Category Archive: Informational

Jan 22

Yet more spam filtering…

Banned IPs per Day

I feel I’ve written a bit too much about spam filtering recently… but nonetheless, here’s one more, only with some graphs and maps! Attacks against our mail servers have not stopped since my last update – they’ve increased – but despite this, we’ve had very little spam (I won’t go as far as to say …

Continue reading »

Nov 06

Spam Filtering Update

We’ve had a full month of our new edge SMTP service in place now so I thought I’d do a very quick post taking a look at how well it had performed in the last four weeks. Firstly the positive: 190,203 (!) attempts to send messages without authenticating A sum total of 430,431 (!!!) attempts …

Continue reading »

Oct 13

Spam Filtering

Junk mail – it’s irritating enough when it comes through your door, but it’s just as frustrating when it clutters up your e-mail inbox too. Sadly, there’s no one-stop solution for dealing with spam – it’s a constant war between the spammers and the spammed. As we deal with one wave of spam, the next …

Continue reading »

Feb 17

Blackboard Performance Update

Average Hourly Logins against Hour of Day

It’s been two months since we moved Blackboard to the new data centre and performed the various hardware upgrades (see the post we made about that here), so it’s about time that we take a look at how the service has performed since it went live, and how it coped with the demand of the …

Continue reading »

Aug 21

Monitoring

With over 1000 servers and almost as many switches and other pieces of routing equipment across the university, one of the most important things is to make sure that everything is working as expected. There are many approaches we could take towards monitoring the services we run, from mostly manual to entirely automated. To save on …

Continue reading »