What is Digg?57 Comments
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -7/+109**Note: This link goes to my own blog, so I'm "blog-whoring" by submitting it. That being said, I don't make money from my site and submit only content that I think would truly be interesting to the Digg community.
My view is that Digg is an idea bazzaar, and that its purpose is to present the community with various ideas in order to see if they are interesting. If they are, people say so. If not, they get burried. It's a natural selection of sorts.
So, after grappling with the idea of being labeled a "blog-whore", I decided that the purpose of Digg is to submit ideas to the community; it should *not* matter what the source is. It shouldn't matter if it's my stuff, my friend's stuff, or the content of a complete stranger.
To me, spam means one thing -- *the content is not desired to the majority of the recipients". If the content is appreciated, but the source happens to be the author, that does not by itself make it spam. Plain and simple.
Anyway, those are my thoughts on the matter. We'll see how it stands. Once again, if I'm proven wrong I'll back down yet again. But I don't think I will be. I think a fair-minded person will judge content based on the content rather than the soruce. But that remains to be seen.
Cheers,
-Daniel - wtfunkymonkey, on 10/12/2007, -1/+98I think the whole idea of blogwhoring and blogspamming isn't so much when you have the content on your own blog, but rather when your blog is nothing more than a link or a rehashed copy of another site.
Original, relevant, content should always be embraced on digg regardless of the source. - argash, on 10/12/2007, -4/+19Stop spamming!!
j/k someone had to say it! I agree with the funky monkey though. Original content should always be welcomed
MIT's banner is awsome, they should have put it in binary or hex though. - ldhertert, on 10/12/2007, -4/+17nice of you to give a helpful link.
http://www.duggmirror.com/linux_unix/What_Mail_Server_Do_The_Major_Universities_Use_/ - krewemaynard, on 10/12/2007, -2/+15It's a moot point once your server has melted. :)
- Impy, on 10/12/2007, -1/+8I think you will find that pretty much anything submitted to www.md5decrypt.com resolves to "Lambertseter kåringen 2006". Which is Norwegian for some kind of contest taking place at Lambertseter (which is just outside of Oslo...)
- krewemaynard, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5Ever hear of a budget? Sendmail and Postfix are free...nothing to purchase, no licensing. And if set up correctly, they're rock solid.
- slippery, on 10/12/2007, -2/+7Nice bit of hackery and interesting results. I've always been a Postfix fan so it's encouraging to see it growing. Digg!
- ohoh, on 10/12/2007, -4/+9I totally agree with you, content is more important than the source... however, the source doesn't seem to be responding for me ;P
- JoshD, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4There's a simple reason. There's no added value. At my school, we have POP/IMAP access to email, but the vast majority of students only use webmail. When we're talking about students with this low level of technical sophistication, why should we expect them to take advantage of advanced calendaring features and shared folders?
Also, shared folders are definitely possible using some other mail servers, although I'm not really familiar. And calling a mail server "non-user friendly" is kind of silly when its just a mail server. If I install Outlook on my computer, using IMAP/POP3 gives virtually the same experience as using an Exchange server. Students aren't missing the shared calendar feature. Plus, Horde is not really that bad. My school placed a different template to the Horde mail client and it's actually quite usable.
I'm a PC user personally, but your claim might has well have been - why is it that universities insist on non-friendly Microsoft boxes when they could switch to Apple which offers much fewer headaches to the user. - nazadus, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4Exchange is only really good for their Calendar (and sharing it). That's about it. Oh, and Public Floders are pretty useful too.
I can't imagine students needing to use the calendar or actually reading public folders.
Also, *nix is much more reliable and stable than any Exchange setup I've ever seen (ok, so I've only seen 3 exchange setups). - Phishcast, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4I'm pretty familiar with a particular large University's email system. There are near 200,000 accounts in their central directory. How many people would I need to employ to keep Exchange (or GroupWise or Notes) running smoothly with that many accounts? A more simple IMAP/POP setup gives the functionality most people need, and running it all on Unix boxes makes for simple and elegant scripting possibilities.
