You will probably notice an increase in spam at the email address you used to sign up here. I went from about 10 spams a month to around 40 in three days starting right after signing up here. I think the trigger was opening the PM from Elizabeth Mark. I got one too
and posted about it here a couple of days ago as well as letting the moderators know about it. I opened it thinking it was legit. I will not open any future PM's from here.

Incidentally this is a classic "phishing" message.
Funny thing is con men often refer to their victims as "marks".
Elizabeth "Mark" anyone.

Everything about this letter is "phishy".:laugh:

It should work fine, I don't know about the separate home partitions though as I don't use separate home partitions. I instead prefer a home directory for each distro. I have plenty of space but it seems I'm limited to no more than 10 partitions on my machine.
If I have more than 10 partitions my MS OS's get sluggish.
I don't know why, they just do.

What I have setup is this
sda1-Primary-NTFS- XP Pro SP3
sda2-Primary-NTFS-Shared program partition (between XP and Win 7)
sda3-Primary-Fat32-Shared (between Windows and Linux)
sda4-extended
sda5-Logical-Ubuntu 8.04.1LTS 64 bit (Ultimate Edition Hardy)
sda6-Logical-Linux swap (shared amongst all linux installs)
sda7-Logical-PCLinuxOS 2009 (KDE)
sda8-Logical-Ubuntu 8.10 64 bit (Intrepid)
sda9-Logical-PCLinuxOS 2009 (Gnome Edition)
sda10-Logical-Win 7 Release Candidate (build 7100)

I know that separate home partitions have some advantages, especially if you have to reinstall a damaged distro.

I get around that by using Partimage (on the System RescueCD)
to make images of my final stable installs with the home directory included in the image..

I keep these images on my Fat32 shared partition as well as "off disc" , in the event that I screw up an install (I do that a lot, LOL) I just fire up partimage and restore the damaged install.
Takes about 5 minutes and I'm back in business with home directory intact. I make a point of creating an image everytime I do a major update or do something that could damage my linux installs. With Partimage this only take about 10 minutes of my time and (using moderate compression) produces a 1.5 to 3.0 GB image file depending on the install size. My largest linux install is Hardy Ultimate Edition about (6 GB uncompressed).

As a precaution and before erasing any previous image I do a restore right after creating a new image to "prove" the new image.
This may be unnecessary as I've never had partimage fail but I do it anyway.
After "proving" the image I replace the old one with the new.

Then if whatever risky procedure I was planning on doing breaks
my linux install I can restore to a few minutes before I broke that install.

An example of a risky procedure: My machine uses an ATi Mobility Radeon X1400 video card. There are proprietary drivers plus a control panel available from ATi that permit full hardware
3-D acceleration, something the open source drivers don't do.

Every month ATi releases updated drivers and initial install and subsequent updates run the risk of breaking X, the GUI if done improperly, I know I've done it a few times. Up until recently installing or updating the ATi "fglrx" drivers involved compiling and installing a "fglrx kernel module" from the released installer using instructions from a FGLRX wiki. Unless these instructions are followed exactly you will break X.

The latest releases can be installed simply by running the installer from a terminal window, but there is still some risk involved because you are messing with X.

Having made an image just prior to installing/updating these drivers makes recovering from a disaster much easier.

I hope this lengthy reply answered your question.

BTW, since partimage works with my Windows installs as well I use the same scheme with them, of course my resulting images are somewhat bigger since the smallest Windows install I have is 11.8 GB.

Brian is aware of this issue and has banned the account in question. He is also searching for anti spam solutions to prevent this from happening again.:)

Yep, I reported this to Brian about 10-12 hours ago.
Unfortunately I deleted the email without thinking so I can't provide headers etc., just the body of the message.

This was in my inbox as coming from Linux.com as a friend
invite from Elizabeth.

I opened it without thinking, assuming it was from a legitimate member. I opened it in Thunderbird on my Win 7 install.

Gee, I hope I haven't infected my Windows machine with some nasty.:laugh:

Seriously I will run a virus scan to be sure.

Nope, no RSS subscriptions for me, I don't like RSS so I don't use it. If I want to read a blog I do it manually.

I don't blog either.

This is a serious issue and I hope we can get it fixed.

Hi Folks,

I'm not sure where to post this but I figure here is as good a place as any. If the moderators need to move it thats OK with me.

So here's the problem. I joined the Linux.com community on May 17. I made it a point to leave the contacts fields in the enrollment
form blank, further I made sure only friends could view my profile
but the radio button to allow messages from Linus.com is checked yes.

Today I received a message at the email account that is supposed to be known only to Linux.com.

It was from an Elizabeth and appeared to be a friend invitation.

It was however a "phishing" attempt
The text of the message is posted below.

Dear Friend, I know that this is an unusual platform for us to be discussing this Kind of business but the situation has necessitated me to use this Medium to communicate you for now. But let me introduce myself to you. I am Miss. Elizabeth Mark, the manager of bill and exchange at the foreign remittance department of my Bank. In my department I discovered an abandoned sum of US$14.5M, (Fourteen Million, and Five Hundred Thousand US Dollars) at our head office Accra Ghana, that belongs to one of our foreign customers, who died along with his wife and only son in a plane crash of Alaska Airlines Flight number 261 which crashed on 31 January, 2000. The owner of this account is Mr. Morris Thompson an American and great industrialist and a resident of Alaska. It is therefore upon this discovery that I now decided to make this Business proposal to you and for our bank to release the money to You, for more detail send me an email in my private email address( e.mark11@yahoo.xxx or elizamark@lycos.xxx ) Yours truly, Miss. Elizabeth Mark.

I deliberately changed the .com of the email addresses in the body of the message to prevent someone here from accidentally clicking on these links and getting into some sort of trouble. Please don't click these email links.

Furthermore on the 17 th I received more spam messages at this mail account than I normally receive in a week. I sometimes go quite awhile before seeing spam at this account.

This spam issue may be a coincidence but the "phishing" message is very real.

My guess is that some lowlife has "hacked" Linux.com.

Has anyone else experienced this invasion of privacy.

Thanks.