Joseph Burford

Dreamhost email delays

If it’s not one thing it’s another at Dreamhost.

Like a lot of people I just forward all my email to Gmail, it’s got a great spam filter, plenty of storage, accessible via web, POP & IMAP, maybe the only downside is they can just de-activate your account without warning

Recently my email seemed to stop working, on investigation it seemed that Dreamhost were still accepting the email however it wasn’t arriving at my Gmail account.

So I logged a ticket and got a reply 12 hours later saying they were aware of a slowness issue with email forwarding to Gmail and I would be updated when it was fixed.

Quoting: “Right now we are experiencing some slowdowns sending emails to Google’s GMail service.”

Days later still no news from my ticket, however earlier this week I got a test message that I had sent… last week.

Received: from staffnet.xxx.com.au (staffnet.xxx.com.au [203.x.x.x])
by spunkymail-mx5.g.dreamhost.com (Postfix)
Thu, 29 Nov 2007 20:07:59 -0800 (PST)

Received: from brazilian.dreamhost.com ([66.33.209.64])
by mx.google.com with ESMTP id k19si1079983rvb.2007.12.05.13.29.07;
Wed, 05 Dec 2007 13:29:07 -0800 (PST)

6 days

Thankfully I was in the process of moving the last of my hosting away from them.

Server load caused by SSH haxors

So like a good admin I graph various hosts of mine and recently looking through one of the graphs sets I noticed this.

The hourly spikes are just webmin / virtualmin doing bandwidth calcs and stats generation, other than that it’s not a loaded box, so it was suprising to see an extended period of load.

A quick hunt through the logs shows that it appears to be due to some infected system trying to brute force SSH login.

I usually secure SSH in a number of ways:

1. SSH Version 2 only
2. Root logins are disabled
3. Only specific users can login
4. Logins via ssh keys only

So now I’ve added to the list and set the SSH Daemon to listen on a port other than 22, it stops the door knockers and I don’t have to run any other active log watching or monitoring software.

Gmail “Account Disabled”

Less than a week after helping one of my brothers move 500mb of email to a shiny new gmail account he gave me a frantic call.

At login he was getting an error stating “Your account has been disabled”, new email to his gmail account was just bouncing with a user unknown error.

When you have done a massive sell on any particular technology, it’s always heart in mouth when you get these type of calls from family/relatives/friends

I logged a support query using the form and got a response back inside 24 hours.

Recently the Gmail team launched several features intended to detect and prevent
breaches of our Terms of Use, such as spamming. As a result, a number of users who
may have not been acting in breach of these terms were affected. The issue has since
been resolved, and these users have had access to their accounts restored. We
apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.

Seems that he wasn’t alone.

New Radio

I look after a couple of servers for a friend who I met earlier this year, as a token of thanks for helping out a new Yaesu 857D arrived today. Thanks Michael

Unfortunately as we drove up the street tonight the power went out So I opened the box and had a look as much as I good via candle light, looks like a nice bit of gear.

Spent the rest of the night sitting in the backyard listening to the fires on KI using the scanner I bought a month or so back. Sounds like it might be a pretty horrible situation, lots of extra fire crews and other emergency services crews are on the wya over.