Noel's Muses

The biggest problems with getting your Email to someone is getting through the receiving ends mail servers defences.

Sadly, long gone are the days of the early 90's where spam was really only something that was heard of in a supermarket, although it had been around for years, even on ARPANET, it was not of plague proportions like it reached in the mid-late 90's through to the problem it is today. Long gone also are the days where you can trust strangers to use your mail server, where it was common two decades ago for most mail servers to be open relays, but, as with anything that's available, it soon became abused, so to combat the problem of spammers abusing this privilege, MTA's like Sendmail soon released versions that no more by default permitted open relaying capabilities, like the 'ol saying... if you abuse it, you loose it!


Defence comes in many forms, most common is the well known method of DNSBL's (DNS based Real-time Block Lists), often also referred to as RBL's, PBL's, Blacklists, or even Blackhole Lists, these are DNS based lists of domain names and IP numbers of trouble makers, people who have given others grief in some form or another (spam, phishing, compromised, abuse, etc...), they become submitted to these lists by trusted persons, also through automated processes, including hidden addresses to trap spambots when they harvest websites looking for addresses to add to their spam-out lists.

Continue reading "550 Access Denied"

So, in light of Murdoch's staffs criminal actions, the worlds media have been filling our airwaves with the term Phone Hacking, why, I'll never know, as it is really incorrect, no phones were actually hacked at all, no conversations were monitored in real time, no phones contacts list or stored emails or photos were ever compromised in this latest scandal.


What is actually occurring is illegal access to peoples voicemail boxes. Most of us, and yes, I bet *you*, are still using the default PIN number for voicemail. Now, most of the time we don't need to know it, since the phone networks know who we are and just give us access, but, you do know that you can access your mobiles voicemail from any phone, anywhere, at any time.


Usually when your voicemail is first activated you will or at least should be, asked for a PIN, if you did not get asked for whatever reason, your voicemail box will be using the default PIN, in 99% of the time, that is simply the last four digits of your mobile number

Continue reading "Phone Hacking - OH NO!!! No, your mobiles not actually hacked"

For decades most Data Centre's utilised raised floors to inject cool air from underneath up to the racks in a back to back arrangement, this is called the Hot aisle Cold aisle method, but for some years now this method is considered outdated and rather inefficient for Data Centre cooling.



This method, as seen at left, involves hot air from hardware released from the rear door of a rack into the general Data Centre airspace, to assist with some form of hot air containment, most rows of racks will be so two rows are back to back, but, this still allows for hot air mixing with cold air as they are not truly contained for exhaust.

Many modern Data Centre builders have got it right in what makes far more sense using the all Cold aisle method, which involves an overhead plenum for the hot air to be expelled into, this means only cold air in your DC, and no mixing of cold and hot air, since the idea is to keep everything cool so your valuable hardware stays at a safe operating temperate.
Continue reading "Data Centre Cooling"