Ok, this is a rant but I think the content is perfectly valid. I moved to Ubuntu from Gentoo generally because I was leaning towards binary distro's after having problems with Gentoo's political system.

Ubuntu is great, but unfortunately after making itself "so" good in certain areas, when I find it's falling over badly in other areas, expectations tend to be dashed.

In particular I'm talking about the fringes that Gentoo supports so well, and Ubuntu screws up so badly ...

Ok, got to get (apparently) a plug in for our hosting provider. Encryptec Limited host these Blogs and they're pushing their plone hosting product.

As hosting goes, it seems to work Ok - not had any problems to date .. in terms of speed / reliability, this is the absolute bottom of the line / bargain basement product, and I've not had problems.

Anyway, if you want a cracking dynamic website for a bargain price, support the little guy!
plone hosting!

Also, a couple of up and coming sites to watch;

• A Week in Tuscany
• Tuscan Villa Rental
  

Once upon a time there was a German car manufacturer who made outstanding cars and provided an outstanding quality of service. Many companies deemed their cards to be "the best" and adopted them as their car of choice for contract rentals.

This made the car manufacturer very happy, very wealthy, and possibly very complacent.

A few weeks ago we noticed our traffic spike by about x100 as a BOTNET focussed it's attention on our main server array. This was enough to cause serious discomfort to our server's ability to render web pages, and to our ability to pay for our transit bill (!)

So, how does one defeat a BOTNET ?

Well I guess the bottom line is that it depends on the BOTNET size, but we've currently collected around 25,000 offending IP's so our method seems to work on a relatively small scale.

The first thing you need is a nice interface to the system's IPTABLES ...

Is it not interesting to look at events in Iraq over the last few years and note that the governments and journalists use the term "war"?

Using a historical context, I generally assume war to mean one of two things. Either a nation defending itself from attack, or a nation attacking another for material gain of some sort. In either event, the aim of the soldiers who fight in that war is to kill any combatants they find who support the other side.

I don't recall any historical "wars" where the intention was to spend a lot of money to take over a nation and them immediately give everything back to the people you've just beaten ...