# At 9/7/06; 6:15:21 PM
To the Kids dept.
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Wrekin wimberries

Yes, we had 'connectivity issues' yesterday and today. Yesterday, late afternnoon, we were hit hard by a referral spammer. Now, these things come form different IPs, different countries, but carry all the same referers. In actuality, it's one person, sending out instructions to drone or zombie machines they've taken over. Anyway, we were hit hard. I came home wanted to do something on my site, saw I couldn't, so in the famous server dude words of, "fuck it!" Crash restarted.

This lead to a bit of corruption in one of my roots, the config.manila.stats.refer.steveswar to be precise. Come the early hours of the morning, when I do root compaction to clear crap, the damn thing hung.

When I awoke Sunday, saw the problem, tracked it down, jettisoned the erroneous table and restarted, we'd been down for some six hours. From 4.00am till 10.00am approx.

Apparently it's a pair of Polish brothers who are responsible to most referral spam. (I was going to link to back up that claim, but 'Spam Huntress' is suffering a Denial of Service attack, probably from the very same Poles. So I can't link deep into her site—see the screen shot. Stick your head too far up beyond the parapet, and they'll come after you.)

# At 9/7/06; 5:19:57 PM
To the Bugs dept.
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Damned Poles