As I'm going through the thousands of emails in my inbox I keep coming across subjects like "(big corporation) Antivirus Email Gateway Notification" with headers that seem to confirm the origin. These emails say things like, "Sender, the following email was blocked due to containing an attached file that violates (big corporation) email security policy."

Do the IT managers of this massive corporation really not know how Windows email trojans work? Do the antivirus vendors not know? Is the IT world filled with that many incompetent people? How is bouncing gazillions of "you are not in compliance with (big company) security policies" to innocent people who are not, and further cannot be, infected help anything? Surely they can disable this in their software. If not, most of these companies are large enough that they could demand from the antivirus vendor that these embarrasing features be removed.

As the conspiracy nuts would claim: maybe it is some sort of screwball advertising policy. How better to spam people? It gets the company name out there, albeit not in a very flattering light, and there's a certain level of plausible deniability involved. The average computer user would probably be grateful for such a false warning. And they might even find a virus on their computer as a result.

Oh well, at least a copy of the virus wasn't attached... Almost everyone seems to have shut that feature off long ago.

BTW, my mail server discards any email with a Microsoft Executable attached. So sorry. Try a zip file or something if you legitimately want to get something through to me.

So, does anyone have 6 LVD SCA hard disks they want to donate? Nah, didn't think so...

Anyway, I finally have an actual server rather than some mess of parts that act vaguely like a server. That will take a load off of my workstation.

So, what will the machine do? Top priority is the SWISH-E daily build and all the services eating away at my workstation resources. I haven't thought far beyond that.

Disk space is a major shortcoming. I have about 500 MB free. But, the machine has 6 (empty) LVD SCA slots in the front. Maybe I'll find some used 9 GB disks at a computer show or something. Who knows. New SCA disks are way beyond my shoestring budget, though. I'd like to get 6 disks and create a mirrored LVM array. I'd have no hot spares but at least there would be redundancy. Another option would be to install an IDE RAID card and move the LVM storage from my workstation. There's no redundancy there, though.

I am having a problem with the machine freezing after about 15 minutes when running in multiprocessor mode. The memory tests good with memtest86. Not sure if it is kernel related or what. I've tried various combinations of apic/noapic, nohlt, acpi=off, apm=off and none make any difference. Uniprocessor mode runs perfectly. So, I'm stuck running on one CPU until I find the problem. The only oddity I notice is that CPU0 and sometimes CPU1 show disabled on the front panel when the machine is frozen. When I got it the CPU0 fan was damaged. (I borrowed a fan from another machine to get it running.) So there's a small chance that CPU is damaged. I don't see any way to boot or run the machine from CPU0 in uniprocessor mode to test it. I guess I could swap the CPUs around...

Oh, yeah, Matt suggested that I name it Hagrid since it resembles a lumbering half-giant.