…and around it goes

I am writing less frequently because I am coding. I’m working on adding the ability to retrieve mail from nearly anywhere. It will retrieve POP3/POP3s, IMAP/IMAPs, and HTTPMail. Retrieval can be set to be automated, regularly retrieving even when not logged into webmail. Retrieved mail will be passed through existing filters.

This means users will be able to set up accounts to regularly check. Such as Hotmail, Yahoo, Juno, WebTV, Netscape, ISP mail accounts, other hosting accounts, and and any other account someone might have. Settings can be made to automatically retrieve it every 30 minutes, every hour, every 6 hours, or once daily. All cotse’s filters will work on the fetched mail, so someone can spam filter it and direct it to a folder or other mail address as with all cotse e-mail.

The end result will be all mail in one place. Then all someone will have to do is check their cotse mail either via webmail or their favorite pop or imap client and they are getting mail from all their accounts. Even pocketPC, Palm, and other portable devices have pop/imap clients. Set it and forget it.

The interface is about 70% and so is the back end. Then I have to tie them together. But it will be a reality to at least make beta sometime soon. Depending upon how much coding time I can get.

4 am, the sound I least want to hear, my phone paging me. It was the monitoring software telling me there was a problem with the mail gateway. Straight out of REM sleep so deep I couldn’t see for a little while I move to my computer to check on it.

Apparently the gateway hung and as should happen it was powercycled by the monitoring software when it could not connect nor respond to ping. It came back and responded, but all connections to it just hung indefinitely. It accepted them fine, but they all just hung. Even the remote console was sluggish, making troubleshooting more difficult.

Turned out to be corrupted data that hosed NFS, a manual fsck (the auto fsck on reboot didn’t do the trick apparently) boot back into multiuser and all seems to be well. If you could not connect for a brief period, this was why. Back to sleep.

It’s been a bit busy lately. Mostly accounting, billing, and support. But I did get to spend a little time with my daughter, it was nice even though I did have to work through most of it. I also tried to take the bike out but the shop that repaired my flat apparently messed up the front wheel. It’s out of line and rubbing on the caliper. Back in it goes. I also got to watch a little TV. This is what I’ll talk about.

I watched a cops-like show called “Video Justice”, in the episode I saw some armed kids tried to rob a pawn shop. They came in firing. They were not successful. This was because the shop owner was armed and shot back. If he had not been armed he and his wife would be dead and the place robbed. This is where the gun control people are wrong.

Guns are not going to vanish from the streets if they are banned, not now or 100 years from now. It’s completely naive to think so. Where they will vanish from is the hands of law abiding people, like this shopkeeper. He and his wife would be dead if he wasn’t able to defend himself. It seems to me that all of these mass murder shootings are in gun free zones. Schools and the like. Law abiding citizens can’t possess weapons to defend themselves here. This leaves them as sitting targets.

It also looks like any place that had armed citizens where some gunman started shooting, the gunman was halted by the armed citizens before too many died. But in every place where the citizen was not allowed to carry and a gunman started shooting, deaths were high. Isn’t this proof that gun control adds to the deaths? That armed citizens allowed to protect themselves lessen the deaths? Seems so to me.

This whole Imus thing reminds me of a piece I wrote some time ago about how no one has the right not to be offended. Now I’m not downplaying anything about what was said nor how it impacts anyone, I’m just commenting on the backlash.

This is a radio show. One that is well known for the antics, comments, and slurs of its host. It is not the BBC news desk. Imus is what is known as a shock jock. His job is to shock and offend and he offends all groups equally. Anyone listening should understand this. Yet when he shocks and offends the wrong group he suddenly must be taken off the air. Silenced.

Now I’m not a big fan of shock jocks, I tend to find them offensive, juvenile, or some combination. So I don’t listen to them. I turn the dial. I don’t demand they be taken off the air because they offended me. This is because I do not have a right not to be offended. This right does not exist.

I can be assured that many things in life will offend me. This is life in a free state. The spectrum of what offends whom is so broad that you can’t have a free state where nobody is offended by anything. And favoring one group over another certainly isn’t the path to an equality based free state.

