In a comment on my entry on us needing to get experience with Ubuntu 20.04, Miksa pointed out the advantages of investing heavily in virtualization. These definitely exist, but among other practical issues, heavy investment in virtualization clashes with our funding model, which you could describe as ‘erratic’ or ‘nonexistent’. Our equipment funding is quite erratic and as a result we have to buy

The conventional way to make a significant commitment to on-premise virtualization is to buy a few big host machines that will each run a lot of virtual machines (possible with some form of shared storage and virtual machine motion from one server to another). In this model you’re getting advantages of scale and also fluctuating usage of your virtual machines over time; probably not all of them ar

Under normal circumstances, we would have a decent number of machines running Ubuntu 20.04 by now, probably including our login servers. But the situation is not normal, because ongoing world and local events still have us working from home, making it not so simple to install and deploy a new physical server with a new version of Ubuntu. However, it really looks like this is the new normal so we s

A long time ago, Daniel J. Bernstein wrote a proposal for a new generation of Internet email he called IM2000, although it never went anywhere. Ever since then, a significant number of people have idealized it as the great white ‘if only’ hope of email (especially as the solution to spam), in much the same way that people idealized Sun’s NeWS as the great ‘if only’ alternative to X11. Unfortunatel

As part of a planned switch to rspamd as our anti-spam system (well, our spam recognition system), I’ve been taking a closer look at how our test rspamd scores some email and what it reports about why. This has given me a new and unhappy view of DMARC in the real world, building on how DKIM looks for our ‘good’ email. So let me tell you a story, starting with the background. The university is now