Slogger’s View

For some time, I’ve been hosting my domain on my brother’s (Andy) server in the States. Albeit line speed from SA is a little slow, (or rather peering links to Qwest in the US are crappy) Andy kindly hosted it for free. Muchos gracias Amigo! My other bro Matt, did the server configs and graciously tweaked stuff when asked.

Latency to the server was getting a bit much especially when downloading mail, so Matt suggested taking a look at Google to host mail for my domain. Eh?

I took a look at Google Apps and swung my mail over. It was a painless and relatively easy process. OK, so maybe it’s a little easier for us geek types, but it does not require any rocket science. Dang, there’s a customisable start page, user definable url’s to the apps and even a shareable calendar that sends reminder SMS’s at no charge. Yep, even in South Africa we get the SMS reminder service. And it actually works!

Methinks Google are setting themselves up to be the ultimate killer app/indispensible/taken for granted/cannot live without part of most people’s lives. Hell “google it” has even become a generic term.

Well guys, if you continue along these lines, you may just do it.

I finally decided to bite the bullet and pay SARS a visit to resolve some outstanding issues (primarily my fault). I called the central call centre and was told that Randburg walk-in centre would be the best place to go. So this morning I went there. Firstly there was ample secure parking on the premises. The building itself is fairly newly built, looks good and is clean.

There is a bank of 10 (iirc) consultants seated at neat/modern desks with a queue of decent clean office chairs for you to play musical chairs on while you wait for the next available consultant. There were at least 15 people in front of me, and nevertheless within about 10 minutes I was at the front of the queue. The consultant was friendly, helpful and efficient! I was outa there around 15 minutes later. Sheesh! What next?

Maybe Mr. Trevor Manuel is actually doing his job. We live in hope.

It never ceases to amaze me how many brain dead IT admin types are actually out there.

Yesterday I setup a domain for nolisting expecting there to be at least one mail server that doesn’t do it’s job properly according to RFC 2821. Essentially in the domain records, a primary MX is specified that doesn’t actually recieve SMTP data, forcing RFC 2821 compliant SMTP servers to seek out the (if specified) secondary MX and attempt delivery there. The thinking being that most spam relays and viruses are hopefully not compliant and will give up if the primary MX doesn’t respond. Thereby helping to reduce the amount of spam/viruses being recieved on the domain. There is already a decrease in spam and virus activity on this specific domain. I tested normal mail delivery from a number of external domains to the nolisting domain, and had successful delivery in all cases without any discernable delay. But of course there is already one complaint from a finance house that is getting bounces when trying to send mail to the domain.

Why is it that so often large corporations who should be regulatory / industry compliant in all aspects of their business, just aren’t. It’s not like they lack the skills or money to actually have the job done properly. It seems to me that one of the largest problems faced by business isn’t a lack of skills or ability, it’s brain dead middle and especially upper management types who it seems are hell bent on making decisions that defy common sense. Common sense just isn’t common anymore.