- kenrblan, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4Since the site is not responding and the script is not on the mirror, I am posting this response partially in the dark. I am assuming this script only looked at the primary MX servers for these campuses. As someone familiar with how colleges handle email, this approach doesn't give you a full picture of what is really in use. For instance, I maintain an edge appliance that handles all of my university's incoming mail and filters spam before sending it on to our MS Exchange system that sits behind a firewall and is not exposed to the outside world for SMTP. Other campuses in my university system use sendmail, postfix, etc in combination with Lotus Notes, Novell, and probably Qmail. In fact, one campus in my system has almost every possible flavor of email used in at least one of its departments... they have interesting problems in assuring message delivery.
- MrDolomite, on 10/12/2007, -5/+8Agreee with OP's comment and wtfunkymonkey's comment 100%. This is what digg should have more of!
- llbbl, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3@emer
There are Linux alternatives to MS exchange that are cheaper, more stable and have the same functionality if not more. They come with pretty GUI just like exchange, as if that really makes a difference.
Novell Groupwise
http://www.novell.com/products/groupwise/
Open-xchange
http://www.open-xchange.com/
Scalix
http://www.scalix.com/
I would recommend scalix over anything. - bvaughn, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3It also seems like the Linux solutions can be used with an exchange backend so that might be whats going on in some cases. So it should read "What SMTP frontend do the Major University's Use"
- ManiacMac, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3As being a IT staff member for a major university I think I can shed some light on this.
In my uni, we use sendmail at the border and many of us who get lots of mail run our own postfix servers vs. eating up the central mail system. The idea here is that the border mail systems simply route all the mail into a centralized location, and then it is dispere it to the various organizations within the university. A typical path for my mail, for example:
Internet Border(Sendmail) --> Central collection point --> My Server(Postfix)
An MS system would simply choke under the complexity. Now this may not seem complicated, however when you have several points of entry, an entire public class B with half of staff and students on it, and asymetric routing, it gets interesting. Also departments like the chem and bio departments have their own infrastructure which adds even more complexity. - helpimstuck, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2ManiacMac said:
"Internet Border(Sendmail) --> Central collection point --> My Server(Postfix)
An MS system would simply choke under the complexity."
It's apparent you have zero experience with Exchange administration. Please conduct at least two minutes worth of research before saying something so painfully inaccurate. - bvaughn, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3Um I find this article to be pretty much inaccurate. Since these universitys have OWA which is part of exchange.
http://www.brown.edu/Facilities/CIS/Doc/qs_owa.html
http://email.med.harvard.edu/
https://secure.uphs.upenn.edu/webmail
http://intranet.tuck.dartmouth.edu/
http://helpdesk.princeton.edu/kb/display.plx?ID=9388
I really didn't want to seach for all of them, but the first five colleges have some sort of exchange setup. - hourigan, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2I have worked in a number of ISPs. I'm surprised Qmail and Exim are not on the list. Qmail especially, it is probably the most suitable for a large volume environment. Although it does need patches to make it work well with other SMTP servers. The author is a very strict RFC guy and won’t allow non-RFC stuff, which most other mail servers support.
- unimatrixZxero, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Yeah, it is still not responding. I've tried it several times. I guess I'll just wait till the world is asleep to try it again. But then again, the world never does sleep.
- climan, on 10/12/2007, -2/+3The MD5 you guys see as being converted to Lambertseter "kåringen 2006" by md5decrypt is incorrect, that is what the site gives you if it doesn't know what the hash is. I just went through and entered a bunch of MD5's and the ones it knew it came back with the correct string but any it didn't know it came back with the answer given above.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Very true what a poster said above -- a better title would have perhaps been "front-end MTA", but I figured the title is more palatable as "mail server", and those who know enough to recognize the difference know the deal anyway.
-Daniel - dthomas53, on 10/12/2007, -3/+4What, no qmail?
