Maia Mailguard

We had a customer in the past week that totally clogged up our Astaro Security appliance (that was protected against DoS by disallowing more than 20 concurrent connections to the SMTP server). Further study taught us that they receive 20000 spam emails per day on average.

Fake MX is a good practice, but we also sped up our deployment of our new spamfilter using Maia Mailguard. This baby had no trouble intercepting all spam messages. It's based on amavisd-new, Postfix and of course ClamAV. Cool stuff.

Maia Mailguard - Trac

GravityZoo

GravityZoo; kewl name for a framework. Looks interesting; let's go and see the presentation at the Open Source Business Club in Eindhoven on Nov 1. More later.

PostPath; Exchange drop-in replacement?

Came across this in Computable. Looks promissing, although it looks like it's really just a drop-in replacement for Exchange; one would still need an Active Directory. Nevertheless, they have a 12 user free version that might be worth looking at: PostPath: New Home Page

And we have lift-off!

Finally I also got the sound working in CentOS5 now. It required rebuiding alsa-drivers, alsa-libs and alsa-utils from scratch. "From scratch" these days means no more than "configure; make; make install". Lucky me ;-)

After rebooting I ran into another snag: No MP3 support. As I had setup yum to use rpmforge repos, I was able to install gstreamer-plugins-ugly for the MP3 support (FedoraForum.org - How to multimedia xmms, rythmbox, ogle, etc.). Now that tis works, DVD support is next. I have tried the Hotkeys in the meantime, but wasn't able to get them running: Pressing the WLAN button actually DISabled the WLAN interface ;-)

Acer Hotkey driver for Linux

I got WLAN (ndiswrapper) and the correct 1280x800 resolution (915resolution) working properly now, on my new Acer Aspire 5310. All that is left, is sound (it's recognized, but doesn't do anything) and the hotkeys. Found this driver; curious to see if this will work. Will let you know. Acer Hotkey driver for Linux.

After WLAN I got LDAP authentication and automounting of my /home through NFS set up. Wonderful to see all my Firefox/Thunderbird settings were used without a hitch. Exccellent!!

7 Rules for Communicating Clearly and Concisely in Email « Web Worker Daily

Email has become an important means of communication for many of us. We all complain about how many emails we receive and how hard it is to keep our inbox at a managable size. For a while now, I have been using the one-touch rul, which means I touch every email only once and then I either archive it, act on it or place it on my todo list. This way, no time is lost on re-reading old emails. Never start reading emails, if you can't react to them after reading.

These seven rules will help you to only send emails that will help you getting your work done...
7 Rules for Communicating Clearly and Concisely in Email « Web Worker Daily

Twitter.com

Guess I have just joined twitter.com ;-) There's a widget on the blog (on the right) and you can hit "follow me on twitter" to follow me on twitter ;-)

ShowMyPC.com - Instant Desktop Sharing and Access Remote PC Free

Finally had a chance to try this with my mom. For the people doing some remote computer help for friends and family, this is the perfect tool. Just a simple download and your good to go. No install, nothing.

Try it out!

ShowMyPC.com - Instant Desktop Sharing and Access Remote PC Free

4 Simple Steps to Start the Exercise Habit | zen habits

You didn't expect that huh? Well, I have been bad about sticking to my 3 times a week habbit of going to the gym and I need to get back into it. Saturday mornings I usually go there, but Tuesday and Thusday nights are harder ;-) Other people must have similar problems with their motivation. You might benefit from this article.

You didn't 4 Simple Steps to Start the Exercise Habit | zen habits

16092007109

I found a way to post photos to my blog now: ShoZu. I love it! After taking a photo it can be set up to prompt you for posting it right away. Excellent...

ShoZu on Nokia N80i | LucaFiligheddu.com

Now that I have re-discovered blogging, I started looking for an application with which I could post from my N80ie. ShoZu is the one I am going to check out. I'll keep you posted!

ShoZu on Nokia N80i LucaFiligheddu.com

Hardware: Are You Prepared for a Hard Drive Crash? - Lifehacker

Are you prepared? It's good to realise what all will be gone when your hard disk crashes. Photos, many many documents, email history.... It's not a matter of whether or not your computer's disk will fry, it's a matter of when.

Personally I use a RAID1 set with a simple 8006-2LP 3Ware controller, which should save me from a single hard disk crash (yes, I do have my email notification set up and checked ;-)). Besides that most important directories are backed up every night using rdiff-backup to a 500GB USB harddisk.
Get ready for the crash. Now!

Hardware: Are You Prepared for a Hard Drive Crash? - Lifehacker

Your kids 15 minutes of fame

Very kewl stuff. Now that I am more into photography again w/ my new Nikon D80, I've been reading the blogs and such. Came across this. It lets you send photos and have Flattenme create you a personalised storybook starring your own children/nephew/niece/...

