2:00 PMLong weekend. Flew to Minnesota Friday night for my brother's birthday, among other things, and we didn't get back until about 3:00 AM this morning, thanks to flight delays. But I'm back, and at work. Joy.

The Windows 2000 Server travelogue continues. Microsoft pulled something very, very interesting on IIS5, and we haven't decided yet wether it's smart or stupid. Essentially, IIS4 stored everything in its own version of the registry, a file called the Metabase. For most tasks, that was fine, it didn't cause any problems. Where we had a problem with it was in trying to create thousands of web servers per machine. You could get just about 1500 sites on a server before the metabase got too big. Every time you made a change to the Metabase, it took forever for the updates to process, simply because the metabase was so large.

Microsoft revamped the backend on IIS5, and overall the changes have definitely been for the better. We were concerned about scripting, however, because iTOOL uses automatic account generation through the metabase, and we were assuming we'd have to completely rewrite our account generation process to accomodate it, since we used the metabase extensively. Nope. Turns out, Microsoft killed the metabase, and then brought it back to life in a new form. Instead of storing it as a separate registry file, they recreated the metabase in the Active Directory. So our scripts will still work, but hopefully the usage limits are gone. We shall see.

Speaking of which, it's time to go find out. Later.

I vaguely recall this day. It's not easy, though, kinda hazy...

11:00 AM It's been an interesting few days. They're just starting to spin up, too, so bear with me. Updates will likely be a bit sparse.

Learning lots about IIS5. We've been pretty impressed with the management tools; they're huge improvements over IIS4. Of course, that's not saying a whole lot, since using the IIS4 controls was like ripping a claw hammer through your nose. IIS5 uses the same STYLE controls - like the metabase being replicated in the AD - but they're over all much faster, smoother, and more user-friendly. No, scratch that, they're more ADMIN friendly. We don't care about those dang users... <SEG>

The numbers are starting to roll in. IIS5 definitely doesn't have the same usage limits as IIS4. We're hitting a machine with 2500 accounts right now, and it's performing better than an IIS4 machine with 1500. The two machines are both older Dell 4200s, but the difference is like night and day. We're going to keep increasing the load, and see how high we can go.

And now, it's time to head off to the weekly "we all live in a yellow submarine" meeting, otherwise known as the all-hands "you have to be here for your enjoyment" meeting. Sounds like fun. Later.

This day was horribly disfigured, shredded, torn, and messily devoured by those !@#$%& at mail-abuse.org.

9:00 AM I suppose I should explain the mail-abuse.org comment, huh?

Yesterday, iTOOL.COM's primary mailserver was put on the RBL list. This meant that any email sent from that mail server to any subscriber of the RBL list was rejected. For an ISP or Web host provider, such as ourselves, this can be the kiss of death.

Please understand, I'm not condoning Spam. I hate spam. It annoys me. But I dislike what the mail-abuse.org organization does even more.

The whole story is that a spammer got in through our system and sent several thousand very annoying Spam messages. We blocked over 12,000 of these messages, but that was a little under half of them. Naturally, we got several dozen complaints about this. We handled the complaints as quickly as possible, explaining what had happened and what we planned to do about it. (For the record, our servers WERE open relays. They no longer are, and this move has been in process for some time.) The most serious complaint was from Julian Haight at SpamCop. He received several complaints from his users, and emailed to ask what we were doing about it, and warn us of possibly being placed on his warning list. Julian was polite, thorough, and explained himself well. We discussed iTOOL's planned moves, he agreed that everything should be fine, and that was the end of the story as far as SpamCop was concerned. An excellent, well-run, valuable service. He doesn't get enough credit.

But the mail-abuse.org people... Feh. One person - if he is a person - sent us a complaint about the spam message. I'm tempted to post his email address, but I won't stoop that low. His message was more threatening than most, snidely implying that we were evil people (debateable) who must have sent the email ourselves (wrong) since we weren't willing to inconvenience all of our customers by immediately jumping to meet his every whim. (Sorry. Not.) We replied twice, once from me, once from my boss, apologizing for his inconvenience and explaining the situation. He then turned around and complained to the RBL list maintainers at mail-abuse.org, claiming that we had refused to deal with the problem by refusing to respond. Since I have the mails right there in my "Sent Items" folder, I'm pretty sure we did. I also know that no spam went out between the time he complained and yesterday. He had a valid complaint, but he went too far. I wish him well in his attempts to obtain a soul and a trace of honesty or human decency.

He's not the worst problem. Having sent his delightful bit of fiction - well done, really, science fiction worthy of a Hugo - mail-abuse.org promptly slapped us on the RBL list. No attempt to contact us, no attempt to verify the information. Emails to the organization, of course, bounced back. Phone calls went unanswered. I spent the day explaining the situation to understandably upset customers, calling those <deleted> at mail-abuse.org, and working with our developers to incorporate those carefully planned changes at breakneck speed. They did a wonderful job, not only coding the changes practically on the fly, but putting up with me while they did it. (I was not in a happy mood.) Because of an unintentional hole in the code, it was still possible to send unauthorized email, and so they wouldn't take us off the RBL. Not that they bothered to notify us about the remaining problem, of course. Seven long hours after being placed on the RBL, we were finally off of it. The after-affects going to take some time, though. We're going to have to incorporate all of our hacked fixes in a neater fashion. We're going to have to explain to all of our customers how this is going to make their lives more difficult. Spammers will have to work an extra three minutes, maybe four, to find another way to send Spam. Money, time, and effort wasted. All because these wonderful people can't be bothered to check their "facts."

How was YOUR day?