The Curious Engineer

All blogs / Networking

That grumpy BSD guy

bsdly.blogspot.com

Field notes and occasional musings by Peter on stuff that happens, from a free software perspective, mainly OpenBSD, FreeBSD.

NetworkingSecurityLinux / Unix

’10’15’20’25
Posts
151 from 19 Dec 2006 to 8 Oct 2026
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monthly (11 in the last year)
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personal blog
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2026 8

  1. A unique piece of Internet history: A packet from the RFC1149 implementation is up for auction at Christie's!
  2. How 'Artificial Intelligence' Is Slowly Drowning In Its Own Droppings
  3. What has (can) the EU Cyber Resilience Act done (do) for you?
  4. OpenSMTPD Is The Mail Server For The Future
  5. The implementation of the Carrier Pigeon Internet Protocol, RFC1149, 25 years later
  6. The Book of PF, 4th Edition: It's Here, It's Real
  7. The Rest Is Trash
  8. A Major Mail Provider Demonstrate They Likely Do Not Understand Mail At All

2025 13

  1. Why 451 is Good for You - Greylisting Perspectives From the Early Noughties
  2. A Bus Ride and the (At Least) 3x UX FAILs
  3. What is BSD? Come to a conference to find out!
  4. EU CRA: It's Later Than You Think, Time to Engineer Up!
  5. Eighteen Years of Greytrapping - Is the Weirdness Finally Paying Off?
  6. Elvis is alive! How 'AI' stunts modern mythmaking
  7. Those Titles the AI Bot Thought I Had Written
  8. Yes, The Book of PF, 4th Edition Is Coming Soon
  9. Should I Stop Caring and Let IP Address Reputation Sort Them Out?
  10. That Grumpy BSD Guy: A Short Reading List
  11. For Upcoming PF Tutorials, We Welcome Your Questions
  12. No Project Is an Island: Why You Need SBOMs and Dependency Management
  13. A Suitably Bizarre Start of the Year 2025

2024 5

  1. Nesten all phishing-trening for sluttbrukere har feil utgangspunkt
  2. You Have Installed OpenBSD. Now For The Daily Tasks.
  3. Fun Facts About the April 2024 Cisco Attack Data
  4. Three Minimalist spamd Configurations for Your Spam Fighting Needs (With Bonus Points at the End)
  5. A Simpler Life: Trapping Spambots Based on Target Domain Only

2023 2

  1. I asked ChatGPT to write a pf.conf to spec, 2023-06-07 version
  2. ChatGPT opines on IPv6 procastination, waxes lyrical over OpenBSD

2022 9

  1. The Despicable, No Good, Blackmail Campaign Targeting ... Imaginary Friends?
  2. Can Your Spam-eater Manage to Catch Seventy-one Percent Like This Other Service?
  3. Harvesting the Noise While it's Fresh, Revisited
  4. A Few of My Favorite Things About The OpenBSD Packet Filter Tools
  5. Open Source in Enterprise Environments - Where Are We Now and What Is Our Way Forward?
  6. Your 'Forgotten' Blockchain Account Needing Reactivation? It's a Scam
  7. The Things Spammers Believe - A Tale of 300,000 Imaginary Friends
  8. Spammers in the Public Cloud, Protected by SPF; Intensified Password Groping Still Ongoing; Spamware Hawked to Spamtraps
  9. Predicting developments in real world conflict from patterns of failed logins

2021 5

  1. What every IT person needs to know about OpenBSD
  2. Recent and not so recent changes in OpenBSD that make life better (and may turn up elsewhere too)
  3. The Impending Doom of Your Operating System Going to or Past 11, Versus the Lush Oasis of Open Source Systems
  4. Are you aware what you lose by just clicking OK to get started using something?
  5. RFC7505 Means Yes, Your Domain Can Refuse to Handle Mail. Please Leave Us a TXT If You Do.

2020 1

  1. The 'sextortion' Scams: The Numbers Show That What We Have Is A Failure Of Education

2019 1

  1. The Year 2019 in Review: This Was, Once Again, Weirder Than the Last One

2018 4

  1. Goodness, Enumerated by Robots. Or, Handling Those Who Do Not Play Well With Greylisting
  2. Badness, Enumerated by Robots
  3. ed(1) mastery is a must for a real Unix person
  4. A Life Lesson in Mishandling SMTP Sender Verification

2017 4

  1. Twenty-plus years on, SMTP callbacks are still pointless and need to die
  2. OpenBSD and the modern laptop
  3. Forcing the password gropers through a smaller hole with OpenBSD's PF queues
  4. A New Year, a New Round of pop3 Gropers from China

2016 7

  1. So somebody is throwing HTML at your sshd. What to do?
  2. The Possibly Russian Fingerprints on the Shadow Brokers' Trick or Treat Package
  3. Is SPF Simply Too Hard For Application Developers?
  4. The Voicemail Scammers Never Got Past Our OpenBSD Greylisting
  5. Chinese Hunting Chinese Over POP3 In Fjord Country
  6. Does Your Email Provider Know What A "Joejob" Is?
  7. Domain Name Scams Are Alive And Well, Thank You

2015 2

  1. The OpenSSH Bug That Wasn't
  2. Solaris Admins: For A Glimpse Of Your Networking Future, Install OpenBSD

2014 7

  1. The Password? You Changed It, Right?
  2. The Book of PF, 3rd Edition is Here, First Signed Copy Can Be Yours
  3. Password Gropers Take the Spamtrap Bait
  4. Have you changed your password lately? Does it even matter?
  5. BSDCan Tutorials: Please Help Me Improve Your Experience
  6. Yes, You Too Can Be An Evil Network Overlord - On The Cheap With OpenBSD, pflow And nfsen
  7. Effective Spam and Malware Countermeasures - Network Noise Reduction Using Free Tools

