=^.^=

E-Mails to Hotmail Bounce 550 SC-001: Part of Your Network is on Our Block List

• karma

Having trouble sending e-mail to @hotmail or @live addresses? Trouble like:

Diagnostic-Code: SMTP; 550 SC-001 (BAY0-MC4-F36) Unfortunately, messages from xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx weren't sent. Please contact your Internet service provider since part of their network is on our block list. You can also refer your provider to http://mail.live.com/mail/troubleshooting.aspx#errors.

The irony of course is that the URL provided gives you less information than the error message:

550 SC-001 Mail rejected by Hotmail for policy reasons. Reasons for rejection may be related to content with spam-like characteristics or IP/domain reputation. If you are not an email/network admin please contact your Email/Internet Service Provider for help.

Spam-like characteristics can mean anything but at least twice I've had this problem the issue was being on Hotmail's internal IP blacklist. Like it said the first time.

First, you should check to see if you're on any of the public RBLs: http://whatismyipaddress.com/blacklist-check. If you are, you have real problems and need to sort that out before bothering Microsoft. Chances are, however, you aren't - especially if we're dealing with a simple web server and not a dedicated mail server.

If you're sure you're really not spamming Hotmail fill out the Deliverability Issue Submission form at https://support.msn.com/eform.aspx?productKey=edfsmsbl2&ct=eformts. In a few hours the automated system will review your case and if successful you will receive an e-mail like this:

Dear Soey McSoandso

We have completed reviewing the IP(s) you submitted. The following table contains the results of our investigation.

Mitigated
xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx
The reported deliverability problem has been mitigated by the automated system. Mitigation may take 24 - 48 hours to replicate completely throughout our system. Please note that mitigating this issue does not guarantee that your email will be delivered to a userÂ’s inbox.

Regardless of the deliverability status, Hotmail recommends that all senders join two free programs that provide visibility into the Hotmail traffic on your sending IP(s), the sending IP reputation with Hotmail and the Hotmail user complaint rates.

Junk Email Reporting program (JMRP) When a Hotmail user marks an email as "junk", senders enrolled in this program get a copy of the mail forwarded to an address of their choice. It allows you to see which mails are being marked as junk and identify mail traffic you did not intend to send. To join, please visit http://support.msn.com/eform.aspx?productKey=edfsjmrpp&page=support_home_options_form_byemail&ct=eformts.

Smart Network Data Services program (SNDS) This program allows you to monitor the 'health' and reputation of your registered IPs by providing data about traffic such as mail volume and complaint rates seen originating from your IPs. To register, please visit http://postmaster.msn.com/snds/.

There is no silver bullet to maintaining or improving good IP reputation, but these programs help you proactively manage your email eco-system to help better ensure deliverability to Hotmail users.

Thank you,

Hotmail Deliverability Support Service

If not successful, being that the system is automated you may have to go hunting for a new subnet.

Both of the tools linked above are excellent sources of information if you administrate an ISP mail server or mail servers for third parties and JMRP is especially useful for tuning mass mail marketing campaigns.

Documentary for Dinner: The War You Don't See (2010)

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The War You Don't See investigates the complicity of media in distributing propaganda, failure to investigate claims made by authority figures and willing dismissal of information that does not suit the pro-war narrative in the modern era.

http://thepiratebay.se/torrent/6042414/John_Pilger_-_The_War_You_Don_t_See

Documentary for Dinner: Game Change (2012)

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Game Change is an HBO movie starring Woody Harrelson as Steve Schmidt, the Senior Campaign Strategist for the McCain/Palin campaign of '08. The film is a dramatic re-enactment of the events leading to Sarah Palin's selection as John McCain's running mate through to their defeat, ostensibly perpetrated a great deal by her incompetence and famously "going rogue."

http://thepiratebay.se/torrent/7094389/Game_Change_2012_WS.XviD-err0001_%28HBO_movie%29

I picked up this little gem after seeing Schmidt on September 7th's Real Time with Bill Maher where the film was brought up by Bill (good HBO shilling work there, Billy :p) and commented on favourably by Schmidt. Apparently, this favour is not shared by Palin or McCain who have dismissed the film as entirely inaccurate without bothering to watch it.

Migrate a Virtual Machine from Full Disk to Single File-System Image

• karma

Full-disk images - that is to say a file containing an MBR, partition table and one or more partitions - are a pain in the arse to scale. Conventional wisdom tells us we should be able to do this with losetup and parted, or less gracefully with (c)fdisk but I've never had anything but trouble. In the end, it tends to be much easier to move the contents of the image to a file-system-only image and externalize the kernel since we'll no longer have the benefit of a bootloader.

Let's create and mount our new image to start off:

# dd if=/dev/zero of=newimage.img bs=1M count=4000
# mke2fs -j newimage.img
# mkdir /mnt/rawroot
# mount -o loop newimage.img /mnt/rawroot

Now we're going to mount our old full disk image's partition. Use kpartx -l to determine what node the partition will be mapped to:

# kpartx -l oldimage.hdd
loop34p1 : 0 4190208 /dev/loop34 2048

This tells us the full disk will be on /dev/loop34 and the partition itself will be on /dev/mapper/loop34p1.

# kpartx -a oldimage.hdd
# mkdir /mnt/rawroot2
# mount /dev/mapper/loop34p1 /mnt/rawroot2

Alternatively, we can let lomount do the work for us:

# lomount -diskimage oldimage.hdd -partition 1 /mnt/rawroot2

Now we'll copy the files in the old file system to the new image exactly as they stand:

# cd /mnt/
# cp -ax rawroot2/* rawroot/

It's important that we use the -a flag or we may end up breaking file system links and will almost certainly fill up the new image when we hit device nodes like /dev/zero, /dev/urandom and so on.

Edit the /etc/fstab in the new image and ensure it reflects the new configuration; / will probably come from /dev/xvda1. Old references by LABEL or UUID will no longer be valid.

Since we'll be forgoing a bootloader it is necessary to externalize the kernel and initrd images:

# cp rawroot2/boot/vmlinuz-3.2.0-29-generic /xen/myvm/
# cp rawroot2/boot/initrd.img-3.2.0-29-generic /xen/myvm/

Now we can unmount both images:

# umount rawroot
# umount rawroot2

If you used kpartx instead of lomount you should remove the old image from the loop device:

# kpartx -d oldimage.hdd

Now alter the Xen configuration file to reference the externalized kernel and initrd:

kernel = "/xen/myvm/vmlinuz-3.2.0-29-generic"
initrd = "/xen/myvm/initrd.img-3.2.0-29-generic"

Remove or comment your reference to pygrub and boot the machine. If everything went well you will be looking at a login prompt shortly.

Please see my article on resizing file system images for details on how to grow the new image.

Force a User to Log Out

• karma

It looks like I have a stale session open which is preventing me from umounting a disk image:

# w
 13:21:37 up 56 days,  2:51,  2 users,  load average: 4.30, 3.70, 2.23
USER     TTY      FROM              LOGIN@   IDLE   JCPU   PCPU WHAT
kfox     pts/8    192.168.8.90     Wed13   20:49m  0.02s  0.02s -bash
kfox     pts/22   192.168.8.90     12:04    1.00s  0.07s  0.00s w

Let's find the process responsible for my session (the "session leader"):

# ps -dN | grep pts/8
20524 pts/8    00:00:00 bash

Now we'll kill the bugger:

# kill -9 20524