I’ve been really sceptical about all the naysayers that claim that Vista’s inbuilt DRM is somehow going to destroy the fabric of the universe. Or something.

But, when I come to try and watch a DVD on my new Vista Ultimate box in Media Center or Media Player I am greeted with the informative message that:

"Windows Media Player cannot play this DVD because there is a problem with digital copy protection between your DVD drive, decoder and video card. Try installing an updated driver for your Video card."

After quite a lot of digging it transpires that my LiteOn DVD drive (which is quite old) has RPC1 region free firmware, which is unacceptable to Vista. I have now had to take a retrograde step and enforce my DVD drive to obey regions just to get a legit DVD to play. Yes, obviously, I could use VLC or some other player but I don’t really see the point in spending money on Vista Ultimate if I can’t use all its features.

On top of this, my Casino Royale DVD subjected me to minutes of adverts and PIRACY IS WRONG messages that I couldn’t skip. I just bought the DVD, why am I getting lectured at! Why would anyone want to do things "the right way" I don’t know…

Bah.

I’m on the beta of home server, which is supposed to act as a central media storage hub that grows with you, gives remote access and stuff – perfect.

I’ve just been through the setup and despite the fact that it has a Vista-esque backdrop to start with it soon turns into the familiar server 2003 setup GUI. Then it rebooted into DOS text mode setup titled "windows 2003 small business server". Make your mind up!

Installation did take a fair while and I lost track of the number of times it restarted, but it did eventually get there.

All in all it’s pretty decent and I love the remote access stuff. It certainly needs some polishing, but the community seems good so I hope it’ll be a good product in the end.

I now need to decide whether to carry on running it – if I do, then I need to get some new cooling kit for my PC as it all sounds like a jet engine at the moment…

I’ve written before about how Vista’s new power management sucks. Since then I’ve found that getting it to go to sleep (even with the modifications to the advanced settings) is a bit flakey at the best of times. I think I’ve tracked it down to uTorrent – if it’s running (or even has been running) then Vista will refuse to go to sleep.

So, assuming that I even get it to go to sleep I’ve been finding that Vsta is waking itself up at 4am each night (and not going back to sleep even though the inactivity timeout is set to 1 hour). I’ve eventually tracked this down to Media Centre’s automatic listings update feature. Turn this off and it won’t wake itself up – not a great workaround for those that use it a lot :(

At the moment I make use of Exim’s sender verification callout feature which tries to work out whether the (supposed) sender’s email address given in the HELO is legitimate or not. For this is connects to the remote mail server and tried to do a RCPT TO for that email address. If it can’t find a mail server or gets rebuffed then the email address is rubbish and Exim rejects the mail even before it gets accepted. This cuts down on a huge volume of mail and also stops the "drive by" spamming of innocent third parties that might get an NDR.

The problem with this is that people are idiots. Most often an automated system (typically shopping carts it seems) try to send as apache@domain which is not a valid address on that system, rather than myshop@domain which probably is. Sometimes these systems set the reply-to header in the message, but this isn’t visible in the envelope.

This is causing me an annoyance. On the one hand, if I leave it on, I seem to end up missing semi-important mail (even FON can’t get it right it seems). On the other, if I disable it I end up receiving a deluge of junk mail (ok, I have spam assassin to sort it for me, but it’s still annoying to have to spend money on the bandwidth and storage).

It would be nice if I could start blocking on SURBLs and RHBLs natively with Exim.

Grrrr…