Introduction

Reinstalling many machines with essentially the same content, is a time consuming process... here's how you can clone Linux machines...

This page details how to take an image of/clone a Linux system to use for restorating or wide scale rapid deployment, simplar to how utilities like Ghost work.

This document outlines how to use 'dd' or 'tar' to take a sytem image.

The 2008 UKUUG Spring conference is coming up soon (well, 31st March to 2nd April). It's focus is large scale systems admin, but some of the talks look appealing to a wider audience (e.g. anti-spam). The good news is that it's in Birmingham, which seems to be attracting a few more technical events lately :)

t-mobile's WebNWalk on Linux

Today, after having to organise a meeting with a customer in a room with no internet connectivity, we decided to 'buy' a t-mobile WebNWalk USB dongle thingy to connect to the web.

So... getting it to work... it was slightly painful. I'm not sure whether I needed to install the Vodafone thing or not - however, after installing it and restarting udev, it seemed to eventually start to work.

What?

This is a quick guide to installing Postfixadmin on a Debian Linux (Etch/4.0) server. I've done a similar guide on this before, but it's getting dated; hence this new one.

This guide also covers installing ClamAV to scan incoming mail and viruses.

This week, we are releasing our first full open source project.

It's basically a piece of web-based software, written in Python and PHP, that allows you to allocate tickets from multiple Trac projects to a simple week-based 'board' in order to organise work priority for developers.

Yesterday, I upgraded Kat's laptop (Thinkpad R50e) to Ubuntu Gutsy. The upgrade itself seemed to go quite well, aside from one annoying thing with udevd.... namely :

• Load stuck at around 1.0+
• CDROM kept checking if it had a disk in it (constant clicking noise)
• The laptop was whirring away as it tried to cool it's busy self down
• Swap partition no longer works

Intro

SpamAssassin is a tool to remove Spam from incoming email. The following describes a way of training Spam Assassin to be more effective.

Background

Email is stored within Cyrus, and mail that gets through SpamAssassin into a user's inbox is then moved to the "put_spam_here" folder by the user.

This script is run hourly, empties the "put_spam_here" folder, and hopefully trains spamassassin to catch more spam.

Dear LazyWeb... I'm in a password mess... please help.

I currently have a (relatively) large number of passwords for myself - for example :

For the last few months I've been using Host Tracker to monitor a server's availability, and to send me text messages if it misbehaves.

However, last Wednesday, the server was upgraded and offline for around half an hour. HostTracker didn't tell me.

So, it's finished. We're both quite tired, and ended up not staying at the Chin for the #lugradio get-together.

My lasting impressions of LugRadio Live 2007 are :

• There seemed to be fewer people this year than last
• Great venue - far roomier, but there seemed to be fewer stalls
• Wow, the local MP came along (thanks to Howard Berry)