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We were in Sheridan, Wyoming, half way across the country to Jill's grandmother's house. I logged into my email to find something I hadn't seen in a long time: more spam than real messages. There were a couple dozen spams in my Inbox, and only half a dozen real messages. What happened to my spam filter?

I originally thought it was just a new type of spam not yet recognized by the filter. But then I looked closer and realized that the little signature my spam filter adds to each message was missing-these messages had not even been checked. No wonder they were getting through in such large quantities!

It's only when the tools fail that you come to recognize how valuable they are. In the 5 hours the server spam filter was out, I received more than 50 spams, and many of my customers also noticed immediately. The cause of the outage was a power flicker in the nasty weather Seattle was getting that weekend, which made that server shut down. Fortunately, we had this contingency (and many others) covered for our vacation, and were able to get everything back up and running.

We've noticed a huge increase in the spam getting dropped into our spam quarantine--it's doubled in the past two months. I have clients complaining about greatly increased spam as well. It turns out we're not alone:

There seems to be a misconception out there that business applications don't exist for Linux. Wrong. There are some excellent ones. Recently, the Linux equivalent of QuickBooks just hit version 2.0, and it has become quite easy to use.

From the BNI Tech Alliance News:

The speaker at the Puget Sound Area BNITA for November is: John Locke Manager, Freelock Computing

Hi,

Lots of news this month, so we're keeping the feature short. We're starting a new feature called "Free Software of the Month." Each month, we plan to highlight a free software package. There are some amazing software titles out there that do cool things for your business, your home, and your communities. Some of these run on a server, which we can host. Others are complete operating systems or packages you can use to replace expensive commercial software packages. We're starting out with a simple one you can install no matter what type of computer you use.

Free Software of the Month: Workrave

How much time do you spend in front of a computer every day? The answer for many of us is too much. If you work in an office environment, chances are you spend many hours a day in front of a computer, and are at risk for repetitive stress injuries such as tendinitis or carpal tunnel syndrome.

While no software can reduce your workload, taking frequent breaks and doing exercises to keep your muscles loose can help prevent injury.

Enter the most annoying software in my arsenal: Workrave.

Open Source projects have to deal with something most proprietary projects don't: forked projects. What's that? It's when a person or group exercises the terms of an open source license to create a derived version that competes with the original.

We use sports metaphors for all areas of life, and business is no exception. Our favorite sports metaphors often come from baseball or football: we hit home runs, strike out, and get sacked. But no sport compares to running a business like sailboat racing.

Sailboat racing depends on many skills and factors that don't exist in other sports. In sailboat racing, you usually have more than one opponent, and teamwork is critically important. Not only does racing involve situational tactics, you also need to have a longer term strategy for the race, and this strategy may change over the course of a race series. In addition to how well you race your boat, sometimes environmental factors such as a wind shift or unexpected current can completely change the game. And while even the slowest boats may occasionally win a race with a lucky break, you have to be consistent in all these areas to come out of a regatta or race series on top.

I know of no other sport that provides a similar breadth of factors contributing to success. And the more you drill into these factors, the more parallels you see with running a business. Let's take a look at a few of these key areas.

Looks like IBM is going aggressively up against the Outlook/Exchange juggernaut. Several months ago, they made Domino, their mail server, free for any business who buys the licenses for the mail client, Notes. Now they're making Notes available for Linux.

Over at Freelock Computing, we're learning the fundamentals of business from experience. We've been doing technology for a long time, but are relatively new to business, so what we've learned is hardly innovative or new.

Sitepoint has a nice summary of when to get a merchant account, versus when to use a third-party payer such as Paypal, complete with detailed example total costs for different types of businesses.

Good introductory article on monitoring disk usage, with a nice little script to send a mail as filesystems approach their limit:

Carla Schroder covers a great network backup utility in her current series. Here's where the rubber meets the road:

Do Automated Cross-Platform Network Backups The Easy Way (Part 2)