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I'm very happy with the results from using a Pi-hole for blocking all kinds of internet advertisements. Running on a Raspberry Pi 3 in my home network, it takes care of allmost all ads. It works by acting as DNS server, but it has an automatic maintained list of ad-serving domains and every request for such an domain results in a blockade. I've now got it running for more than three months.  

I hardly get any feedback through the contact form, so whenever something pops up, I'm always curious. This time it's Marilyn Shaw informing me that I've got a broken link in one of my articles. And, very helpfull, she pointed me to a useful replacement. 

And that's when the cautious mode kicks in, the message contains a shortened URL , and the shortened URL and the useful replacement both end up at the same domain www.whoishostingthis.com , and the email address also points there. The ip-address that's used for the posting originates from the Philippines. Searching the internet reveals more of these spams, including another message if you do not reply or change the link.

What surprises me the most is the effort that went in to sending me the message, as the contact form I've used requires you to select a picture to send the mail. There's no simple way to script this, so an actual human, in my case Marilyn, has to type that message

Message after the break

Because SME 8.0 is based on Centos 5, support ends at 31 March 2017. I planned the upgrade to  SME 9.0, a long time ago, but some things made me postpone it for a while: 

• The upgrade scenario is a full backup, re-install and a restore. I foresaw all kinds of problems.
• I had installed all kinds of software, some of that had to be re-installed.

After an inventorisation I started on a day off. The backups worked, I had tested those with a partial restore. The re-install went smoothly but soon the first problem arose: