I setup junk mail filters at work last week, and they seem to be doing the trick. So far I’ve received no complaints of missing mail or blocked mail. We’re rejecting 28% of attempted deliveries, and have tagged 35% of the mail that passes the initial tests as spam. All told, 53% of all mail coming into the centre is unwanted, and blocked or marked as such.

We forklift upgraded the two main wiring closets in the hospital on the weekend. As expected, there were some problems with workstations not connecting properly or having their connection speed throttled. At the end of the day yesterday a couple of techs finally resolved a problem with a station failing to connect to the network.

A few minutes later the network became completely unusable. Of course we were foolish and didn’t immediately go to the last change made, and spent the next three hours going through our normal diagnosis. Similar problems have occured in the past when worm-infected laptops were connected to the LAN. In the end, we went back to the prior changes, and disconnected the now-working node. Lo and behold, the problems went away immediately.

The experience was good for us. I recall one of Pournelle’s Laws is something to the effect of: always start with the cables, because you’ll end up there. But the time spent hunting wasn’t wasted because we discovered some other traffic to be inspected while running Ethereal.