The Barracuda Spam Firewall VMware Appliance (Vx) finally exists!

Mon, 04 Oct 2010 18:24:12 +0000

When I started at my current company, spam was handled with a separate server running SpamAssassin and a few other services. This sort of got the job done but required babysitting. I wasn’t part of the Sysadmin team at that point but I know they had to restart SpamAssassin relatively frequently, manually clear out the email queue when people noticed they weren’t receiving email, etc.

After a few months, someone wised up and purchased a Barracuda Spam Firewall. I assumed this was basically a pretty GUI wrapper around the same tools we had already been using, but it was certainly worth the money. In addition to the basic filtering of spam it filtered for viruses, performed recipient verification against AD via LDAP, had nice graphing and reporting.

I almost forgot that I hate computers.

Mon, 31 May 2010 23:29:39 +0000

I’d almost forgotten that I hate computers. Then I came home from Memorial Day weekend and woke my desktop up from Sleep in order to extract the pics I’d taken. The computer looked ok for about 15 seconds, then kind of froze. The cursor would move but it didn’t do anything. I watched it do (apparently) nothing for about 2 minutes when I hit the hard-reboot button. It hung at POST with the HDD light on solid. I couldn’t get into the BIOS, so I tried plugging into a different SATA port on the mobo, and finally got the thing to post by … unplugging the drive completely. I got into the bios, did a “load failsafe defaults” and tried plugging the drive back in and booting. It made it through POST this time but gave me the “INSERT SYSTEM DISK” error. After about an hour of messing around with it I turned it off and came upstairs to go to bed. The drive is a Seagate Barracuda 7200.11, 1000 GB, purchased less than 18 months ago (Christmas 2008). I know things die, but this is just dumb. Maybe tomorrow I’ll see if anything shows up using a USB-to-SATA adapter. Sigh.

Barracuda on Evan Hoffman

The Barracuda Spam Firewall VMware Appliance (Vx) finally exists!

I almost forgot that I hate computers.