I’ve done it. I rode my bike through a bunch of still-wet asphalt in a street-paving project. Those tracks will be permanent, baby!

So, there you go. Granted, it’s not your handprints in the sidewalk in Hollywood, but it’s the best I could manage.

Also, my weblog has been receiving truck spam – “Dodge trucks cheap”, “truck parts”, that kind of thing. Is this a market for blog spam? I guess it is. That and a lot of internet pharmacy spam. Not so much porn spam these days.

Maybe it goes in a phases. Porn, then pharma, then trucks, then back to porn.

For now, anyway. I’ve dropped from an average of 7,000+ spam messages per day to less than 25 per day.

Comments have been turned back on as a result.

Until I have time to fix things (oh, yes, I have solutions!), comments on this page will be disabled.

This is due to the more than 14,000 blog spam posts I have seen in the last 48 hours.

If it weren’t for my slave kittens my weblog would not be an unusable, unsalvageable mess. Once I’m done fighting other fires I will fix this problem, too.

My mail client gave me a rather unusual message this evening. It told me that contact with my mail server had been lost.

Okay… unusual, but not too concerning. However, the fact that I could not get to any of the web sites we host was a bit unusual.

It took a while, but once I logged into the machine I noticed it was slow. Also, I had a load average of 89.15. Since the normal load average is about 0.15, this concerned me.

The culprit was httpd – the Apache web server. It was trying to serve data to nearly 150 clients at one time – not a lot by most standards, but this machine isn’t made for that sort of use. I saved a dump of the network connections and killed the web server ASAP.

Examination of the network dump revealed that most of my connections were coming from one netblock … in Syria. Checked the logs… yep, it’s a spambot run out of control. Plus, I’m probably not that popular in Syria. Luxembourg? Hell, yes! But not Syria.

So, I added them to the IP filter list, turned down the clients that the http server would talk to and turned things back on. All seems well. For now, anyway.