Friday, February 10, 2012
Small Business Networking
Error 404--Not Found |
From RFC 2068 Hypertext Transfer Protocol -- HTTP/1.1:10.4.5 404 Not FoundThe server has not found anything matching the Request-URI. No indication is given of whether the condition is temporary or permanent. If the server does not wish to make this information available to the client, the status code 403 (Forbidden) can be used instead. The 410 (Gone) status code SHOULD be used if the server knows, through some internally configurable mechanism, that an old resource is permanently unavailable and has no forwarding address. |
A new flood of spam
Until recently, we havent had much of a problem with spam, nothing that using the delete key would handle. In the past few
weeks, we have been getting an increasing level of spam. The ones we seem to be getting the most of are the ones with some
type of color or image background with different combinations of colors. How can we get this under control?
-- Via the Internet
Related links
Ron Nutter, a Master Certified Novell Engineer and Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer in the Lexington, Ky., area, tracks down the answers to your questions. Send him your tough questions.
Dr. Internet
Our other helpful columnist.
You can either purchase a turnkey solution from companies such as Barracuda or you can come up with your own solution using Linux and some additional open source packagaes such as Postfix and spamassassin. Which way will be the best for you depends on how much time you have to devote to managing the system and how much you can handle on your own in terms of managing Linux and some of the associated administrative tasks. If you go for the turn key approach, look carefully at the hardware support. One reader I have known for years got burned recently when their spam system failed and was told by the vendor it only came with 90 days coverage since no additional hardware warranty was purchased.
Blocking spam will be a never ending task. The type of spam you are talking about, "image spam," is the latest entry onto the scene and is proving to be one of the harder ones to block, because the spammers are using graphics files instead of text. This means that the "signature" used to block this type of spam is rendered useless by making even a minor change to the background of the image, thus requiring a new signature in order to be able intercept it. If you go with the roll-your-own approach, there is a Optical Character Recognition add-on that can help you look inside the graphics file. There is no 100% solution to blocking all of the spam all of the time.