Windows-only, yecch!

Try KeePassX... much better, cross-platform, free, secure and has a great generator built right into it.

http://www.keepassx.org/

There, fixed that for you :)

If you have a real solution to those two issues, I'd love to hear about it.

Well first, some of those Firefox add-ons actually send an encrypted blob through the web-based email system... so if you don't have the add-on, you get ascii-armored jibberish, with legible headers.

Also, the systems you mention all support IMAP and POP3, so you can use the mail client of your choice to interact with them (Evolution, Thunderbird, Outlook, OE, Mail.app, etc.)

If you send your email to somebody (the "third party") that somebody can choose to hand it over to anyone.

This is PRECISELY why you encrypt emails to recipients... there is absolutely no doubt that there was an expectation of privacy, when the receiver has to decrypt the email using a private key, to read it.

Checks are insecure, inconvenient and pretty useless in today's electronic world. For non-electronical purposes you can just use cash.

And what happens when systems go down? Power goes out? Electronic transactions are blocked/denied/lost for any reason? What then?

No, no, I'm afraid paper money (currency, checks, notes) will be here to stay, for many, many decades to come.

I've said this many times here before, and I'll say it again... don't let them see anything other than the delivery envelope (headers) of your email. They can't legally open your postal mail, so treat it the same: gpg/PGP-encrypt your emails; all of them.

If a recipient you email frequently doesn't know how to use encryption, teach them. There are plugins for Firefox, Gmail, Thunderbird, Mail.app, and dozens of other mail clients.

If it's someone you don't converse over email with often, then it's probably not worth protecting anyway.

Seriously...

• http://www.sente.ch/software/GPGMail/English.lproj/GPGMail.html
• http://enigmail.mozdev.org/home/index.php
• http://getfiregpg.org/s/home
• http://www.cumps.be/gpg-in-outlook-2007-outlookgnupg/
• http://www.gnupg.org/related_software/frontends.html

Learn to create, protect and use your gpg keys and your keychain. It's not that hard, and the benefits far outweigh the minutes of work and learning it takes to incorporate it into your daily workflow.

I appreciate your concern, but sendmail is definitely not the issue causing the load to skyrocket. I've already tested that by shutting down sendmail right before the window when I know it's going to happen, and it happens anyway. Besides, if sendmail is already refusing connections due to the load, then sendmail itself isn't the problem.

I'm already 30GB into the rsync of the data. I run rsnapshot on an hourly basis to my Drobo here for near-line backups, but the Drobo just ate 1.5TB of my data (dangerous device to rely on, and the company line is to always back up your Drobo to... another Drobo). So I have to pull the data clean from the server to another storage array here, otherwise the backup would have been incremental.

Once that is done, I'll be terminating my contract. These rampant, unexplained outages are infuriating, and my users, clients and customers are pissed off, and so am I.

"When there is a problem, you call the landlord to come fix it. Yes, you have the right of sole use of the property, but you can't reasonably expect him to fix the problem without allowing him access to the property."

To continue with your analogy, this is like telling the landlord that there's a problem with the lawn, and he demands to have a copy of the keys to my home office desk drawers to fix it.

Yes, they "rent" a KVM to customers for $35.00/USD for a 24-hour period, unfortunately...

In this case, to break the standoff between myself and the hosting provider, I yielded and had them invoice me for the $35 so I could get the server up, rip the data off of it, terminate my services with them and go after them for financial compensation for the damages, downtime (12 day outage 2 months ago without an apology), etc.

"In any event, tuning should be able to prevent that from knocking the box over completely, allowing you to stay logged in and see what's going on."

If absolutely nothing changed other than the IP and physical datacenter the hardware was located in, and the problems every other Sunday only started after the physical machine was relocated, how could it possibly be the OS or applications?

The network graphs clearly show external activity flooding the machine with connections that never complete. I'd show you the graphs, but my server is down at the moment. :(

I understand where you're coming from, but knowing that it's every other Sunday, I've even shut down any and all apps, cron, etc. and just watched it, and it still happens, consistently. It's like clockwork, and it's not the OS or its configuration, because this never happened when I was in the old dc.