A while ago I replaced my Amavis-Spamassassin-Rules_du_jour-MaiaMailguard setup with a single product called DSPAM.

This anti-spam solution relies completely on statistical spam analysis and takes less than a second to process (spam-detect/virus-detect) a mail on my server. Spamassasin would take anywhere between 10 and 30 seconds to detect spam, and even with all kinds of custom rulesets in place and using bayesian spam detection the accuracy was only around 95%.

After my switch to DSPAM I immediately fed it a spam/ham corpus from my personal archive. This was enough to give it an extremely good accuracy.

These are my current statistics for the filter’s accuracy:

The ‘misses’ you see in the ‘Total processed by filter’ statistics are caused by the way I fed the spam/ham corpus into my clean DSPAM installation. After the training I’ve reset the filter, and as you can see my spam-catch rate is now 100%

DSPAM really is an excellent way to rid of spam!

In my spare time I work on a gamehosting project called 1stGame.nl. We run about 20 public gameservers for Counter-Strike and Counter-Strike Source.

All our databases ran on a old Dual Xeon 1.8Ghz server with 4 disks in a RAID-5 array. Yesterday one of these drives decided to die and take the system with it.
After a reboot, the system came back with missing data, a nightlong rebuild restored all of the data but the system is considered unstable now. All databases were moved to a newer Xeon 3.06Ghz system with 10K SCSI disks.

Whenever Debian asks you to get rid of the hotplug package when it’s detected /etc/init.d/hotplug, just do it.

It will spare you a great deal of unnecessary frustrations while you’re trying to figure out why some of your devices aren’t working after a reboot.

For example /dev/lirc and ivtv TV cards requiring firmware.

Wasted half an hour of my life on this….

On a positive note, I’ve finally made myself set up an SVN repository for all my coding stuff. A nice way to keep track of all kinds of silly scripts I wrote and to make sure I’ll never lose “version ‘x’ where function ‘y’ still worked” because it was overwritten with version ‘x++’.