist request
with the email address you're attempting to send mail TO." Ya go ahead click on the link and you will see that the e-mail is sent to a fricking G-mail account. WTF! This is a American ISP's solution to spam. Come on. Either way I put in my best effort and sent the request. A few moments later I received this in my inbox. Undoubtedly automated. "Whitelist requests can only be addressed effectively through our helpdesk at http://helpdesk.hostpc.com Helpdesk tickets should be opened by our hosting clients ONLY. Clients, please use the helpdesk system to request your account be taken out of our global spam filtering. This will likely result in a good deal of extra spam incoming, please request with that in mind." Now I am really pissed. Not only did my mail not get through but I wasted 15 minutes trying to resolve the problem. So if you were in the same situation what could you do? 1. First drop hostpc.com 2. Build yourself a new box LOAD and one of the MANY popular Free Os's on it. IE FreeBSD CentOS Ubuntu Gentoo ect. 3. Read the documentation, download and install the following packages postfix, dovecot, spamassasin, amavis, clam and freshclam. 4. Install and configure them. 5. Thats it..... I know these are simplified steps but if you are running a ISP or even a mail server. You should not be relying on any one else to scan your mail for you. NOTE: If your really lazy. From the list on #2 select CentOS then install DNS and Zimbra. It will take care of all of that for you and then some. I am not even going to get into how I tried to set up a account at SORBS to check what they think of my domains. Finally if you want some one to do it for you.... contact me. I do not charge that much...... ;-) E./

I was ridding down the street the other day when I saw a old friend. I like the guy he has been keeping his web based company going through good and bad and making a profit along the way. He took good care of me when I worked together and I appreciate what he did for me. We started to talk about work stuff and I told him I wanted to buy him a beer and pick his brain about importing some stuff. He was pretty keen about it and we started talking about web services and the abundance of CRAP services in America. He started to tell me he is opening a branch in America and I should talk to them about hosting some of the new services I am working on. I said sure and told him we would get together later. I rode off, and became irritated by our conversation as I replayed it in my head. The reason I left his company was we ran under 2 different philosophy's. His customer control and handling situations as they arise with codes and buzz words. Mine build a solid server and service .... and there will be less problems. I knew it was time to move on when we sat down to buy 1 server, and I could not convince him to pay about 200 dollars plus or minus to buy a extra HD and the run a HD's as a mirror. His argument's were he never had a hard drive fail, and he was going to make all the servers mirrors of each other. A theory we discussed but could never archive due to my inexperience and his unwillingness to try anything that he didn't "think" was a good idea like rsync. My argument was it server mirroring (not clustering) is a waste and will never work in that small environment and more importantly we never had a hard disc fail.....yet! Regardless we went our separate ways and now I gained quite a bit in experience and more skill at running a server and server based services. I talked to one of his employees and about 6 months earlier and they are still in the same boat. Single servers with mission critical data on single discs. I appreciate a man for his skills, but please appreciate mine. I needed some business expertise, and he has that, but why when I know more about his infrastructure and how to trouble shoot it or fix it would I even think about paying him or anyone else to host my stuff? Know your audience and play to them, other wise you will just irritate them. E./

Last night I told Eric that I would be home late tonight and he asked why? I said I was going out with my friends. He asked if Maruo's baby was coming and and if he could come? I said no to both. He had just finished another level in Super Tux [1] and said he wants Keith, Mauro and Josh to come over so we can play Super Tux together. I looked again, noting that he has been playing it about 15-30 minutes a night since we all moved in together and saw that he is on level 22 of 26! WTF! I didn't finish my first video game till I was 35 (Navy Seals SOCOM PSP). I was never much of a gamer but now that I have a little time on the train everyday I like to have something to pass the time. Eric however is relentless at this game. I am just shocked the way he pursues certain things. Now if I could just get him to eat with the same enthusiasm. E./ [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SuperTux