Journal of the Pandemic Years: May 20 '20

Sorry about the lack of updates lately; I'm still here, still doing well, but
life's been... hectic.

"Officially", the state "reopened" two days ago, with the stay-at-home order
expiring. To be honest I haven't been outside since then, so I don't know how
everyone's behaving, but I assume people are largely being stupid and selfish.
I'm also assuming that infection rates and deaths are going to spike again in a
week or two, and we're all going to wind up right back where we started... if
not worse off, 'cause the weather is nicer now.

Nationally deaths-per-day are down slightly from a week, two weeks ago, which a
lot of people are excited about. But what everyone's missing--and I think I
mentioned this in my last phlog--is that deaths are *rising* in a lot of
places; it's just going down nationally because A, the numbers in NYC are
declining, and B, states like Florida and Georgia are withholding or lying
about their numbers.

Work has been absurd and stressful. One of our internal DB servers had hardware
problems and needed to be rebuilt, which took a couple of days. And then the
corporate mailserver has been getting just absolutely mauled by a botnet for
the last couple of days, trying to brute-force IMAP passwords for nonexistent
accounts. We've banned close to 3k IPs and netblocks as part of the botnet, and
they show no sign of slowing.

Why care, if it's entirely nonexistent accounts? Because they're seizing every
IMAP login process, no matter how high I raise the limit. I've put ACLs in
place, I've got iptables rules in place, I've raised the number of processes to
an absurd limit, I've made sysctl adjustments to kill closed connections PDQ...
and I'm still getting ten or fifteen "could not connect to mailserver" internal
support tickets a day. FML.

Other than *all that*, though, life's been okay. Making a lot of bread, baking
a lot of cakes, eating a lot of rice.

The flour shortage that's existed all pandemic persists, and every indication
is that it's going to persist for a while. So I conceded defeat and ordered
twenty-five pounds(!) of bread flour from an artisanal mill over in Wisconsin.
It arrived yesterday, and just in time - we were down to about two pounds of
flour, otherwise.

Yes, it's bread flour, and this does mean I'll be stuck making cakes and
cookies and *everything* with bread flour for a month or two, but I find this
vastly preferable to not having any flour at all, which was the alternative.

Sigh; gotta get back to work. In the time it's taken to type this up, the
botnet's hit us from... 81 new IPs? Oof.