This is where personal choice comes into play. If I don’t like the show, I change the channel. If I don’t like the shock jock, I change the channel. Speaking out, demanding an apology, they are also options open to me. But demanding that what I dislike be silenced, that’s not one of my options. I’m not forced to listen.

Nobody is forced to listen. Silencing the speaker because he/she offended someone is not the mark of a free state. Certainly not one that promotes equality and freedom of speech. To live in an equality based free state means that I do not have a right not to be offended and neither do you.

We’ve had to get strict on credit card acceptance. This is because of the amount of fraud on the net. Nobody gets hurt by this fraud but the merchant. This is because the bank takes the money back and then charges the merchant an additional $25 for doing so. The consumer isn’t responsible for the charge, the bank isn’t hurt, the bank actually makes money on fraud with that $25 fee, only the merchant is hurt, they lose not only the money but an additional $25.

Because of this we can’t just accept whatever cards the bank approves. If we did that we’d go bankrupt in chargeback fees. So we developed our own process. We have a number of ways we verify charges before submitting them. One of the most effective has been placing required information into a page and making that page required reading. If the page isn’t read, the person doesn’t know that the information is required and omits it. Most of the carders don’t read it, so it’s a quick first level weed out when the required information detailed on that page is missing.

But it also catches some legit. This I can’t quite comprehend. This means that there are people who think enough about privacy to sign up with a privacy service, yet not enough about their privacy to read the page where they are entering their credit card details. They are entering their personal information into some page they didn’t even read, yet they “care” about their privacy? This makes no sense to me.

I’ve always felt that there is no security without privacy. They go hand in hand. Freedom also goes with them. Every society in history that has lost privacy has turned into a police state. In every case it is the people who suffered for it. It is ignorant to think that this time it will be different. I was very distressed by the way things appeared to be moving after September 11th.

The US government has a long history of abusing powers granted. The US people don’t learn from history, they keep repeating it. Six years later we are seeing that the powers granted were misused. That’s a hell of a shocker. Only a blind sheep could not have seen that wolf coming. Unfortunately there were a lot of blind sheep.

I’m very glad to see the PATRIOT Act being chipped away. The powers it granted were too much. You can not let any agency run both the project and the oversight to ensure things are not abused. Oversight must be independent or abuse is guaranteed to occur.

Add to this one key fact, most arrests, interceptions, and convictions stem from good old fashioned police work. In fact few, if any, terrorist cells were broken up due to the new surveillance powers. Most reported stemmed from under cover activities and informants.

When you grant surveillance powers at will it also has the adverse effect of making investigators lazy. They tend to rely too much on fishing expeditions and the easy way of electronic mining. Look at it this way, besides terrorists, police want additional powers to catch pedophiles. That is the number two rallying cry for pursuading people to give up privacy.

Gonzales was harping on this before his attention got absorbed by the investigation into the firings (a slick, if not slightly shady, political move that put a cap on him). I don’t understand that attitude of they can’t do it without these powers, not when I can watch Dateline’s “To Catch A Predator” number two hundred and something and see them still pulling them in one right after another.

So many it swamps them. Dateline doesn’t have the ability to get logs from ISPs. It doesn’t have access to the databases the police do. Yet they can catch them without these powers. Why can’t police? Because it’s work, good old fashioned police work. Under cover work and setting up the sting. It’s much easier just to go fishing electronically.

What is gained from granting these powers is a very poor return. We have given up privacy. Privacy is paramount to freedom. We have granted them the ability to abuse at will. Oversight must be independent. And we have made them more reliant on fishing. It’s an easy way to look for criminals.

Instead we should be increasing budgets. Increasing manpower. Putting more emphasis on the good old fashioned police work. And ensuring that oversight remains independent. Legislative, Judicial, and Executive are separate for a reason. That is the only way to keep a choke on abuse. Giving up privacy is giving up freedom. You don’t give up something that valuable.

The pendulum seems to be swinging back towards the positive. Lets hope that nobody blows up a building and sends the blind sheep scurrying again.

Unfortunately I did not get to spend as much time with my daughter over the weekend as I had hoped. Again I was sucked into the data center at inopportune times. I hope to make it up to her over the summer, winters have me in front of computers seven days a week and many hours a day. I’m not much fun to be around winters. I feel bad as I was looking forward to spending more time with her (I hate being a part time dad).

