I as well as many others have been enjoying Valve's new game Left4Dead and whilst I was enjoying the Match Making system and general carnage the SysAdmin in me was thinking "dedicated server....". After grabbing a few more achivements (Witch and Hunter headshots ftw) I set up a dedicated server for Left4Dead and let it run on its merry way. Whilst investigating the cvar's and other server options I discovered the logging and thought to myself; "Well Valve are keeping track of the Acheivements but who keeps track of each and every kill?" 2 hours later and the groundwork for L4DStats was ...

When I heard the news that McColo had been pulled I wondered if we'd actually see a drop in Hostile traffic and Spam. Turns out that there has been a massive drop in Spam levels coming through some of the filters I have dotted around the place. C&C or Spam Hosts? I wrote a little script to see what percentages of machines that had made incoming connections that were then classified as spam were still alive. The majority of hosts were still contactable in some way shape or form but weren't listening on known SMTP ports, some were alive and actively listening on SMTP ...

So much so that he votes at 13:37!                               http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/7700298.stm ...

With the initial tests over it was time to actually move over to 'real' IPv6 addresses. After applying for a tunnel from SixXS it was time to set it up. Unfortunately none of my JUNOS or Cisco IOS images have IPv6 support so rather than buying another 2600XM I decided to use the Windows Server 2008 server that performs IPv6 DHCP as the router. The advice for setting up a tunnel on the Wiki only covers up to Windows Server 2003 and is below: netsh interface ipv6 install netsh interface ipv6 add v6v4tunnel SixXS [Your IPv4 Endpoint] [PoP IPv4 Endpoint] netsh interface ipv6 add ...