Saturday, December 06, 2003

Reverse MX Proposals

Checking up on reverse MX proposals to see where they're at in the approval process: (prior mentions: Aug 21 2003, Oct 2 2003)

As I said before, the concept of reverse-MX is pretty simple. It allows a destination SMTP server to find out whether an e-mail message from a particular domain came from an authorized IP address. (e.g. all e-mail for a corporate domain can be forced to route through a specific corporate SMTP server so that the content can be checked for viruses or encrypted) Any reverse MX proposal answers (2) questions: (a) does domain X have a list of authorized outbound mail server IP addresses? (b) is IP address "Y" on that list?

RMX proposal (Mike Rubel's page) - Last published draft (Oct 2003).

DMP - No change or update since this was posted back in August 2003.

DRIP - Published July 2003 by Raymond S Brand and Laurence Sherzer.

SMTP+SPF - Last updated Dec 1 2003. Last RFC draft is Oct 2003.

Really though, not much has happened in the last 3 months. I've heard rumors that ASRG and the IETF formed a sub-group to work on the issue... but I don't expect to see anything until 2005 at this rate (at which point I'll be getting 1000 spams per day).

Labels: Spam

posted by Wuphon's at 1:46 PM

Thursday, December 04, 2003

GPG Links

Currently looking around for shells to make using GPG easier on Windows 2000/XP (previous posts: Getting started with GPG, GPG A-Z, , Right-Click GPG Encryption, GPG Right-Click Encrypt Only).

Starting at www.gnupg.org is recommended... specifically frontends for GNUPG. There's only one listed that work on MS-Windows:

Windows Privacy Tools (WinPT)

GPGShell has also been suggested, but I don't have a link handy at the moment.

posted by Wuphon's at 2:59 PM

Antec Sonata Case Reviews

Reviews + Information:

ARS Technica

PC Abusers

Build Silent PC

Antec Inc

posted by Wuphon's at 7:49 AM

Tuesday, December 02, 2003

UPS Pricing

Currently I have an APC Back-UPS Pro 1400 and an APC Back-UPS Pro 650... and it's not enough (chuckle). I'd love to get another one of the 1400s, but they don't seem to make them anymore, so I'll probably go with the 1000VA unit instead. Big advantage of the 1400 was that it had more plugs on the back. The 650 (BP650S) has (3) UPS-protected and (3) surge-only outlets. The 1400 has (6) plugs all of which are UPS-protected.

The Back-UPS RS 1000 model looks interesting, (6) UPS outlets, (2) surge-only outlets. The price is a lot lower ($180 vs $360) too. (Reviews: Scott R. Garrigus' review) The cost is low enough that I may as well give it a shot since I can purchase (2) RS units for the cost of the Pro unit.

posted by Wuphon's at 7:32 AM

DV Editing

Well, after all of the difficulties that I've had working with the ATI All-in-Wonder card... the audio slippage, ridiculous drivers, pops and clicks... I'm looking into some other method for off-loading my old VHS tapes into digital format. What looks probable is the Canopus ADVC-100 which is a little external box that converts analog video signal into the DV format (hooks to the PC using Firewire/IEEE3894). Gets good reviews, simple operation, only costs $260ish and I won't have to fight with a lot of the issues that I did with the ATI AIW card.

DV video size is moderately large (25 megabits/sec) and requires around 15 Gb/hr. That means I'll want to have around 75-100 Gb scratch space for capture. MJPEG editing was around 10 Gb/hr at quality level 9/10. (Previous mention of MPEG1 data rates and MJPEG rates.)

Promise just released a 4-port SATA raid controller which would allow me to have a mirrored system drive as well as a dedicated capture drive (non-mirrored). Pricing for the card is $66 at TheNerds.net.

The Seagate Barracuda SATA-150 120Gb drives are only $110 now. (I believe those are the "quiet" drives.)

I'll also need to change-over from a desktop case to a mini-tower case (probably will look at 2CoolTek and see what they have).

Total budget for the drives, the Canopus thingy, the case and another stick of memory (to get me to 1Gb) is going to be around $800-$900... so I won't be doing anything until I get paid for the last job that I did on the side.

posted by Wuphon's at 6:47 AM

Monday, December 01, 2003

Hard Drive Prices

Looks like IDE drive prices dropped recently. I picked up a 5400 rpm Maxtor 160Gb drive for around $130 including shipping and handling. Toss in an external USB enclosure for $40 and it does make a very nice backup solution (I now have 2 that I alternate with plans to add a 3rd sometime next spring).

I am about ready to rip down and rebuild my 282Gb RAID5 server (Windows 2000). What I'm finding is that once you get 500,000+ files on the partition that it becomes very difficult to defrag the drive and keep performance up. When I do, I figure a 20Gb system partition, a 60Gb scratch partition and then a pair of large partitions that are 100Gb each. But by that time I might be ready to rip out the (6) 80Gb drives and replace them with 160Gb drives to give me 565Gb net space. (I don't think I'll do that until next fall at the earliest, and most likely create multiple 120Gb partitions.)

More likely that I'll be switching to small, power-efficient mini-ITX cases with mirrored 160Gb 5400rpm drives. Less noisy, probably running on Linux, and distributes the workload / risk a bit.

posted by Wuphon's at 7:46 PM