- rideagain, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1emer:
The reason they use the tools that they do is because they feel that these tools do a better job. I'm not a mail admin so I don't know exactly what part of the job the unix tools do better, but it may be that they crash less, or they scale better, they're easier to maintain, or they're easier to modify to stop spam? Someone more well-versed may want to share some more insight? - Prol1fic, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Bradk50, you obviously don't know what obscurity means then. You can hide the server information, but that doesn't change the server you're using, there are other ways of finding out - so it IS security through obscurity. There is not active "extra layer of security" hiding the information from the hackers.
- peterjhill, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2Some people are saying the list is inaccurate... what they need to realize is that many universities have departments that run their own mail servers. Carnegie Mellon uses Cyrus IMAP, for example, but their Business school uses Exchange.
Expect more than one type of server... - Luuvitonen, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1At the bottom of the post there's a link: http://dmiessler.com/files/check_mail_servers.sh.txt
- ArcusOfSV, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1One thing is for sure. You need a new site host. Da Digg effect. Im looking forward to checking it out though so dugg.
- whalesalad, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Screw Postfix, Screw Sendmail. It's all about QMAIL! Qmail is the ultimate MTA, and is very easily configured. It also works beautifully with spam asassin and clam antivirus and has a lot of other tools that make managing domains and accounts extremely easy.
Google uses Qmail with Gmail, and so does Yahoo.
http://www.qmailrocks.org - vondur, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Here at CSULB, we are using Communigate Pro for email. Some of the administrative offices use Lotus Notes, but the majority of staff/faculty/students are on the Communigate Pro email server.
- lysander, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1% host -t mx gatech.edu
gatech.edu mail is handled by 10 mx3.gatech.edu.
gatech.edu mail is handled by 10 mx1.gatech.edu.
gatech.edu mail is handled by 10 mx2.gatech.edu.
% telnet mx3.gatech.edu smtp
Trying 130.207.165.58...
telnet: connect to address 130.207.165.58: Connection refused
telnet: Unable to connect to remote host: Connection refused
% telnet mx1.gatech.edu smtp
Trying 130.207.165.56...
Connected to mx1.gatech.edu (130.207.165.56).
Escape character is '^]'.
220 deliverator1.gatech.edu ESMTP Assigned to CosaNostra #30332
quit
221 Bye
Connection closed by foreign host. - bhess, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1>Why is it that most universities insist on using non-user friendly unix packages with
>old and awfull front ends when they could offer something like oracle collaboration suite
>or ms exchange which gives so much more to the user. ie. Both have a nice graphical
>UI which is supported under both IE and Mozilla, not to mention students could schedule
>study meetings togther or check each others schedules (permission permitting) etc.
-Here at Carnegie Mellon, anyone can get an Oracle Calendar account. Many of the faculty and staff members use it; the vast majority of students do not. Since CMU students do tend to be pretty tech-savvy, I'd say student use of a large-scale calendar (be it Oracle, Exchange/Outlook or something else) would likely be *lower* elsewhere, so I'm not sure that using that as a reason to use Exchange would be justified.
-Outlook Web Access is not *fully* supported in Firefox. It provides basic functionality, but it still does more in IE than it does in Firefox. SquirrelMail, which is free, can do everything that Outlook Web Access does (although it's not as pretty).
-MAPI is proprietary. Since the IMAP standards are open, if there's more functionality that we want out of our mail system, we're free to implement it (and there was, and we did). Simply put, we don't have as much power and flexibility with Exchange as we do with our Cyrus IMAP servers.
>It clearly works for the business world, so why shouldn't education
>be included as well.
