[NTLUG:Discuss] Be impressed/Be appalled

[asenec@senechalle.net]

Naw, any of you who work with spam won't be appalled,
but you will be impressed by what a 2.036 kernel machine
is handling.

I've resorted to putting up firewalls against address ranges
from which large amounts of spam originates--I had to since
the never-ending, ever-growing flood of spam was about to 
burn up our primary mailservers (incoming hubs for about 5K domains).
At the moment, I have firewalls up against:

/16  269 
/17  25 
/18  7 
/19  7 
/20  6 
/21  6 
/22  5 
/23  123 
/24  3794 
/25  295 
/26  205 
/27  244 
/28  230 
/29  168 
/30  3097 
/31  221 

Total addresses firewalled:  19772961 

That's about 8750 fw rules--and look at the load:

 10:53am  up 1 day, 17:36,  3 users,  load average: 1.11, 1.63, 2.00

I have to give a round of applause to Linux (and of course, to sendmail which
is working its little heart out filtering spam that does make it to our servers).

Annette