Winters are rough because I try to plan all new development work in the winter. It’s usually quite a bit of work. It’s not just development, but testing and support as well. Any change at all, no matter how minor, seems to break something for someone. For example, those critical security patches that have to be installed ASAP and always break something (PHP is good for this).

But even worse than those patches is building out a new back end. So much change, so many variables. Even with months of extensive testing I am bound to miss something. For the most part this one went smoothly, nothing exceptionally major. But it did have it’s issues, ram failure, suicidal daemons, file perms, and such. Enough to keep me hopping. The bad ram this am was just icing, especially since it tested fine before install and ran fine all weekend.

An additional aspect that also contributes to the load that some may not be aware of is the “every problem is a result of the upgrade” phenomenon that occurs after any change. Techs know it, if you work on someone’s printer one day and their CD ROM drive stops working the next, it had to be because of you working on the printer. The same thing happens with a service. Don’t get me wrong, I am not saying that no problem is service related after an upgrade, that is obviously untrue, but not every problem is related.

Someone changes something, tries to log in using all capitals, or has a network problem and it is very hard to get them to look at anything but the upgrade as a possible cause. This adds to the confusion when I really need them to test something so I can eliminate either end, and they refuse because it has to be on our end. I can’t adequately troubleshoot an issue with only one half of the information.

I admit sometimes these things are very tricky, just as it can seem all on our end to a user, it can seem all on their end to the service. The problem is that an honest 99% of helpdesk tickets come back to something on the user’s side. A configuration issue is the most common. I try very hard not to fall prey to that because I know what it is like to call support and have them refuse to look at anything but my end.

So I work to gather all info from both ends and look at it as a whole and as a new issue. But that gets frustrating if I can’t get the person on the other end to even look at anything on their side, leaving me with only half the data involved. It can make a rough week or so on the helpdesk after an upgrade. (please note that I am not pointing at anyone, I have fallen prey to it myself, I’m just explaining one of the frustrations involved with an upgrade).

So this is why I save this stuff for the winters. I used to ski, but had an accident racing (I used to race GS back when I was in college, well actually Bridgeton Academy, it was after HS and before college. My career was very short as I wracked up trying to show off for some local girl…Bridgeton was an all male school then, I would have tried to show off for the lunch lady).  I have not skied since, so I shut myself inside and code. Not much else to do in NE winters, especially NE city winters. I’m not a bar fan at all, consider going out to dinner a waste of money, and have a home theater system specifically to save me the costs of going to the movies.

Summers, however, are far different. Summers are for trips on the bike, 500 mile rides for no reason other than I wanted to know where a road went or wanted to see the sun rise or set from somewhere specific, taking the kids to local tourist traps (Plymouth Rock, Faneuil Hall, Salem, the fishing villages on the coast, the cape, etc), trips to the cottage, BBQs, sitting on a deserted section of beach with a fishing pole, and anything but sitting in front of a computer all day. So by summer all the new dev should be ironed out and then I run things from anywhere I am, even my bike. That is usually the plan, anyway.

But winters, they suck. I am very glad this one is nearly over.

Something interesting for the techs who might be reading:

Problem:

Every time I shut down the old mail server everything stops moving on the network ten minutes later. No machine can ping another. No traffic reaches any of the other machines.  Nothing in nor out. It does not happen until ten minutes after the old server was shut down. If the old server is powered back on, everything moves again. It happens as soon as I hit the power button.

The machine has two nics, on two separate networks. Each attaches to a switch, each switch through a separate firewall to a different Internet gateway. Both networks are active, but one is failover. Tcpdump on the machine shows only the ssh traffic to and from the term running tcpdump, as well as normal broadcasts.

Answer:

I do know the answer. That old server is now off line. Given the information above it was actually the first place I looked. But I thought it interesting enough of an issue to post it here. It’s not one I run into everyday. Lets see how many techs are reading. Comments are open and I will give the answer in two days if no one gets it before then.

I know, only two of you are reading, it’s too new for more, but humor me