In the business world, IT can force its users to use PCs, run Outlook, and autheticate through Active Directory. Universities don't have that option. They are stuck supporting whatever OSes its users use. Here, Linux and Mac use are much higher than in the business world. People want to use their mail client of choice, which isn't always Outlook. Personally, I prefer Thunderbird, and it plays much better with a Cyrus IMAP server than it does with an Exchange IMAP server. - ArcusOfSV, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2Ive never been a mail admin but it seems like the businesses I have worked in / with that have used exchange have nothing but problems. Im not sure if it is due to the fact that the admins were just not expericneced with the product or what but after seeing the same problems over and over again from company to company there is no way I would use exchange.
The company I am working for now used exchange for 25 people. None of who were using it for anything other than mail. It was company wide joke to not expect any email on Monday morning since the server seemed to like to have problems on the weekends. Im sure that's not a coincidence. When it got dumped in my lap after the company downsized I wouldnt touch it. I set up with a host for domain and email. The cost of maintaining an exchange server for 7 people ( even 25) cannot be justified. Its crazy. Im not sure what they use but they have been down once for 2 hours in a period of one year. Ill take that. I should find out what they use.
Not slamming on exchange, just givin facts. - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Security conscious admins modify the Qmail banner to incorrectly display their mail servers as Qmail or Postfix ,which explains why Qmail doesent figure in the list.
Sharjeel
http://www.sharjeel.net - woozy, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1Carthage College, class of 2001. It wasn't THAT long ago, but they went with Banyan/Vines (no joke!). Our network was token-ring right up until I graduated, don't know if they changed yet.
- Markd1, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0I don't see qmail in there... In addition to that on most universities eahc department has
their own mail servers.. - emer, on 10/12/2007, -4/+4While I realize that the *nix fan boys will have field day on this comment here goes....
Why is it that most universities insist on using non-user friendly unix packages with old and awfull front ends when they could offer something like oracle collaboration suite or ms exchange which gives so much more to the user. ie. Both have a nice graphical UI which is supported under both IE and Mozilla, not to mention students could schedule study meetings togther or check each others schedules (permission permitting) etc.
It clearly works for the business world, so why shouldn't education be included as well. - crimpshrine, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1I wonder how accurate this test really is anyhow. Any proactive security conscious admin changes the banner to either display nothing related to the MTA/version, or something else to be misleading.
- felderado, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0because qmail's license stinks. nobody should try to do business with DJB's software
- bubba9999, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0
Yeah, but Postfix is the Postfixiest. - irq13, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0At MSU (michigan state university) we use Exim/Clam/Spam Assassin.
- cgseller, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1Are you suggesting security through obscurity is secure? It's easy to find out the information that you are looking for. I'm not disagreeing with you about the security in place, I'm just questioning how you reached that conclusion.
- forkqueue, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0I'm very surprised not to see Exim on there, especially given that the lead author works for Cambridge University.
I've done a few large ISP setups in my time, and can honestly say there isn't a mail server that holds a candle to Exim, particularly for a big cluster. - SnowSurfns, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1pretty cool...wish i could look at the script so I could check a few schools not on the list
- bradk50, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1cgseller: thats not security through obscurity. Its an extra layer of security by not giving the hacker any extra information. All servers have known bugs and holes, so why make it easeir for someone to find out what server your running? Security through obscruity is just hiding and praying no one notices you.
- jkendel, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1and some people will complain about anything and everything....
- therernospoons, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1Next time Coral Cache it before you submit! DuggMirror to the rescue.
Almost everytime I try doing the ol'e .nyud.net:8080/ it never works =( - hohlermann, on 10/12/2007, -7/+5Using http://www.md5decrypt.com/, the Princeton MD5 hash 0ebdea0d60768e14e7c57b1a3713dd99 resolves to
"Lambertseter kåringen 2006" - emer, on 10/12/2007, -4/+1See this is the problem. Mail admins choose the unix product because its more "scalable", but if you purchase enough hardware the ms product is more than scalable enough to do the job and has far more resources with regards to things like anti-spam products and maintenance tools (Unix Man pages aren't the most helpful source when your in a panic). So who are the admins really serving? The user or themselves? With regards to budget, ever seen the budget some of these University IT departments have? (I have and they're not always small)
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