Caught Up On Email
I finally got caught up on email today. I had over 3,000 messages for work and over 500 for my personal email. It took me until about 2 PM today to finally get through it all. Most of the work messages were automated messages that I could mass delete, so I did that. Even after the filters, mass deletions, and randomly ignoring emails, I still had about 70 that I had to read and respond to. Some of them were important, but most of them were not.
The personal email was a little better. About 300 of them were from technical mailing lists, and I didn’t feel like going through it all. I hadn’t posted to the mailing lists recently, so I wasn’t expecting any replies. I just deleted those and moved on. Lots of messages were from my father-in-law, so I read his jokes and deleted them.
I have some automated emails from my server that tell me about “health issues” with the server. This includes break-in attempts. It was pretty much average (about 300 a night), so no big deal. However, one of the days logged almost 3,000 attempts from a single IP. I pushed all of the logs through a Perl script that I had written to parse hack attempts, capture IPs, do DNS lookups on those IPs, and publish results. It took a while for that script to run since it had over a week of data to go through instead of just 24 hours. I took the results and blocked over a dozen IPs that had more than 20 attempts to break into my server in the past week. I don’t screw around when it comes to protecting my server.
I may have time tonight to write up some blog entires about my vacation. We’ll see how it goes.
