It appears that all of a sudden there has been a failure of the gentoo-wiki.com site. Maybe not a failure as such but events being such that it nolonger exists. It means that a huge ammount of Gentoo and Linux information has been lost from the web (some may be recoverable from Google cache).
Now I have been saying for a while that I need to give back to the community, now seems like the time to help, or it will be very soon. My plan is to contribute articles including the mailserver guide still missing from this site to the gentoo-wiki project. It has been a very useful resource to me in the past and with effort from others in the community it can be again.
I’m planning to do my bit, I hope you can contribute something too.
Well its the end of September and it has been an expensive month. Part of this is down to my wreckless IT spending the other down to an automotive parts supplier.
Early this month I had a problem spring out of nowhere, the hard disk in my old laptop died suddenly. I didn’t loose any vital data, just my mailserver test setup, hence why no update on that front. I should get most of that back when I complete the reinstall on a new drive. Not an expensive part to replace but its another drain on the pocket.
During the search for a new drive I was tempted by the cheap hard disk prices for the 500GB drives. Temptation from technology is a bad thing for me. One thing lead to another and I ended up assembling a 1TB NAS device. The idea is that large files for long term storage can live there and smaller drives and smaller files in my laptops & desktops are quicker to archive/image as a result. There was some method in my madness.
I had planned for that to be the end of my purchases for this month but it was also time for the car to have an MOT. Whilst it was at the garage I decided to get the warning light issue that had plagued me for the past 9 months looked at yet again. 4 days and £410 later I have (I hope) a working car again. The problem seems to have been caused by a 3rd party catalyst I had fitted to replace the old worn out one. The 3rd party part had been playing havoc with the sensors on the car and triggering the warning. Thats what you get for not getting a genuine part.
So October will hopefully be a cheaper month, only time will tell.
I posted a few weeks (possibly months) ago that I would get my guide to setting up a mailserver onto the site. Unfortunately I ran into a few security realted problems that needed to resolved. The good news is I have made plenty of notes of the process and it should just be a case of typing them up.
I hope to have the notes up soon after I have a basic secure working setup. This should take no more than a couple of weeks if I am able to dedicate time to the project.
Low power CPUs are a big thing at the moment with the surge in popularity of netbooks and mobile devices. I found a very good review of the parts on offer from Intel and VIA.
It’s that time again when another peice of my IT equipment has died. When I say died it’s more akin to requiring the replacement of several major organs at the same time. Thurday night I was going about my usual activities of checking email and surfing the web with my windows desktop and 24/7 linux server.
I have been using the linux box alot recently due it collecting my rss feeds for me, the windows box being used for emails and games. The screen for the windows box had gone dark, not a big deal the screen saver kicks in if it’s not being used. The discovery of a problem came when it didn’t wake up when I moved the cursor to that screen (I use synergy to share kb&mouse across 2 machines). Ok not a huge problem, sometimes an error occurs with the kb/mouse sharing so I used my Belkin Switch2 to connect directly to that machine, still no response. Read the rest of this entry »
May 2008 has been somewhat uneventful on the traveling front, work has mainly taken my to and from the office (3 miles a day). On the plus side being based at home I have invested some time into trying to setup a mail server. Now setting up a mail server was never going to be an easy task, the fact that I still don’t have a working setup after several weeks of attempts is testament to this.
I did discover one solution that may be of use to somebody wishing to setup a headless server. ClarkConnect is a modular server and gateway operating system which can be setup for your needs. There are commercial and community editions available, I tried the community edition. What was obvious for the brief test installation is how polished ClarkConnect is; but you would expect this from an established commercial product. The fact that as a home user I can use this product for free is fantastic. ClarkConnect is linux based but its essentially a highly customised single purpose distribution. You can’t for example install a gnome desktop on it, its a headless server and as such is a web interface for the server processes only. If I wasn’t wanting to run non-server applications on the same machine as the mailserver then ClarkConnect would be my first choice for a simple and secure home server setup. Give it a try.
When I finally get a solution for my own mailserver setup I’ll try to create an install guide, I’ve not found a good guide yet so I may as well try and create one.
Since the upgrade to WordPress 2.5 I have been a little unhappy that the site wasn’t validating as XHTML 1.0 Transitional Compliant. Today I have taken steps to correct this.
Why is it important to have a standards compliant site? Well for starters a site that adheres to the standards should appear the same on whichever browser and operating system combo you choose to use. If my site looks wrong for any reason its probably due to the browser not rendering the standards correctly, Internet Explorer is very bad for this.
This week I needed to use a business site to look up some information. I tried to access the menu system to get to the contacts page but the interactive menu appeared at the wrong side of the screen. This made it impossible to click on the link I needed. I was using Firefox at this point which is for all intents and purposes a major browser; even if it still is behind Internet Explorers majority market share. I then tried to access the site with Internet Explorer and surprise surprise it worked. The developer had created a buggy site to work with a buggy browser.
If everybody out there makes their websites standards compliant then the browsers will be fixed to adhere to them and your page will be correctly displayed on all platforms people choose to access it from. Thats my rant over for now.
I have been developing my own iptables firewall scripts for my Linux machines. On the whole the process has been going quite well. Part of my research into the firewall rules involved buying a few reference books, one of which contained what claimed to be a very secure script. I copied the base rules over to use as a base to add my own rules to and things have progressed very well.
Today I was going through the code trying to open some ports for another service when I noticed an anomoly; one of the rules I had copied was badly wrong. I went back to the book to compare what was listed; I was expecting to have made a typo. I found the book listed the flawed code in its main script but earlier in book it was used in its intended context. Had I not gained a sufficient understanding of the iptables rules and how they fit together I would not have noticed this error. It is worrying to think it has been exposing my machines to uncessesary danger. A few quick ammendments and all my machines are once again secure. The added bonus of the correction was that it removed some of the extra packets being logged and dropped by the firewall.
I will be very careful of what I copy from reference books from now on. I will also be paying much more attention to my firewall scripts in general to ensure I keep the rules sensible and secure.
