Just this past week, we had a time change and that is when I started to notice higher than normal load averages on my Arch Linux box. I use Cacti to monitor the load averages and bandwidth of my Internet connection in order to get an idea of how much I actually download and upload each month. Earlier this year, I had to get a wireless Internet connection through Alltel and I wasn’t sure if they had a cap on bandwidth. There appears to be no 5GB cap on Alltel’s services since I average about 30GB of traffic monthly. Most other carriers seem to mention a 5GB cap for monthly bandwidth.
We’ve Moved to Slicehost
After many many months, I’ve finally moved everything over to a VPS. It has taken forever to get everything up and running exactly the way I wanted it. Ran into a few bumps that delayed the progress but I finally finished. I’ll be making a few articles on configuring services for a VPS or any situation where speed, security and memory usage is important (which should be any place). I’ve upgraded WordPress too and reconfigured everything from scratch since the database upgrade didn’t work for me.
I think the amount of spam that I’ve came across already is insane. Since the 7th of September, I’ve already blocked 106,686 attempts to send mail which got blocked by a DNS block list or was a non existent address. I’ve also blocked 306 relay attempts.
Posted in Random Thoughts.
– September 22, 2009
Installing Zimbra on Arch Linux
Zimbra is a modern groupware solution with an AJAX web interface. It combines email, contacts, shared calendar, tasks, instant messaging, spell checking, and online documents into a single product. The web interface is solid and rivals Gmail’s in terms of ease of use and intuitiveness. Email accounts are stored in LDAP and provide a global address list for everyone in your organization. Instant messaging is built-in through the web interface (but not turned on by default yet since it is still in beta). The spam protection is comprehensive and combines SpamAssassin and DSPAM. SpamAssassin combines many methods of detection while DSPAM is an adaptive filter. Anti-virus is built-in as well and included is ClamAV. Since AMaViS is being used it can be reconfigured use any anti-virus of your choice. It can be made to work with Microsoft Outlook and Apple Mail through proprietary connectors. The worst part about the whole thing is that it is a Java application which uses a lot of RAM.
– April 24, 2009
Opera Face Gestures Beta
Earlier this month was April Fools’ Day and there is no better place to be than the Internet. Many different companies like to release fake products and services on that day. Opera was one of the many companies to release such a product. This year they introduced Opera Face Gestures to revolutionize web browsing…or not. Even the guy making the faces can’t keep his face straight. Out of all of the jokes that I saw that day this one really stuck with me. I ended up sharing the link with a few of my friends and one of them commented on how hilarious it would be to see a whole class of people using it. Imagine someone unknowing walking in and seeing all those people making ridiculous faces.
Posted in Programming, Python.
– April 23, 2009
Using Mock to Build Postfix RPMs With MySQL Support For CentOS
Recently I’ve been trying to configure Postfix to support virtual domains and pull the information from MySQL. I’m using CentOS and the default build doesn’t include MySQL support. Even though there is already a build with MySQL support in the Extra’s repository there appears to be a newer version in Updates with a security fix. Since rebuilding SRPMs has always been a breeze in the past I decided just to get the latest SRPM for Postfix and rebuild the package myself.
As I was typing the following command, I noticed a bunch of errors that I’ve never seen while the SRPM was installing. I thought I did something wrong at first and I even opened up the SRPM in midnight commander to take a look at what it was doing.
Posted in Linux.
– April 22, 2009
Uplink Inspired Multiplayer Game
Several months ago I pulled out my old Uplink game and decided to play it again. There is something about the game that makes it fun to play for me. The music and the atmosphere appeals to me, not to mention that cyberpunk is one of my favorite genres. I’m not sure exactly how much of Uplink would be considered cyberpunk but it shares some characteristics. While Uplink might have turned seven years old in August, I can’t help wishing there was a multiplayer version of this game. I know there are at least some other people that feel the same way.
Posted in Facebook, Gaming, PHP.
– October 30, 2008
Your Own Personal MySpace Tracker
Have you ever wanted you own MySpace tracker? Well look no farther. I’ve decided to convert Jordan’s MySpace tracker to be used in a web application framework. The framework I’ve chosen is Kohana and originally was a fork of CodeIgniter. The code originally was going to be used as a reference for Jordan so he could see what it looks like. Anyways, the tracker is simplistic and doesn’t have all the features that I’ve seen in some of these MySpace trackers. It wasn’t designed to be a full solution or as a replacement. It is good enough for me and I’m sure you’ll find it useful.
Posted in MySpace, PHP, Programming.
– August 22, 2008
Linking Volume Controls in Ubuntu
Ever since I’ve switched over to Linux a few years ago there has been a few annoyances that I haven’t fixed. Every time I play a video or listen to some music the volume is never right. I always end up using the volume controls on the front of my laptop. Then I end up having to open the volume applet to make adjustments because the subwoofer on the bottom is a different control. This finally took its tole and I had to finally fix it.
Posted in Linux.
– August 10, 2008
Getting Dual Head to Work in Fedora Core 9
Fedora Core 9 has been out for a while and I haven’t seen any decent dual monitor configurations. Of course this might have changed in the last month and a half but I doubt it. FC9 comes with the latest Xorg Server which as of this writing is 1.4.99.905. It was until very recently that many people were downgrading their Xorg version to the one included with FC8 because the ABI was so new that NVidia hadn’t released a driver yet. Also in this version of Fedora is one second X and kernel-based modesetting. The Intel driver that I use has been updated so when I decided to switch I found that my previous xorg.conf repetitively caused X to crash.
Posted in Linux.
– July 11, 2008
Grub Issues With Fedora Core 9
Fairly recently I have updated my laptop to the latest Fedora Core. I also have several other Linux distributions on this laptop as well. I use the Grub installer from SuSE, since the GFX menu works across all of the menus I have. After installing Fedora I didn’t do much afterwards and I pretty much have had my laptop off for over a week. Today, I felt like finishing up and reinstalling Grub from the SuSE partition. I booted into SuSE and ran grub-install which completed successfully. I rebooted to boot into Fedora but I got a “Error 2: unknown file or directory type”. I thought maybe the partition wasn’t cleanly unmounted.
Posted in Linux.
– May 24, 2008