2013 10

  1. The UK "Porn" Filter Blocks Kids' Access To Tech, Civil Liberties Websites
  2. Three Books You Too Should Read This Year (Or Early 2014)
  3. Compatibility Is Hard: CHARTEST.DOC Is From 1989, Was Not Readable By 2003
  4. The Hail Mary Cloud And The Lessons Learned
  5. DNSSEC Mastery, Or How To Make Your Name Service Verifiable And Trustworthy
  6. The Term Hackathon Has Been Trademarked In Germany. Now Crawl Back Under That Rock, Please.
  7. Keep smiling, waste spammers' time
  8. You've Installed It. Now What? Packages!
  9. Maintaining A Publicly Available Blacklist - Mechanisms And Principles
  10. There's No Protection In High Ports Anymore. If Indeed There Ever Was.

2012 9

  1. It Really Should Not Be Necessary To Write This. We're Professionals, Dammit!
  2. DDOS Bots Are People! (Or Manned By Some, At Least)
  3. Ubuntu Made Easy May Have Achieved Its Noble Goal
  4. Keeping Your OpenBSD System In Trim: A Works For Me Guide
  5. In The Name Of Sane Email: Setting Up OpenBSD's spamd(8) With Secondary MXes In Play - A Full Recipe
  6. Why Not Use Port Knocking?
  7. If We Go One Attempt Every Ten Seconds, We're Under The Radar
  8. The Linux Command Line Is A Very Appealing Story
  9. SSH Mastery: A Very Welcome Addition to Any Unix User's Bookshelf

2011 12

  1. You're Doing It Wrong, Returning Scoundrels
  2. You're Doing It Wrong, Or, The Return Of The Son Of The Hail Mary Cloud
  3. Practical Packet Analysis Is Good Fun [Book Review]
  4. What to expect in OpenBSD 5.0 onwards
  5. Anticipating the Post-ALTQ World
  6. SEK 1995 for six months' worth of trademark protection?
  7. My First IPv6 Spam
  8. How Do We Appropriately Celebrate The Arrival Of The 100,000th PF Tutorial Visitor?
  9. RFC1149: Ten Years of In-Flight Internet
  10. The Problem Isn't Email, It's Microsoft Exchange
  11. La oss prise fruktbarheten, for den lar de snakkesalige slippe til [.NO #DLD]
  12. I will not mindlessly paste from HOWTOs

2010 6

  1. Ikke styrket personvern, men brev- og besøkskontroll for hele folket [.NO]
  2. Du er en forbryter eller et virus, så Arbeiderpartiet vil overvåke alle, hele tiden
  3. The Book of PF, 2nd ed: It's Here!
  4. If It Runs OpenBSD, It Has To Be Important
  5. EuroBSDCon 2010: The Finest Software Tool Is Alive And Well
  6. The Goodness of Men and Machinery

2009 6

  1. Rickrolled? Get Ready for the Hail Mary Cloud!
  2. A Third Time, Uncharmed
  3. The slow brute zombies are back
  4. Oh yes, you signed up for this. You did. Honest.
  5. What have the black boxes wrought
  6. The slow brutes, a final roundup

2008 18

  1. Into a new year, slowly pounding the gates
  2. A Small Update About The Slow Brutes
  3. A low intensity, distributed bruteforce attempt
  4. IETF failed to account for greylisting
  5. “Name and Shame”, or socially responsible use of your log data
  6. [.NO] “Name and Shame” eller samfunnsnyttig bruk av loggdata om spammere
  7. Logfiles in the buff
  8. Is one of your machines secretly a spambot?
  9. Now that we have their addresses, do we name and shame?
  10. Is there really a market for an open source router?
  11. Yes, we can! Make a difference, that is
  12. BSD Unix? That's purely historical
  13. More than 40,000 served
  14. I challenge your response, backscatterer
  15. Fake Address Round Trip Time: 13 days
  16. Network devices that lie
  17. Does anybody here remember Artie Eff?
  18. Riga, here we come, OpenBSD 4.3 on the horizon

2007 21

  1. A year ends; what to do next?
  2. I Must Be Living in a Parallel Universe, Then
  3. Of Course, It Had To Be A Webshield
  4. Always a pleasure to be wasting your time, guv
  5. The Great SCO Swindle Winding Down, But Will They All Get Away With It?
  6. EuroBSDCon was great, disks dying and some scary Windows stuff
  7. Wanna help science? Study your greylists' innards!
  8. A Lady in Distress; or Then Again, Maybe Not
  9. BSD is dying, security shot to hell, clamav wins and other tales of depravity and greed
  10. We see your every move, spammer
  11. On the business end of a blacklist. Oh the hilarity.
  12. Harvesting the noise while it's still fresh; SPF found potentially useful
  13. The noise, we ignore it
  14. Linux is easier than Windows, hands down
  15. Spam is a solved problem
  16. Hey, spammer! Here's a list for you!
  17. China has a Norwegian speaking techie population
  18. Which Windows XP version is it on that laptop?
  19. Summer's here and the time is right ...
  20. Go west, young man! (BSDCan, that is)
  21. May 1st: OpenBSD 4.1 is out, rootprompters pouring in

2006 1

  1. A mission statement of sorts