It doesn't get easier to deal with loss

I don't mean to imply that you never get over loss. I mean we all get over losses eventually, it mostly depends on the impact of the loss. What I really mean is sometimes it weighs on you and the way it affects you changes, but that feeling never goes away completely. This is especially true when someone dies, or at least it is still true for me and the death of my father. He would have been 52 this year, his Birthday would have been just a few days ago. We lost him almost two years ago and he was buried in Arlington, or his ashes were, just over a year ago now.
We weren't particularly close, not like some parents are with their kids. I think we're both to blame for that. I miss him though, almost every day. Funny thing is, I didn't think I would. Which I guess is a lousy thing to say, but what I mean is I didn't realize the impact his death would have on me. His death, albeit tragic in it's own way, was both expected and not. He had his demons and they ultimately led to his death, but we just didn't expect it to happen to him so young.
I find myself thinking about him, wondering if I could have done anything to change the circumstances of his death or the long set of events that would ultimately lead to it. However I also remind myself that I was just a kid when he started drinking heavily and I didn't have any control over him.
I sometimes wish I could ask him advise on things. Just about cars or things around the house or even parenting. But I can't. And I think about all the moments in my life he's missed, both now and when he was alive. I wish I could have asked him so many things before that I will never get a chance to ask him now. These are the things I still think about.
The funny thing, and maybe funny isn't the right word, and I may have talked about this before, but he wasn't even my biological father. Of course my parents in their finite wisdom didn't officially acknowledge this until I was 18, though on some level I had made this determination years earlier, around 12 or 13. I had discovered my father's original enrollment papers in the army and the dates didn't make sense because I knew how long it took for a baby to born, but I never said a thing, going along with the "secret". I'd really like to ask him why he never said anything. My mom is still here and I could ask her, hell she lives with me now, but I can't find a way to bring it up. I have so many questions about my bio dad too.
My wife Facebook stalked him for me, thanks to some information my grandma had (my dad's mom - just to make this slightly less confusing). It seems that I have at least one step brother and sister, though I don't know if that's the right way to say that about the offspring of someone who is in my mind just a sperm donor. I don't know why I am sharing all this, maybe it's over sharing, but I don't care these are all thoughts I'm having.

I like this song

Quick weight loss update

So it's just a few days before Thanksgiving and I got on the scales to find I am now down to 318. Recall I started at 344 so that's 26 lbs to date.
I've been having to walk my mom's dog, as she's been out of town, so I have been hitting my step goal in Garmin Connect for the past seven days. 
Plus continuous calorie tracking in MyFitnessPal seems to be helping me make sure I keep my self on track to lose weight.
That's it for now, just a quick update.

freebsd postfix python policyd-spf ip addres validation error

The solution to my Problem was (for now) to add the following lines to the function _cidrmatch in /usr/local/bin/policyd-spf

def _cidrmatch(ip, netwrk)
  netwrk = unicode(netwrk)
  ip = unicode(ip)
  try:
    address = ipaddress.ip_address(ip)

This is done so that the python module ipaddr only has to deal with unicode string (as requested by the error message)
switching to python3 as suggested by other posts on the web did not work for me (maybe some missing dependencies?)

 Stolen from here, but it worked:
https://superuser.com/questions/1253657/freebsd-postfix-python-policyd-spf-ip-addres-validation-error/1253658

CIDR.pm

So for whatever reason the CIDR.pm file uses on my FreeBSD setup doesn't work for MailScanner.

II had to comment out these croak lines and now it works just fine

diff  /root/CIDR.pm /usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/Net/CIDR.pm
218c218
< The result is a two-element array: 
---
> The result is a two-element array:
437c437
<     
---
> 
596,597c596,597
<           #croak "Invalid netblock range: $r[$i]"
<               #unless $isipv6_1 && $isipv6_2;
---
>           croak "Invalid netblock range: $r[$i]"
>               unless $isipv6_1 && $isipv6_2;
794c794
<     my $mismatch = shift;
---
> 
801c801
<     if (!$isipv6_1 != !$isipv6_2)
---
>     if ($isipv6_1 || $isipv6_2)
803,805c803,805
<       return $mismatch if defined $mismatch;
<       #croak "Invalid netblock: $aa-$bb";
<    }
---
>       croak "Invalid netblock: $aa-$bb"
>           unless $isipv6_1 && $isipv6_2;
>     }
810c810
<     #croak "Different number of octets in IP addresses" unless $#a == $#b;
---
>     croak "Different number of octets in IP addresses" unless $#a == $#b;
979c979
<                                 
---
> 
1014,1015c1014,1015
<       next if _ipcmp($b[$i], $lo, -1) < 0;
<       next if _ipcmp($hi, $a[$i], -1) < 0;
---
>       next if _ipcmp($b[$i], $lo) < 0;
>       next if _ipcmp($hi, $a[$i]) < 0;
1284a1285,1286
>     $v =~ s/([0-9A-Fa-f]+)/_triml0($1)/ge;
> 
1291a1294,1299
> sub _triml0 {
>     my ($a) = @_;
> 
>     $a =~ s/^0+//g;
>     return $a
> }

Gym Time

This morning I spent over an hour at the gym. 
I actually enjoyed it a lot, I noticed that I hard time not smiling.
I spent the entire on the treadmill and after 65 minute I covered 3.9 miles.
It was, according to myWellness cloud, my fastest pace for 3 and 5 kilometers, at 16:41 per mile.
At the end I was totally drenched in sweat, my shirt on the front and back, was totally soaked.
I also logged just over 8,000 steps on Garmin Connect.
I guess that's it really, but I just thought I would share.
See not everything I post is stupid work stuff, sometimes its also stupid me stuff.

One Massive Screw Up

So at work we have some MX servers running Postfix with Mailscanner/SpamAssassin on FreeBSD.
Last week I decided to continue my FreeBSD 10.3 upgrades and decided to tackle all five of these machines at the same time to 11.1.
Everything went well, or so I thought.
Turns out somewhere in the upgrade process when I upgraded all the ports the MailScanner port decided to over-write all the config files and so we would up with a very malfunctioning mail scanner.
Plus due to some other strangeness, the servers were eating up all of their memory.
Well I wasn't sure why, but nailed it down to MailScanner.
So I reinstalled MailScanner and all of its dependencies.
That didn't do anything.
It was next figured out that a configuration file had been renamed, but the original still existed so a quick copy fixed that error.
Then an issue was discovered in the antivirus scanner used by MailScanner, this was resolved by making a quick change to a configuration file.
It was then discovered, that the Bayes database had grown to large to be useful, in excess of 5GB and it was trying to load that into memory.
The database was purged and an automatic process was put into place to purge the database once a week.
Finally, as an extra precaution the main MailScanner configuration file was modified to reduce the maximum number of children processes running at a time.
 This limits the amount of mail that can be processed, but also ensures the memory used didn't exceed what was available
Anyway, all of this kept the mail for being delivered for a few hours.
I don't have anything technical to report about it, just this horrible synopsis.
The bad part is I still have a bunch of servers I need to upgrade.

Oh in coincidental and slightly related news the migration from self-hosted Exchange 2010 to Office 365 is ongoing, but working smoothly.  I guess I shouldn't be surprised.  The documentation is rather exhaustive, both official and otherwise.

I managed to migrated my own mailbox as a "proof of concept" and before I move any others I'll be testing it like crazy.  Of course because I am not changing the mail flow until we're all off Exchange 2010 I need to make sure that the MXs continue working as expected.