Posted on: July 7th, 2009 by Famous Phil

First, I think I should put in a plug for exchange hosting. I got exchange 2007 up after deciding to get a bigger server and host a few more people.  Exchange 2007 is a bit more bloated but has nicer spam fighting features and has a much nicer interface in browsers like firefox.  I’m still looking for a few people to help me pay for the server.  I put all the details on codecall in this thread: http://forum.codecall.net/hosting-registrars/18780-exchange-2007-email-hosting-offer-personal-server-looking-4-more-people.html.  If you’re interested, feel free to drop me an email

Now onto the rest of my blog (and the main reason why I’m even blogging)

I really think its time I take the time to update other parts of my site.  My blog gets a lot of my attention because it is fun to write when I get a chance to write about stuff I care about!

Lets start with why am I taking this sudden initiative to update the rest of my site.   A few days ago, I was talking to John who has a low page rank (PR) on his blogging site at johnciacia.com.  John wants to increase his PR.  I currently have a much higher rank than he does but I’d like a higher rank too.  Higher PR means more popularity and higher search rankings for common key words.

Why would I want a higher PR?  Higher PR means my popularity will go up on search engines and I will get more traffic to my site.  I really want to get 10,000 people reading my blog within a few years.  I feel this is a very obtainable goal because I tend to write 2 to 3 very technical articles per month that aren’t easily obtainable elsewhere on the web.  I constantly find the Microsoft knowledgebase is insufficient at helping me fix my own problems, so when I come up with a solution elsewhere, I tend to post it either here or on Adminreference.com.  I have looked back on AR quite often to find my own solutions to recurring problems due to corruption, etc.

Now time to move onto my photo gallery

I finally got around to putting a few photos up from the same old photos forever.  I have yet to filter out the spam comments, but they will go eventually.  Within the next week or two, I plan on posting a few of my nature photo galleries that I’ve kept on my computer now for quite some time.  These include a fox that comes to our house quite often and a rare shot of baby skunks.

Anyways, I would like to point your attention to my latest gallery: http://famousphil.com/gallery/?level=album&id=4 (You can get to this from the main page by clicking the photos navigation link).  This is of a practice barn burning for the Humphrey Volunteer Fire Department (no website available).  Our Fire Department is very small and right down the road from us.  We had a barn on our property that was falling down and we felt it was time to burn it before someone got hurt in it from beams falling, etc.  Anyways, I got a few really cool shots and thought I’d share them   Look forward to more nature photos in a few days.

Tags: barn, burn, burning, department, email, Exchange 2007, fire, Google, humphrey, page rank, pr, search, seo
Posted in Hosting / Server Administration, Personal, Technology
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Posted on: June 20th, 2009 by Famous Phil

First I guess I should apologize for not posting anything in the past week here!  I really hate it when I have to ignore my own blog for more important admin business elsewhere.  The good thing is, I always manage to learn a lot of new stuff that I can easily share

Over the past week, I got a new server to host Microsoft Exchange which is a powerful email server from Microsoft.  Before you go all crazy on Microsoft (I know I typically do), Exchange is one of the few excellent products they make.  I am actually very hard pressed to find anything that compares to it that is open source and can easily run on Linux which 99% of  my hosting business up until now has ran off from.  Man, I never thought that I would say that

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Tags: 1and1, 3dgwebhosting, active directory, Admin Reference, administration, Elite data hosting, email, exchange, exchange 2003, Exchange 2007, fsckvps, mailxchange, Microsoft, Microsoft Exchange, mobile, outlook, outlook web access, owa, server 2003, vaserv, vps, windows
Posted in Hosting / Server Administration, Mobile Technology, My Site
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Posted on: April 20th, 2009 by Famous Phil

So today I was reading through my comments to approve and disapprove suggestions / comments on blogs.  I usually get about 30 to 40 spam comments a week that I have to manually delete.  This time I got a funny spam comment that I thought deserves its own blog (no I didn’t approve it, rather, I promoted it!).  Just to be an “ass”, I thought I would also post this user’s IP address and email publically.  You may feel free to spam him

So here is the comment to a blog “Google features and what I utilize from Google“,

User: Afforsenerede
email: aninuebit@gmail.com
ip: 209.239.112.48
submitted on 2009/04/19 at 11:20am:

“Yooo..

I kno it has nothing to do with what you wrote, but have you ever heard of http://www.bluestickers.info/ringtones.php . They seems to promise free ringtones

PS. Dont be an ass, this is NOT spam ”

Why did I post this although it only deserved a deletion?  It is quite simple, I get enough spam email a day to know that when I post my email on a public site that is quite popular, I will get more spam to that address. My goal is to get this spammer a lot more spam to hopefully overwhelm him to where he has to increase his spam filter and possibly start flagging legitimate email as spam.

To get around spam, I implement a system to where my emails are filtered at the address level then forwarded on through more filters on other servers before being forwarded to a central email address that I have set up.  My central email address is not filtered because I rely on email to be filtered before it gets to my central email account.  This way if I notice a high volume of spam, I can simply increase the filtering on public addresses and start deleting legitimate email without too much worry.  People who know me probably know one of my lightly filtered addresses and can send the same email to multiple addresses to ensure delivery.

If the above confuses you, I simply have a bunch of public email addresses that I filter then forward to an unfiltered address that I look at email from.  Spam doesn’t bother me much anymore, especially since I use a text email client that doesn’t show pictures and makes deleting a message as easy as the “d” key (this is called pine).  Deleting 100 spam messages takes me about 1 minute now compared to about 5 minutes with a web based client like gmail or yahoo mail or hotmail.

Pine is a great program and all of my hosting clients may use pine on my server through ssh, I have compiled pine with password file support (.pinepass).  Pine is a bit tricky to set up, but I posted a little bit about the process on adminreference.

Finally, I would like to thank this spammer that goes by the name: Afforsenerede for getting me on this topic.  I will have a reply out to you soon   I also intentionally removed the link to that info site just to be a bastard .

Tags: email, pine, smart, spam
Posted in Hosting / Server Administration, Technology
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