Experiment: Comments Enabled

I’ve enabled pyblosxom’s comments plugin. Don’t be dicks and I won’t have to turn it back off…

Pissed Yet Another Day Away

I went to sleep around 7pm or so last night and woke up at 5am. I then played around with my virtual server, played an hour of FFXI, played a couple hours of Ryzom, and then I played around with some of the CSS and HTML templates for this site. I also managed to play with h323/SIP/VoIP for an hour or so with some people in an IRC channel and then managed to add a few more feeds to my RSS aggregator.

I’m now pondering taking a shower, finding and dusting off one of the Netflix DVDs laying around, and getting around to generating that Fedora Core 1 UML image I’ve been wanting to get around to.

It is amazing what useless stuff you can get done when you piss away a day!

Yes, It’s a blog update.

Is everyone fucking happy now? Go find yourself a game to play.

As requested:

Humor With A Point

If you were starved enough for asinine forms of entertainment you probably witnessed the infamous Apple/RIAA/Pepsi commerical during the last Superbowl. A prime example of an idea that should have died before it left the board room. It left people with clue and many mac users (don’t be too shocked, the two groups are not always mutually exclusive) wondering “What The Fuck?!”. And here I thought I couldn’t possibly have a lower opinion of Apple. God damn Jobs really knows how to pull it off!

A great parody … erm … truthful version is available here (mp4 in a zip file… QuickTime, Totem, Mplayer, etc should play it fine).

Once you are done watching the masterpiece make sure to check out whatacrappypresent.com and downhillbattle.org.

I’d recommend boycotting Apple but that would be redundant. Considering Linux has already passed Apple’s meager 1.8% total market share (or 3.2% if you forget there is a world outside the US) I’d say the market already is.

Pesto Mayonnaise

I was reminded to look up what exactly is in Pesto Mayonnaise. Of course this recipe requires regular Mayonnaise. Very yummy stuff. I wonder if it can be purchased premade from the local supermarket.

Microsoft and HP’s Athens PC

Microsoft and HP apparently showed off a prototype PC design called “Athens” that might be pushed by Microsoft as a standard to be adopted among PC manufacturers. Pictures can be found here. I think the specific design shown is ugly as hell but I like the form factor of the screen and the size of the actual computer itself. The PC needs to go on a diet and ditch the ATX form factor.

Warhol Worms

This paper on Warhol Worms is a good read for anyone that cares about security. It is all a matter of “when” not “if” in my opinion.

Edit: I forgot to remove the timezone hack I had previously used in pyblosxom’s blogger xmlrpc interface. The new server is located in the same timezone as me now.

Server Fun

Mail: I’ve set up Postfix with SMTP authentication, spam filtering using SpamAssassin, virus scanning using Clam Antivirus and MailScanner and other niceties on my personal server. I’ve also set up Dovecot as the IMAP server with Maildir storage and I’m using Procmail to filter incoming mail into the appropriate folders. SquirrelMail is installed and configured for web based mail access and, of course, Apache is set up to host this page.

Server: This and more yummy stuff is all running on an Fedora Core 1 UML Virtual Machine image. All I need to do now is set up BIND and find a tool to generate handy image galleries without needing server side scripts that I have to keep track of lest I be left running some old exploitable version.

Dovecot: Before yesterday I had never heard of the Dovecot IMAP server. Dovecot looks like a new feature of Fedora/Red Hat as of Fedora Core 1. I had always disliked how Red Hat had only shipped wu-imap, a fundamentally useless and insecure server, as its only IMAP server. That looks like it will be fixed in the next version of its Enterprise product line if Fedora Core 1 is any indication.

At first glance Dovecot is a decent IMAP and POP3 server that is dead simple to configure and looks well written as far as security goes. The software seems to follow the principles of privilege seperation (ala OpenSSH) and seems to chroot itself whenever it can. The “seperate what needs to be done into logically seperate processes with the absolute minimum of privileges needed” approach used by postfix seems to be followed by Dovecot and it seems to make a nice complement to it. And did I mention it was dead simple to configure? Only one very heavily commented configuration file to deal with.

The experience reminds me I need to pick up a book on SASL as I keep tripping on it every time I go to touch SMTP and IMAP servers.

Useful resources:

• http://postfix.state-of-mind.de/patrick.koetter/smtpauth/index.html
• http://www.projektfarm.com/en/support/howto/postfix_smtp_auth_tls.html
General

• New Server

  Posted on February 7th, 2004 Bruce No comments

  If you can read this then it means the DNS chances I made have propagated. My domain is now hosted on a different system and I’ve been working quite a few hours on the move over the last couple days.

  I’ll get around to explaining what I’ve been working on tomorrow I guess. ~wanders off to get something to eat~

  General

• Driving and ACLs

  Posted on February 3rd, 2004 Bruce No comments

  Driving: The latest weather system dumped about 3 inches of snow in an hour then changed to sleet and rain a few minutes just before 5pm. Roads sucked, traffic sucked, and the DoT seems to have found new efficient ways of introducing some very deep potholes into Route 299 near Ames Plaza.

  ACLs: I spent some time banging my head into the table over filesystem ACLs and umask issues on Solaris today at work. This guide to Solaris ACLs proved handy.

  General
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