Ended up spending most of my day dealing with spam. Turns out there was a bad PHP script that a student wrote and someone found a weakness and began spamming hundreds of people today. Took a few hours before we finally got to the source and quickly disabled it with a friendly note to the owner. Then we had CGI spamming bots attacking lots of other CGI applications that contain blogs. Some of these blogs had up to 14,000 entries and just bringing the systems down to their knees. Got most of them blocked now.

However, this lead to another problem with one of our IBM x366's where it was particularly sensitive to the large loads. Tried all sorts of things to clear it up to no avail. So, since it's redundant, we rebooted the system, but now it can't get past POST! Call IBM and they quickly tell me that I need a critical update that addresses this (along with several other critical updates). So, I have the images ready to go, but, wait, how do I apply an update when the damn thing won't get past POST? Grrr!!! I call them back and they suggest I remove one of the memory modules (related to the BIOS bug) and it springs to life. I apply the updates, get to the last one (of six) and now the system won't power up anymore. It tries, tells me there are multiple CPU errors and just shuts down. Just brilliant.

Guess what I will be doing tomorrow morning (searches for sledgehammer)...