There’s real writing coming again soon… (I promise) but for now, enjoy the pictures from Jakob’s First Thanksgiving!

Yes, I know… everyone hates spammers, but I really hate them today.

We’ve had some problems lately where Beacon’s server has gone down inexplicably. Well, we’ve figured it out. Blog spammers are crashing our machine. Today, after admissions (which is what I really wanted to be writing about today), I came home and found us in the middle of a blog spam attack. The load on our machine was up around 200 by the time I was able to get a root prompt and shut down httpd. I had to let the machine calm down, restart httpd and then log into MT to be able to add the offending spammer to our blacklist. Each time I restarted httpd, the attack started again, and I had to shut it down after getting one step closer.

The whole process took about an hour of my life that I can’t have back.

Now, right now, Beacon can’t afford to upgrade to MT 3.1. So either we have to turn off comments, stop blogging or deal with the fact that we all will have really disgusting email messages in our inboxes every day and have periodic shutdowns of our system.

Pathetic.

Anyone have another option for us?

No… not John Kerry. Kerry Lutz, blogger and friend.

He’s angry and he’s sorry.

And he’s not apologizing for it. And he shouldn’t.