Areas of Expertise:
- FreeBSD
- OpenBSD
- documentation
- PF
- consulting
- speaking
- writing
Biography
Books
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Blog
Peter N.M.'s blog posts are hosted at:
http://bsdly.blogspot.com/
http://bsdly.blogspot.com/
“Name and Shame”, or socially responsible use of your log data
September 22 2008
Your logs contain an ever-growing mass of data on spammers. How about making an effort to make that data useful to others?Those of us who run email services know, from sometimes painful experience, what it takes to ensure that the minimum possible amount of unwanted advertising and scams that may… read more[.NO] “Name and Shame” eller samfunnsnyttig bruk av loggdata om spammere
August 31 2008
Today's post is in Norwegian - I'll be back in English laterVi sitter med stadig voksende mengder med data om spammere. Kan vi bruke dette på en måte som er nyttig for andre?Vi som selv står for driften av eposttjenester vet av tidvis smertelig erfaring hva som skal til for… read moreAugust 27 2008
Search engine optimization, deflowered.Logs are important. Depending on the specific kind of log, the data may shape lives and generate fortunes (how many times were those ads displayed, your clickthrough rate), reveal suspicious behavior and trigger actions (such as shutting the door to that bruteforcer) or provide sysadmins such as… read moreIs one of your machines secretly a spambot?
August 09 2008
Some times we just need facts on the table, automated.In my previous blog post, I wondered aloud about publishing data about the machines that verifiably tried to spam us. The response was other than overwhelming, and with the script running once per day anyway, I now publish the results via… read moreNow that we have their addresses, do we name and shame?
August 07 2008
Earlier this week a friendly Australian who I think had been reading my blog sent me a few questions about spam, spammers and what to do with them. Would it for example be useful to forward the IP addresses in the local traplist to law enforcement? After all, I publish… read moreIs there really a market for an open source router?
July 02 2008
Open source goodness. Coming soon to a router near you (if it isn't there already).I have a confession to make. Today's headline isn't mine. I snatched it from Dana Blankenhorn's June 30th piece over at ZDNet. It almost made me utter a Simpsonian grunt and start ranting about my more… read moreYes, we can! Make a difference, that is
June 25 2008
Good netizenship sometimes comes with a green tinge.Taking in my daily Linuxtoday dose this morning, there was one item grabbed that my attention, with the headline "Botnets and You: Save the World--Install Linux", and the Linuxtoday entry in turn points to Ross Brunson's blog post with the same title. Do… read moreBSD Unix? That's purely historical
June 17 2008
If you've ever bought something that ended up disappointing you to the point where you wanted to yell at somebody, you will recognize the frame of mind I was in after reading the book I ended up reviewing. With perfect hindsight I should of course have smelled the rat -… read moreJune 04 2008
Today's blog comes to you from sunny Aalborg in northern Denmark, where our Danish friends had the good sense to put together a one-day conference. Go to the web site at http://www.foss-aalborg.dk/ for details of the programme, I certainly hope the organizers will start a tradition and put on another… read moreI challenge your response, backscatterer
May 25 2008
A few weeks before I left Datadok, some real user accounts there, including mine, were joejobbed. That is, somebody, somewhere started sending spam with the From: or return address set to a real, live mail account in one of our domains. There were several incidents, the backscatter output of one… read moreFake Address Round Trip Time: 13 days
May 21 2008
The results are in. Our adversaries really are mindless automata.Regular readers will have noticed that I've been running a small scale experiment over the last few months, feeding one spammer byproduct back to them via a reasonably accessible web page. The hope was that I would learn a few things… read moreMay 14 2008
Do some network devices lie about their config, or are they just talking past each other?One of my tasks recently has been to start integrating the networks of two companies, because one of the companies bought the other.At my end you would have guessed already that anything exposed to the… read moreDoes anybody here remember Artie Eff?
April 13 2008
That's what you thought you heard, right? Actually, this is not Uncle BSDly's nostalgia for a backstreet hoodlum he might have known way back when. It's Uncle BSDly trying to point out what happened the last time a standard was entrusted to that little Seattle company called Microsoft. R-T-F. The… read moreRiga, here we come, OpenBSD 4.3 on the horizon
February 16 2008
On Wednesday, Riga is the place to be, if attending a PF tutorial session for free is how you want to spend a day. You may have missed the announcement (and the update), but no matter - on Wednesday, February 20th I will be giving a full day tutorial in… read more
