Grrrrr cd rm -rf Desktop mv Documents docs I don’t want desktop environments messing with MY home directory. Thank you.

I’ve battled with amavis too often and I started to dislike it a little. So when I wanted to configured my postfix setup to scan for viruses and spam and needed a solution which would work without amavis. This is what I came up with. debian administration was kind enough to do the hard work, but this is only the setup for clamav and I also want to spam scan.

I’m trying to move my noisy server to the cellar I’m left with the question how do I cater for my desktop computer needs. I would be nice to have a thin client, but then you have the problem that local devices do not work: because you are actually working on the server, it needs to “know” somehow that you have locally inserted an USB disk. This sucks. So how about a thick client, a client with enough power to run a full blown Linux distro.

Small script which display “teletekst” pages from the Dutch teletext (or the Belgium, but I’ve never used that). I’m not the original author, but feel free to grab your copy. #!/usr/bin/perl # # Dit scriptje laat de NOS teletext zien # # (c) 2001, 2002, 2003 by Bas Zoetekouw <bas@debian.org> # All rights reserved. # # Naar een idee van Wouter Bergmann-Tiest # # Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without # modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions # are met: # 1.

This is an older article that I’ve brought back to live This was original written at the time of Linux 2.6.0 So be ware! update As it turns out, the script below never did work correctly (see the bottom of this page for an updated version). The reason it did work for me was that sshn INET_2 never blocked outgoing port 25…until October the 8th. This was at the same time I was experimenting with linux2.

This info can also be found on the Internet, but I thought I compile it here too. Problem You want to save something (say passwords) in a file and protect the file with a master password (say with your PGP/GPG key). This can be cumbersome unless you have vim. The following examples will handle *.gpg files differently, vim will decrypt the file when opening it and encrypt the file when writing it.

You all, of course, know about the fc command. From bash’s help system: fc: fc [-e ename] [-nlr] [first] [last] or fc -s [pat=rep] [cmd] fc is used to list or edit and re-execute commands from the history list. FIRST and LAST can be numbers specifying the range, or FIRST can be a string, which means the most recent command beginning with that string. Now I had the following problem: you have a file with shell commands in it.

Well, after giving Xmonad a chance I’ve reverted back to XFCE. This time with a 1-pixel wide window decoration. Short story: I really like the tiling of Xmonad (or any other tiling window manager). But you do miss some flexibility if you really want to move a window. Also I needed a panel and system tray, which are available as third-party tools, but aren’t the real deal. So back to XFCE.

Every now and then I get the ‘prompt-itch’ and then I need to tweak my prompt again :) Of course I’m very happy with the way my prompt was. My idea of a good prompt is to be as short as possible and still be informative about your environment: Only tell stuff I’m really interrested in and for the rest SHUT THE HELL UP! So no date output in my prompt, If I want to know the time I will type date myself.

I’ve created a new latex style to mimic some old school UNIX manuals I’ve been reading the past few months. It’s a very plain style that keeps out of your face. This in contrast with the blockbook style This is how it looks: You can read about it a small howto doc. To use it, you will also need the class file. UPDATE I’ve updated the style file so that the description lists will be indented with the same amount of space, no so more

Hmmm, this is the second time in 1 year that I had a corrupt filesystem on my raid partition. I saw no other option than mke2fs -j /dev/md7. My first problem with XFS started on my fileserver, which only had 256 MB of memory. Turns out XFS was OOM-ing inside the kernel, this in turned messed up the filesystem. xfs_repair was also running out of memory. When I finally got enough virtual memory in this box xfs_repair was kind enough to segfault.

The GNOME decadence thread got me thinking. What does GNOME give me? (I consider myself a hardcore UNIX user). Well… it gives a nice interface with a nice terminal implementation (gnome-terminal). Further more with the recent Ubuntu 8.04, it also provides PulseAudio, never got that working btw, went back to ALSA. Tracker, what the hell was ever wrong with locate? Never got that working, and when I did, it was dog slow.

I’m publishing this for my own future reference. A short usage guide on git for an ex-svn addict. goal client server init .git repo git init git init start remote repo git clone ssh://server add a file git add $file git add $file commit the file git commit -a -m"log" git commit -a -m"log" upload to server git push origin master import remote changes git reset --hard get changes from server git pull

Note: this is an older article that I’ve revived. Also note: in todays email flood I don’t know if such a popup is something you want to use… #intro I’ve used gnubiff, xbiff and God knows what to provide a simple notify when receiving mail. But I wanted more. I want to be able to tweak certain settings, without going in to the source code of the application. Also the way mail notifiers mess with your mailbox is not something I particularly like.