Award winning truly magical personalized children's books & gifts - flattenme

Clonezilla, the opensource clone system

After some month of absence, I am back again. More kewl stuff to try, more need things to discover. Take Clonezilla for example. I accidentally came across this need tool, while checking up on DRLB from Freshmeat.

Clonezilla is really complete and makes one think of Norton Ghost:
http://clonezilla.sourceforge.net/clonezilla.php

Make sure this gets checked out properly!

SSL-Explorer: The World's First Open Source SSL VPN Solution

Is this something for our VPN offering? Initially we just need file access....
SSL-Explorer: The World's First Open Source SSL VPN Solution

eBay scrambles to fix phishing bug | CNET News.com

And more phishing problems. This time it's eBay whose website actually apparently contains a bug that aids 'phishers' in their attacks: eBay scrambles to fix phishing bug | CNET News.com

Phishing: Lots of small fish can make you rich

Last Thursday (after our night of having fun with The Presidents (see previous blog post)), I gave a brief introduction to a small group of women of the International Women's Club of Breda. Although it was a small crowd and there were painters painting the room, while I was presenting, I think I managed to give the ladies a pretty good idea of what is out there on the Internet and what one should look out for.

I promised I would post interesting things in my blog, so the audience would be able to get ideas from that and be informed about new stuff. So, you might read stuff here that is obvious to the experienced computer user (or geek), but might not be that obvious to others. Get used to it ;-)

This morning I read an article about phishing @ The Washington Post (registration required*), something I had explained about too. It's one of the most dangerous things going on on the Net right now and people need to be informed about this. The article explains how banks in the US are trying to fight phishing attacks and how a totally new industry is starting to arise around it.

To read more about phishing you can read this article in Wikipedia. It gives you a good idea what to look for if you think you're being fooled...

*) Some news sites require you to register for an account. A lot of times, it's just to get an idea of who is reading there online news. No real harm in it; just limit your registration to the required information. A good rule of thumb anyway.

Snowballs and dead presidents

Although this blog has a pretty technical focus, I just have to sneak in a little non-technical entry today. Yeah, some of us nerds have other interests than just computers ;-)

Last Wednesday night we were experiencing some (for our standards) serious snow (mayb 3 or 4 inches - woohoo!). It was also the night me and my S.O. had a chance to go see The Presidents of the U.S.A. in the Mezz here in Breda. We saw an awesome concert of three guys enjoying playing just plain fun music! They plyed for a small crowd, which made it feel even better. After the concert we hung around for a drink or two , when some co-worker of B (she volunteers at Mezz) came to get us, because Jason and Andrew (drums and gitar) were drinking beers in the hall where they had played. We hitted off and went (snowball fighting) on to the pub with some other 'groupies' ;-). Because of my American accent one of them even thought I was their tour manager. LOL! I couldn't keep a straight face and confessed I was just a groupy like they were ;-)

There was only one bummer of the night: We didn't bring a camera, so there will never be proof, other than our signed dead presidents...

Virtual Worlds

Developers, software engineers, network engineers and common folk: Unite! Use VMWare workstation! (No, I don't hold any share in this company, am not related to any of it's employees, nor am I working there myself).

VMWare must be one of the best inventions ever. It's right up there with Subversion. Together with Zend Studio these are the tools that will make a PHP programmer happy. And a Linux specialist (Guru for some ;-)).

We have managed to get everyone enthousiastic about VMWare Workstation. We've found ways to utilize it as a development platform, a testing platform, as well as a demo platform. Because of it's ease of snapshotting and reverting back to those, we are able to test server and application upgrades in no-time. We can now do between 10 and 20 testing iterations per day per testing engineer, where in the old environment we were maybe able to go through one to two iterations.

Because our application will be rolled out to around 40 schools within the next two weeks, we want to be able to do this with the least amount of effort and after sales service. All servers are the same at the application level and can be upgraded through our update service. We're using RPMs to distribute the changes in server configuration and setup, as well as for the server based application updates. This way we can guarentee that all servers will be similar. And that will make future updates easier again. Lately I have been starting to view our servers as hardware firewall/router type of boxes that can be upgraded to a newer 'firmware' version.

Our VMWare setup helps us with that tremendously! We start out with a standard server that has been installed and configured through the same process as our regular servers are. We snapshot it at that point and use a debug Yum channel to upgrade the Virtual Machine. Basic functionality is checked and if all is fine, more extensive testing occurs.

The same happens with our new server installation process. That can now be tested in a similar way. From what we've seen at VMWare's website, Workstation 5 is gonna be even more kewl! Teams Console and Snapshot Manager. Wow! I can't wait :-)

zsync

Yet another OS package that might be helpful in our distributing mechanism. It's an interesting alternative to rsync and other MD5 checksum based methods. Although, how many times do we really want to 'update' a file like zsync can do very well.

Nevertheless a note to self: zsync