totalnetsolutions.net

As of today:

“Akismet has caught 347 spam for you since you first installed it.”

That’s since 11/29/2007. Akismet has YET to miscategorize a comment as spam, and it has missed a single spam comment. All I had to do was click “this is spam” and it’s cleaned up.

The only other anti-spam product I’ve seen to perform this well is the IronPort mail system at a client. 130,000 or so attempts / day, 1 spam / day in the entire company queue, and no users complaining about spam in 5 months.

Akismet, Ironport, my hat is off to you both.

Just as a quick note – Windows Server 2008 RC0 seems to have the same setup issue as Windows Vista, or at least the x64 RC0 does – I spent most of the evening last night editing settings, rebooting, plugging in the product key, and reading “This computer’s hardware may not support booting to this disk. Ensure that the disk’s controller is enabled in the BIOS.” The problem is detailed at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/925481 for Vista. Windows Server 2008 RC1 fixes this issue.

I was having the problem on a Virtual system in VMWare ESX 3.5, so it was easy to disconnect a disk to get past the error, but downloading and installing the updated RC seemed like the better fix for the first DC in a new test lab.

What apparently is going on is if you have 2 hard drives that have never been partitioned or initialized, then the Setup.exe program gets confused. You can remove one of the disks temporarily, format them with another boot medium (BartPE, anyone?), or just not use Win2k8 RC0. According to the support note, the only fix for Vista is to format the drives.  I bet you can remove one of them and Vista will work, too, but haven’t tested.

Building a new ESX host on new hardware with the PERC6/i RAID controller, we came across an error. ESX installs perfectly fine, but upon the initial boot, the server hangs showing:
Loading VMKernel megaraid_sas.o (options: '')
It turns out that this is caused by an IRQ routing issue in the 2.0.1 BIOS on the newest 2900 series (including 2950). You can get the update here, and the release notes here.

Note that the install I linked to is an “Update Package for Red Hat” – this requires RPM to install properly, I’m not sure if that’s to install the script in /etc/rc6.d/ to perform the actual update, or if there’s also a binary driver that needs to be updated as well. To perform this RPM update, rather than building a DOS floppy (or if you don’t have a floppy drive in the server):

1. Download the update to a USB thumb drive or burn it to a CD.
2. Reboot the ESX server.
3. At the boot prompt, you have the choice of “VMware ESX Server”, “VMWare ESX Server (Debug)” or “ESX Troubleshooting mode”. Boot to Troubleshooting mode – this WILL bring you to a shell, eventually.
4. Insert the thumb drive or CD media and mount it.
   For a thumb drive:
mkdir /mnt/usb
mount -t auto /dev/sdb1 /mnt/usb

5. Execute the fix:
/mnt/usb/PE2900_BIOS_LX_2.1.1.BIN
6. Read the notes and hit “q” to finish, then let the server reboot and apply the update.

Server should come up 100% fine after the reboot, and you’re good to go!