trog's haus

Another good email scam, this one purporting to be from BigPond:

Dear Customer,

This e-mail has been sent to you by BigPond to inform you that we were unable to process your most recent payment of bill. This might be due to either of the following reasons:

1. A recent change in your personal information. (eg: billing address, phone)
2. Submitting incorrect information during bill payment process.

Due to this, to ensure that your service is not interrupted, we request you to confirm and update your billing information today by clicking here [note the link: http://tusdrei.de/futtern/telstra.com.au/members/myaccount/LANGUAGE/ECareServ/ID12549JDk23/Online%20Billing.htm].

If you have already confirmed your billing information then please disregard this message as we are processing the changes you have made.

Regards,
BigPond
Billing Department

It looks like the link has already been removed (and it is also flagged by Firefox automatically as a scam site), but I couldn’t find a lot of reference to this email with a Google so I figured this might help other people: it’s definitely a scam/phishing attempt.

After reading this thread about the limit BigPond imposes on sending email on regular user accounts (apparently “it’s no more than 25 electronic messages in a period of 10 consecutive minutes and no more than 100 recipients per single message”) I got interested in how much email I send. I certainly feel like I spend all day reading and writing emails, but when I actually crunched the numbers for the last month, I was surprised about how low the volume was – only 286 emails in 30 days.

If anyone cares, this data came from hackily parsing the Outlook Express smtp.log file (which you can enable by going into Tools, then select Options, hit the Maintenance tab, and check the “Mail” box at the bottom under troubleshooting. The log file will end up wherever your .dbx files live – if you can’t find it just search your system for smtp.log.)

A few people have asked where the Gutsy repository has gone on the BigPond Files mirror – we swapped it over for the upcoming release (Intrepid whatever). Given more people seem to be on the older release (combined with the fact we don’t have unlimited disk space) we’re going to restore Gutsy, possibly at the expense of Intrepid, at least in the short term.

While we’re repopulating the mirror, please note there might be some issues with syncing from it – possible symptoms include 404s/missing file errors (this seems to be a semi-regular problem when the mirror is being updated off the masters that we’re still looking into).

We haven’t posted about it on the official site just yet as it’s still in testing, but it looks like we’re going to be full steam ahead soon on the BigPond Files Fedora repository mirror.

It’s not finalised, but at the moment the current setup seems to be working fine – if you’re a BigPond broadband customer running Fedora, you shouldn’t even need to do anything – it should automagically detect you and redirect you to the BP Files server for unmetered updates.

…and available for download for BigPond Broadband customers on BigPond Files.

At the moment I’ve just got all the major/popular ISOs up – i386 and AMD64 architecture ones. The SPARC, HHPC and PowerPC ones I’ll do a bit later (although if you really want them now, just hit the File Request page to let us know).

I believe there’s also a way to upgrade an existing distribution using the repository mirror (BP users only) we have, but I’m not sure on the process. (Update: Nathan has provided some instructions on the process on his site.)

Unfortunately given the release happened on a public holiday it caused a bit more havoc than normal; I underestimated the demand (which was HUGE, which is great to see) so for the first hour or so downloads were a little bit slow until I got another distribution server into the mix – then that got hammered as well.

I’m interested in feedback from users having performance problems; feel free to post details about your issues here and I’ll see if I can figure out a way to speed things up for you.

Even though I had my say over on QGL, I figured I might as well have rant some more. Basically, I think its mean and nasty. The BPA service as it compares to the other cable provider in Australia really isn’t that great. A 60k/s cap (which at first didn’t bug me, but now that game demos are coming out that are over 100mb in size, waiting for them to come down the wire really bugs me) I could live with, but 3 gig a month on top of that?

A quick check from my Linux box revealed the last month had me using around 4.6 gig of data. I’m not a big user – my family shares the cable, my parents for occaisional web browsing and email, and my brother for playing games. I download the odd game demo, do a lot of browsing and email, and play a few games.

Fortunately, most of the stuff I download is game-related, which will come through Wireplay, but its still a pain in the ass having to keep track of my usage, especially when there’s other people in the house using the same network.

Oh well. Maybe it will make life better and give me better pings for games? Hmmm. Anyway, something else is I’ve decided to update more, especially when I do stuff like add new pictures and stuff.