LinuxWorld San Francisco Update
So here I am on the show floor of LinuxWorld 2006 in San Francisco, and I have broken away from the hectic pace to provide an on-the-scenes, uncensored update. Let’s start with the positives: the weather is true to form, a slight chill, great sun and a gentle breeze. San Francisco is my second favorite city in the US and it is always a great time, and this trip is no exception. Went to a great party last night courtesy of Splunk and Mainline, and hung out with some interesting and fun people. Had a small trip to Napa on Sunday and hit some great wineries in our rented PT Cruiser convertible, which was also quite fun. Decided to venture out of the tradeshow quadrant of the city and we stayed in Japantown at a great, economical hotel, the Miyako, which has proved to be a smart move since JTown is interesting and a nice change. By in large, the trip to SF has been great.
By now you may be asking yourself if this an update on LinuxWorld or is this a diary of another boondoggle? Well, the truth is that this is that the show is, once again, a little disappointing. Attendance, while way better than Boston, is still continuing the downward slide and IDG’s lack of focus to get the show back on track is painfully obvious. There are notable holes in the exhibitor list, such as Redhat and Sun, and a total defection by leading security vendors. Our focus is email security, and in this space there is a paltry showing as well, with Barracuda being the sole email security vendor to make the show. They have a big RV as their booth, BTW, but they won’t show off the inside for some strange reason. A few antivirus vendors showed up such as BitDefender, Sophos and Nod32, but besides these companies plus Astaro and, of course, Message Partners (us) in the IBM booth, there isn’t much of a security focus.
Of course, the server vendors are here - Dell, IBM, SuperMicro, Pogo, etc. - the chip vendors and the OS vendors are here along with .org folks and book hawkers, but there is no real excitement to speak of. One of the most notable observations to me is that there are very very very few venture guys walking around. In Boston a few venture guys were walking around, but here, in the VC central, there seems to be zippo, or next to zippo.
Unfortunately, I am standing at my booth or yapping to partners so I don’t get to the keynotes so I can’t comment on those, but I have not heard any great excitement for the keynotes either. So, I certainly want to be too negative because, LW is not much different than many trade shows now-a-days and somewhat reflects the reality of Linux as well. Linux was a big story in the 90’s and as it became a force it was interesting, but now it has arrived. Now it’s time to use Linux and a show that is not solution focused, such as this, has minimal value for business customers. We all know that Linux is here, it works, it is reliable and it is business ready. We all know that servers can run Linux and that servers are incredible now-a-days. Linux is no longer the story, the story must be on applications and solving business problems. Until LW can figure this out, and figure out how to organize the show in such a way that it excites business users to actually show up to learn things, I’m afraid that the downward trend will only continue.
I will enjoy SF for the rest of my stay and I welcome anyone to stop by and say hello in the IBM booth. A BIG thank you to IBM for helping us out so much as always. We love Kathy C., Dave M., Sam Q. and all the folks who are so nice to us, thank you!
Small SMTP Restriction, Big Results
We try various smtp level spam restrictions here with varying results. Here are some of my observations on our efforts.
We highly recommending rejecting non fully-qualified host names. This means that hosts that try SMTP HELO that do not present their fully-qualified name are rejected. This small check will get rid more spam than you’d believe. In postfix this option is configured as:
smtpd_recipient_restrictions =
reject_non_fqdn_hostname,
This can be augemented with reject_non_fqdn_sender which checks mail from: in the SMTP exchange, after the HELO. From: addresses not presented as fully-qualified names will be rejected.
These small tidbits will spare you much spam.
Arbitration for Blacklists
I have been reading on various mailing lists how small isp’s are struggling keeping their email servers off of blacklists. It is a terrible thing when a big service provider like AOL can severely impair a smaller competitors aol-bound email service with no penalty by refusing to accept mail from them. Similar issues arise for innocent businesses who find their email servers blacklisted because of a single irate customer.
Having been a victim of blacklist terrorism I can say firsthand that it truly sucks when your emails start getting rejected all over the place. If getting blacklisted is not sucky enough, things become even suckier when you try to get your email server removed from the blackhole lists. Many blacklists have arcane methods for submitting claims, some simply ignore you, while others are quite helpful.
I think that a black list arbitration system should be setup by a trusted third party to quickly resolve blacklist disputes. Blacklist providers should be forced by their customers to subscribe to an arbitration processes and the decisions should be binding. An arbitration system can be automated for most claims but can have a human involved for special cases or richer customers.
Technorati Tags: blacklist, spam, antispam, rbl, real-time blackhole lists,
Marketing Claims of Barracuda Networks
Just had a great laugh reading through the marketing claims of Barracuda Networks. Sorry guys, but with SpamAssassin and the lowest-end hardware you can dig up you will never do 1, 4, 5 or 10 million messages a day no matter how much ink is in your printer. Even with decent hardware you could never do these numbers with SpamAssassin. If their box can filter 100k messages a day on the lowend platform I would be astounded, the upper claims are utterly ridiculous and beyond comment.
More power to them because they seem to be making tons of cash and can afford great marketing, but it takes a ton of balls to print such ridiculous claims.
Technorati Tags: barracuda networks, antispam, spam, email security, marketing