Crapflooders

seems as though Jizza's account got deleted?

Didn't happen to block his subnet, didja?

I really hope that was a one time thing.

[Undertoad]

I did everything you said to do. But in configuring the firewalling to block the guy's IP block, I blew a setting and wound up munging my DNS overnight.

This, in turn, had two paying clients on the phone this morning wondering why they couldn't get to certain addresses I had set up for them (and yeah, hadn't announced to the secondary yet).

Nothing wrong with the goatse guy, it's all good clean fun until someone gets their DNS hosed and people lose confidence in the net and in my ability to provide services for people.

Ow. That sucks. Sorry. Get it worked out?

I find some of the goatse posts funny, and I'm generally a first post/crap flood/troll fan, but only on /. or geekizoid. I think the Cellar is much less deserving of that kinda shit - it's an intelligent forum, and I'd really hate to see it get diluted with shit like that.

[Undertoad]

Yeah, everything's happy now, I just have to find a good reference on firewalling with IPCHAINS. I haven't seen a utility so incomprehensible since the early Sendmail. O'Reilly really nees a 4" book on it!

There's nothing I hate worse than utilities that demand you understand their entire philosophy before you can do one useful thing with them. I understand why that is, I just wish programmers would give us a break once in a while.

[lisa]

What? You don't love editing sendmail.cf and all those rules??

LOL... agreed. Many times the people who code these things think little about the people who will have to maintain it and do not want to learn the code themselves.

I suppose I can't blame them. In many cases, they are not getting paid to do this. But it'd be nice if they found someone who liked writing friendly UIs to work with them and write a front end.

(BTW, I have edited sendmail.cf -- couldn't cure the headache for a week!)

[Undertoad]

My thinking on that sort of thing has changed completely in the last few years.

It came from working with the web and reading all the usability gurus for a while. It's gotten so I can't use anything without judging the usability of it. This includes things like clock radios, every remote control (of course), cars (where bad UI kills people)...

Because when it comes to the web, if it's not usable, it's not done. That thinking oughta apply to every product!

You know what I find to be the most usable text editor ever?

Mother fuckin' vim.

I bet usability experts would have a shit fit about that, but they're boners anyway, and I'm tired. Vim is great. You can do everything quickly. Isn't that one of the keys to usability? Sure, it's not intuitive - is that important? I don't know. But it works. It works great. Especially for editing simple text files, like sendmail.cf.

Yes, I am a UNIX nerd. I wear my badge proudly. Except when I leave it home, which is every 3rd week.