(posted at 09:58PM BST) 
An interesting few weeks, to say the least!
After enjoying some quality time in Ireland, I'm now back in the 'seat' as it were and as of yesterday, spilsby.net's new mailserver platform has been rolled out to my production servers.
The first impressions are good; average delivery times have dropped from 6 seconds to just under 3 seconds (which includes virus scanning and spam filtering during the SMTP transport stage; the old system didn't do any of this and if any customers are reading this, virus/spam stuff is optional).
The changeover took less than 25 minutes, throughout which, no mail was delayed for any longer than 5 minutes and through the use of distributed filtering logic, each MTA will dynamically change its' behaviour based on what happens to the any of the others - i.e. if a specific IP starts flooding one of the MTAs with spurious SMTP connections, it will earn itself a 24-hour block and that will replicate to the others within a matter of seconds.
I also have a few surprises for those customers who subscribe to my backup MX service... but those surprises will have to wait until the official service announcement goes out!
As a sidenote, it is quite intriguing to see a lot of hits from a certain former employer (regular readers will know who I mean when I say 'Muppet Central') and I didn't realize that my journal was still read quite avidly there - one would have thought that all of my netblocks would have gone the way of my old Demon Super Showroom netblock and been shoved in their border firewall as 'persona non gratia'.
I owe a lot to them... perhaps more than they will ever know and certainly more than I will ever let on because if certain events hadn't unfolded in October 2003 like they did, I would probably still be there and the events which have taken place since then would never have happened and I wouldn't be in the absolutely heavenly position that I am in now.
Life is strange like that, innit ? | 
