Category: Uncategorized

And a new theme. Perhaps one day I’ll fix my twitter sync script. In the mean time, there’s a bit on Solr on Pale Purple’s blog. along with SpamDyke to stop Qmail being overrun by spam.

Recently on the Twitter the following (attached) image came up – presumably legit, of a job advert. Highlights below. It’s almost like someone cut and pasted two job postings together. The phone number does appear to be legit … so perhaps the advert itself is?

One of my customers uses Akismet to protect his various blogs from the masses of spam. Oddly torwards the end of last week, Akismet started to identify everything as spam, with no error message being returned on check of spam, and the admin dashboard showing the api key/akismet were happy. I initially thought that perhaps […]

NFS really can be a major PITA. Our office network has been breaking all day. This seemed to coincide with moving more of our computers to gigabit ethernet (removing the 100mbit CISCO 7960 phones which their network had been daisy-chained through – and seemed to cause intermittent packet loss) Here are some tips for others […]

At work we keep receiving emails from sales-droids in India who are trying to persuade us to outsource PHP/Android/Java/whatever development to them. Here’s my first attempt at a spamassassin rule to neutralise it – in my case, copy into a something.cf file in /etc/spamassassin/mail, and running over a suitably loaded email results in : Content […]

Scenario – one Linux box runs multiple Postfix instances. By default they all log to /var/log/mail.log which makes it difficult to see what’s going on without using grep and so on. The server already uses rsyslog, and Postfix is configured to specify a syslog_name to each instance. i.e /etc/postfix-blah/main.cf contains “syslog_name = postfix-blah” rsyslog allows […]

I keep forgetting these one line OpenSSL commands – perhaps if they are here, I’ll remember — Create private key file : openssl genrsa -out server.key 2048 Create certificate signing request (to send to e.g. GoDaddy) – openssl req -new -key server.key -out server.csr  Verify a certificate – openssl verify file.name To convert a .crt […]

Our work server seems to enjoy crashing (at the moment) about once a day – but when I go to look at the console I can’t see anything because the screen has dimmed to black – and as the computer has locked up, I can’t wake the screen up to see if there is a […]

I’ve written the below Python script to defragment MySQL database tables. This should work with both InnoDB and MyISAM table formats, and is just calling “OPTIMIZE TABLE blah.foo”. It rummages through the information_schema for tables which may be defragmented. You should be able to run it on any Debian based system without making any alterations. […]

My son woke up at 6am crying quite loudly this morning – he’d been having a nightmare involving a Chocolate Headed Pirate being mean and nasty to him. Personally I think a chocolate headed pirate would be quite tasty – although perhaps it’d be a bit more than I could eat in one sitting (or […]