I use Akismet on my Wordpress site to catch spam. At first I was very impressed with it. When I first installed it (a few weeks after it was announced), it worked very well; it would catch all spam and let all ham through. I’ve made sure to have the latest version of the Akismet plugin for Wordpress installed. Since 99% of the spam determining is done on the akismet server side, there haven’t been any client side updates in some time. My Akismet setup has caught 25,521 spam comments so far.

But recently, it has been misbehaving on my site and the sites of some of my friends that use it. I get 5-10 spam comments a week that Akismet thinks is ham, and every once in awhile I’ll get a ham comment that Akismet thinks is spam. Then it will place SOME items in moderation which are VERY obviously spam (100+ links).

It’s annoying, and I wish Akismet would get it together. For now, I’ll be patient and keep flagging comments accordingly. After all, there’s still nothing better…

Edit: I found an announcement for Defensio, which could be an Akismet replacer. I requested information and perhaps inclusion in the beta. This sounds promising.

I’ve used Godaddy to register my domains for some time. The only reason I used it was because it was cheap, I didn’t really enjoy their interface or the company as a whole. So, when I found someone cheaper (or comparatively priced), I jumped on it.

So let this be a guide on how to transfer domains FROM Godaddy. I used Mydomain.com as an example.

First step, go to your Godaddy control panel and ensure that
a) Your administrative e-mail is correct.
b) Your domain you will be transferring is unlocked.

Next, go to MyDomain.com and login (signup as necessary). Once logged in, you will see on the bottom of the main page “Transfer Your Domains To Us”. Click that then put in the domain name in the following page. Just follow the steps until you can place the order. Two things that really appealed to me were the fact that
a) Coupons exist for a $5 transfer, which INCLUDES a year renewal. If for no other reason, this makes it much cheaper than godaddy can do.
b) You can use paypal for payments. You can do this with Godaddy but it’s just not as seamless.

Next with the Godaddy control panel, select “Authorization Code: Send by Email”. You will get an e-mail containing a code which you will need later.

Next you will receive an e-mail from Mydomain entitled “Confirm Domain Transfer”. There will be a link in there to confirm the transfer, click that. The page you go to requires you to put in the authorization code obtained from Godaddy. Once you enter that code, the transfer process has begun.

Next (a few hours later), you will receive an e-mail from Godady along these lines:

Dear %NAME%,

GoDaddy.com(R) received notification on %DATE% that you have requested a transfer
to another domain name registrar. If you want to proceed with this transfer, you do
not need to respond to this message. If you wish to cancel the transfer, you must do
so before %DATE%+4.

Followed by a bunch of “incentives” to try and keep you. I’ve tried to hasten the 4 day period, but they won’t have it.

After the 4 days have passed, the domain will be copied. Fortunately, they keep your NS records in tact, so the transition can be seamless insofar as there should be no transition-downtime.

Overall, yes it’s a lot of steps, but it’s worth it. Domains are expensive, and they really shouldn’t have to be.

My new job is less than 2 miles from my house. I’ve driven my car everyday so far, although that might soon change. I filled my gas tank today for the first time in 3 weeks, in contrast to once every week at the job before, or 2-3 times a week at the job before that. Gas is teh suck.

Every couple hours for the past week or so my system has been running out of memory and swap. It is a budget system, but I’m not doing anything extraordinary on it. I’ll be investigating, so yes, I know my site is down intermittently.

I’ve setup multiple IPs on FreeBSD before, so I expected the process to be about the same for RHEL 4. It took me about a half hour to figure out that I didn’t want to create an alias (at least not by using that terminology). I finally found this site which helped me through it.

Manual:

ifconfig eth0:0 up 192.168.1.2 netmask 255.255.255.0
ifconfig eth0:1 up 192.168.1.3 netmask 255.255.255.0

Automatic:
In /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0:0 put

DEVICE=eth0:0
BOOTPROTO=none
ONBOOT=yes
IPADDR=192.168.1.2
NETMASK=255.255.255.0

In /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0:1 put

DEVICE=eth0:1
BOOTPROTO=none
ONBOOT=yes
IPADDR=192.168.1.3
NETMASK=255.255.255.0

That’s it!