September 2004 Archives

I spent all day Monday at the IIA conference in Clontarf. Most of the bigger names were represented, including Microsoft, Macromedia and Realex, though the quality of the talks had little to do with the size of the companies involved. The IEDR gave an interesting talk on DNS and updates within the IEDR, while Realex provided some general tips on implementing credit card payments and e-commerce.

This browser is really taking off! The latest preview release added a bunch of new features including: - RSS support: bookmark any RSS feed - SSL: The location menu changes colour if you are using SSL - Search: much more advanced - Live Updates - download patches on the fly without quitting the browser. This works on windows at least. I haven't been able to test it on Debian yet :neutral: Probably loads of other features that I haven't even found yet!

Tom is continuing with his campaign to force/persuade Beamish to do something with their offices in the centre of Cork. He is currently running a poll, which looks like it will draw rather amusing results - albeit not for Beamish & Crawford.

Spam Assassin 3 was released the other day, so I started rolling it out across as many servers as possible. We had already been testing it on a couple without encountering any issues, so putting the stable version should have been quite easy. In most cases it was, except for one Red Hat 9 server. It simply refused to go on properly. If I got it past the install, either via CPAN, tar.gz or Julian's RPMs it would not pass the spamassassin --lint test After struggling with it for over an hour I gave up and rolled it back to 2.64, which works fine. I've also ordered the book from Amazon, so I'm waiting to see if it covers anything I haven't thought of or come across:

A number of people reported severe problems with the bitdefender update scripts yesterday. Seemingly the processes were hanging and eating up CPU. Kevin Spicer found a good interim solution: vim /usr/lib/MailScanner/bitdefender-autoupdate Comment out the following two lines: LINE 190 system "$bitDCmd > $origFile "; LINE 253 system "$bitDCmd > $destFile "; You then need to kill any bitdefender update processes. Most of them are "bdc", so you can run: ps auxwww|grep bdc but I also found a few with "bitdefender" in the string. Thanks to Kevin for solving this! EDIT: This issue was resolved by the developers a few days later

Niall has written an excellent howto for setting this up: Postfix + smtp auth It worked for me first time

Someone brought up IEDR and Comreg on the IIU list yesterday. I was chatting about this with a friend and he pointed me at Dave Wilson's very incisive posting about it: So the department of... The reality is that the cost of IE domains to resellers is not as high as some people would like to make others believe. Yes - co.uk domains cost less per unit Yes - .nl domains are cheap too However, and this is the point that most of these people miss, the way things are handled is completely different. Nominet basically allows just about anybody to register a domain and a lot of their resellers (who hold an official nic handle) do sell domains at a "low" price. Try moving your domain away from them... The number of our clients who complain about being "hit" with STG£25 handling charges for retagging is quite worrying. A lot of other CCTLDs weigh in at a very similar price to .ie An example that Nick Hilliard cited was .es He didn't mention anything about the rules or regulations, then again I shouldn't be surprised, as most people focus entirely on the price. So let's look at that. .cz - Czech Republic, now part of the EU. Rules / restrictions - hardly any but the language barrier may prove awkward. Cost of domain registration (excluding time involved) approx €50 + VAT (They are still coming into line with EU fiscal policy for intra-EU transactions) .ie - Republic of Ireland. Rules/restrictions - quite a few, but registration is possible in most cases. Cost of domain registration (excluding time involved and any extra discounts etc.,) €45 ex-VAT .fr - France. Rules/restrictions - up until July of this year registration was restricted to French companies only. Cost approx €40, depending on reseller. What about the legal aspects of it all? Or, dare I mention, the technical aspects? .de - requires nameservers on 2 separate subnets and admin-c with address in Germany .it - can require 2 MX records. CNOBI - little or no technical knowledge required. ICANN rules "require" correct contact information, but in reality you could register a domain to Mickey Mouse and use any address or telephone number you wanted. Technical stuff?? They don't even care whether the domain has an SOA. The IEDR has brought down the wholesale price of IE domains and the rules, regulations and processes are in constant review. Would Comreg be able to do a better job? I doubt it. Will people stop whining about the price? I doubt that also. When you consider that you use a domain name as an integral part of your business' identity surely it is worth the price of one night out?

I finally got my DVD of Coppolla's Dracula back. I'd lent it out to Ashley about 3 years ago! I'd forgotten how dark a film it was, though I must admit that some of the cast were a little weak. Keanu Reeves' accent really grates on me, but Winona Ryder et al more than make up for it :mrgreen: Of course, to truly appreciate the film you should read the book: When I was about 18 I worked my way through most of Stoker's writings (or at least those I could get my hands on)... ah the memories!

Julian released a set of scripts to install Spam Assassin RC3 yesterday for both rpm and non-rpm based distros. You can get them here and maybe you'll have more luck with them than I did :mrgreen: I couldn't get it to work on the Whitebox machine I was trying to install it on, as it would not overwrite the contents of /usr/share/spamassassin After trying to rectify this in a number of ways I finally opted for a "clean" install using the tar.gz from the Spam Assassin site. Word of caution: If you are using custom rulesets you may need to remove them first, as a lot of them are now part of SA3's code. There are a number of new features in SA3 that should make it more interesting: - Mail::SpamAssassin::Plugin::URIDNSBL - SURBL - available via a plugin that ships with it. I must have a closer look at the scoring on this -Mail::SpamAssassin::Plugin::SPF - Checks for SPF content -Mail::SpamAssassin::Plugin::RelayCountry - fairly obvious, though I'm not sure what we can do with the output -Mail::SpamAssassin::Plugin::Hashcash - not 100% sure what that does :smile: Update: I did a bit more research into Hashcash. The concept is quite interesting. In essence you "earn" the right to send email by "spending" CPU cycles. As each email requires you to "spend" resources before you can send it a spammer would not be able to send the same volume of email, while a "normal", "legitimate" user would not even notice the slight delay. More information is available on the Hashcash site.

/usr/lib/MailScanner/MailScanner/CustomConfig.pm contains a number of handy little features that are not "on" by default. One which came up on the list today was IPBlock which allows you to control the maximum number of emails from a particular IP per hour. This might be useful for combatting infected machines spewing email at servers, but it still does not address the issue of the connection to the MTA. Vispan can also achieve this. It would be interesting to implement something like this that interfaced directly with IPTables instead of the MTA.

About 3 years ago I came across a fairly good, but quite incomplete, php meta-tag generator. It was capable of outputting a fairly rudimentary set of tags, but not as many as I would have likes, so I expanded it and kept it under the GPL. Apart from one or two minor tweaks I hardly touched it again until the other week, although I had been meaning to do something with it for aeons. I've cleaned up a lot of the hard-coded formatting, such as font tags etc., removed references to Fireball (a German search engine) and added a couple of other features. You can download it here