While driving today near the Kusunoki interchange on the Nagoya Expressway, I spotted a sign like this: “CONSTRUCTION SITE — DO NOT APPROACH!!!

Spam is flooding the address I give to friends — not a throwaway. The headers suggest one operation rotating through domains. How do you fight that in 2005?

Last seminar before Obon — and the server logs show visits from a mobile carrier, two electronics makers, and a distribution giant. Yahoo registration is paying off.

Now, let’s talk about my home server. Since I rarely travel abroad, I configured it to only accept access from Japan.

I have six email addresses — provider, home server, school — all funneled to the home server. The internet-facing ones are the spam magnets, and it’s getting worse.

My professor’s one-liner — ‘why not try FreeBSD instead of obsessing over Linux?’ — sent me down a rabbit hole, including a site that documented a text-mode install as selectable HTML.

I expected there would be some differences — but trying it out revealed they’re actually quite significant.

Tried Fedora 4 in VMware after Fedora 2 once wrecked my HDD and sent me back to Red Hat 9. A friend says recent versions are stable — maybe time to move my home server’s services over.

Set up the home server’s top page to display its uptime, using a Perl CGI that parses the uptime command into days, hours, and minutes. Full script included.