Screw you, NameCheap.

A couple years back I took advantage of NameCheap’s “Move your domain day” specials to move from GoDaddy to NameCheap. I was motivated by a couple of things. First was GoDaddy’s effective censoring of RateMyCop.com by yanking their registration, and second was their CEO’s prolific hunting of endangered animals. So, fuck GoDaddy, I moved to NameCheap.

Today I noticed that I had lost a domain. It was a domain that I had hosted for a friend for nearly 20 years. I perused my email, and I didn’t have a single domain renewal email for this domain in 2015; but when I logged into NameCheap I found a long list of renewal notices that had been logged internally on their system but never delivered by email to my contact email address. When I contacted support @ NameCheap with the request that the delivery issue be tracked down, they actually offered to get my domain back for $10.87. Delighted, I transferred money to my NameCheap account. Within the hour they refunded it. Apparently, the first support agent hadn’t bothered to actually look at the issue, and had fired off some bullshit response that gave me false hope the issue could be rectified. The second agent conceded that they couldn’t get my domain back, and assured me that the problem couldn’t be on their end and I was therefore screwed.

I offered to how them ten years of mail server logs, proving their mail servers hadn’t even had a failed SMTP handshake with mine, if they’d show me their logs they said proved they had emailed me notifications.  Not that it really mattered, as some scumbag domain speculating company snatched up that domain and they aren’t giving it back unless I pay a ton of money.

Bob Parsons is a dick, but I know that GoDaddy will call me directly a dozen times before they let a dime of registration money slip through their fingers. I’d rather deal with a dick than lose another domain.

Screw you, NameCheap.

ps. I’m really sorry Marietta.

Mailcleaner – adding uceprotect.net RBLs

One of the first things I wanted to do with Mailcleaner was improve the selection of RBLs.  I had noticed that a lot of spam was still getting through, but would have been stopped if a few of the RBLs listed at The Anti-Abuse Project’s Multi-RBL Check were being used on my Mailcleaner instance.  I parsed the list, and turned it into script for creating the appropriate database entries and RBL config files.  I quickly noticed that three of the entries I had created were not showing up in the web interface.  A little googling and I found that I wasn’t the only one with this problem, and that other people with this problem had unanswered threads in the official forums.

Continue reading “Mailcleaner – adding uceprotect.net RBLs”

The Cheap Parts Paradox

Every hobbyist has experienced it, and yet it seems to be the hardest lesson to retain over time: The more money you save by going with cheap parts, the more of your time you will waste getting them to work… if you can.

I was recently reminded of this rule while adding GPS to a Raspberry Pi project on which I was working. One of my co-workers had recently had good results with a GlobalSat USB dongle on a Pi project, and even though I had an Adafruit Ultimate GPS Breakout in my wishlist I was enticed by the price and the plug-n-play state that didn’t require me to do any additional wiring. So, I ordered a GlobalSat BU-353-S4 from Amazon.

Getting gpsd set up was pretty trivial, but the results I was getting from ‘cgps -s’ was inconsistent.   Despite the GPS unit reporting that it had a lock, the clock display was several hours off from the displayed timezone, and the ‘Speed Err’ was +/- 300MPH.  The unit, which was marketed as having a start time of less than 15 seconds, needed to run for an hour or more to finally settle down.  Meanwhile, ‘cgps -s’ would keep crashing after a few minutes at most.

At the time, since this was my first experience with gpsd, I assumed cgps was just unstable.  After a bit of googling, and reading other people’s tutorials, it became clear that cgps wasn’t unstable and that something was frak’d with my rig.  That’s when I visited the gpsd hardware compatibility table.  On the entire table, the only device with a ‘do not buy’ rating is the BU-353-S4.  (Turns out my co-worker has bought the GlobalSat BU-353, which doesn’t have the ‘do not buy’ rating’)

I’ve since wired up an Adafruit Ultimate GPS Breakout directly to my Pi project.  It just works.   GPS lock was quick, time reported was correct, margin for error was reasonable, and I was able to run ‘cgps -s’ for hours without issue.

It’s easy to be tempted by the plethora of cheap parts on Amazon and eBay.  Not to mention that sweet perk of free shipping…  But sometimes it just isn’t worth it.  There is a huge value in buying parts that have been fully vetted by someone with more expertise, even if it does mean you have to solder eight measly wires.

I use Amazon affiliate links in some of my posts. I think it is fair to say my writing is not influenced by the $0.40 I earned in 2022.