Next Generation Spam

Last Wednesday I received spam over IPv6 for the first time. Somebody (or something?) tried to post a spam comment to this Blog from a computer in Japan using an IPv6 network connection to my web server.

One of the things I really liked about IPv6 so far was the total absence of spam. But thanks to Microsoft’s Windows Vista (with builtin IPv6 support) spammers are now invading this domain, too. 🙁

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Movie of the Week: Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

It took a lot of magic to lift the curse of the bad sequel but the fifth Harry Potter movie managed to do it. Like the four previous movies it was well made. I even had the impression that less of the story got lost when the book had to be compressed to fit into the time-frame of a movie. But maybe that is just because the fifth volume was less dense than the previous ones.

A bunch of new characters were introduced and I was especially pleased by the performance of Imelda Staunton. She portrayed Dolores Umbridge just as nasty and wretched as J.K. Rowling describes her in the book.

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First bit of trouble with NetBSD 4.0

Ever since I updated my server to NetBSD 4.0_BETA2 it has been working without any problems … until last Friday. After 80 days uptime it crashed while I was logged in remotely during my lunch break. I was lucky and the machine came up without any manual intervention. This is one of the things I really like about NetBSD: if the kernel panics it writes a crash dump, the machine restarts and NetBSD boots up fully automatically. That’s much more useful behaviour than printing out Aiiie, killing interrupt handler and waiting for someone to press the reset switch. Unfortunately I managed to crash the machine again until I figured out what was going wrong. I unmounted the /proc filesystem to stop Coreutils from causing more trouble and waited for someone to look into my problem report.

It didn’t take long until Antti Kantee, one of NetBSD’s filesystem experts, came up with an analysis. Two days later he provided a patch which fixed the problem on my system. The fix needs more testing (mostly with weird Linux applications) but should make it into the NetBSD 4.0 release.

So the bad news is that my NetBSD 4.0 installation lost the zero crashes since deployment label. The good news is that a serious bug was found and fixed.

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