On Jun the 7th I gave a little presentation about DNSSEC at the NLLGG meeting. The presentation is in Dutch and the title is: “DNSSEC, wat is het? Komt het er ooit nog van?” (DNSSEC, what is it? Does it ever happen?) the pdf of the presentation

I’ve been using git for some time now, but as mentioned elsewhere the learning curse for this ‘stupid content tracker’ is quite steep. Right now I finally seem be getting the hang of it and can use it in a svn like manner. So we have: adding a file to a reposity: git add <file> committing it to the local branch: git commit -a -m"log" uploading it to the remote master: git push origin master And the one that took about 2 months to find:

Hmmpf, those Ubuntu guys are good. If just finished a painless upgrade to the new Ubuntu: Hardy Heron. Some subtile differences; better Gnome (new metacity with composer). And some other stuff that I’m discovering right now. :-)

The default VIM7 install is equipped with the English dictionary, but as I’m Dutch I wanted to use the Dutch spelling, unfortunately these spell files are not included in Ubuntu. The following article is a short howto on how to add this wonderful feature to your VIM. Dutch spelling Download your language from the debian experimental archive. I needed Dutch so I downloaded: /main/v/vim-spellfiles/vim-spellfiles-nl_20060604-1_all.deb Install this with: dpkg -i vim-spellfiles-nl_20060604-1_all.deb This will put some files in /usr/share/vim/addons.

Vim tip 21 allows you to copy text between VIM session running in different terminals! No more using your mouse to copy, just yank in one terminal and paste in another! Put this in your .vimrc: set clipboard=unnamed set go+=a

Usually people use SSH as a replacement for rsh, which is of course a good thing. SSH uses encryption to transport your password to the remote server for authentication. But SSH can do more, you can use a public/private key pair and set it up in such a way (google around for howto’s), that SSH will only transport a public key over the Internet. This way no passwords are transported, so even if someone breaks the encryption, no harm is done.

Goal The name of the game is getting a minimum maintenance RAID server up and running. The OS should be bootable from an USB stick and the RAID disks will be SATA disks. Installation and setup This section handles the initial installation and setup procedure. By keeping the OS small (and on USB) it will (hopefully) make backups and restores more easy, USB stick First install Debian/Ubuntu on the USB stick.

I’ve been running a development release of metacity for some time know and I really like it. Especially with the new composer that you can enable. I’ve made some screenshots of my setup: drop shadows Every menu and window has a drop shadow now, this shows the workspace switcher. Too bad this hasn’t got a fixup (yet?). alt-tabbing The new alt-tab screen. This looks quite a bit like the one from Compiz, but its very nice to have this in metacity itself.

older article that I’ve revived. Problem The problem: you have a laptop and you’re not always connected to the Internet. Still you want to sent mail even when you’re offline. You cannot use just any mail server out there, ‘cause a lot of them don’t relay. So you must use your own mail server. You'll need: postfix, only used for queuing and forwarding the mail openSSH, for setting up a tunnel OpenSSH config You will need to create a ssh tunnel to your mail server.

I’ve reworked my older DNS filesystem Perl script to make something nicer. It’s still not perfect, but works much better. You can now cat files for instance. The filesizes are something that should also be fixed, if set them to 512 bytes. From a DNS standpoint some other things can be improved. Right now everything is shown from a zone (everything that can be discovered that is), however this also includes glue…

Open recursors are a problem. They can be used by attackers to amplify a packet stream to a victim. As such you should only be running a recursor on your internal network and an authoritative server on your interfaces facing the big, bad Internet. You can run BIND9 with a split view (also called ‘split brain’), or use my setup: a NSD serving the outside world, and using BIND9 as recursor for your internal network.

I like tweak my prompt and I use zsh, thus I have infinite possibilities :-) I owe much the phil’s prompt which gave me a lot of ideas. My prompt is ofcourse in full color, as I’m a fan of that too. (Old UNIX users may shrudder at this point…) Right now I have a prompt that keeps out of my face, but when needed has some usefull extras; like showing background jobs and showing the exit code of the previous command if it wasn’t equal to zero.

Well, after having used the go’old mbox format, I have now changed my mail setup to maildir. What a difference. I think the load on my machine is actual less then before the transition. I used google (mbox convert maildir) to convert my setup to maildir, this was all relatively easy. Both postfix and procmail were “fixed” this way. After restarting I indeed saw mail being deliverd to my newly created Maildir directory in my homedir.

Ik beheer mijn eigen DNS en mijn eigen mail/web server op de computer die ik thuis heb staan; gewoon om te blijven leren hoe zulke zaken in elkaar steken. Ik zal hier vertellen hoe ik een site op heb gezet. Tis wel ontzettend lang geleden sinds ik dit allemaal opgezet heb, dus ik hoop dat ik het nog juist vertel. voorbereiding Dit verhaal gaat er vanuit dat je een domein hebt geregistreerd en dat er een A (address) record met de naam ‘www’ bestaan.

I’ve worked with cfengine in the past and really like it. It really cuts down on management for the systems that used it. For my home network I thought I try something else, that something turned out to be puppet. I must say that I already like it more than cfengine as you can write much smaller manifests. goals I want to centralize the management of the files in /etc and I want to keep track of changes of the file.

more Compare the following: $ touch -- -x $ less -- -x <control-C> $ more -- -x more: unknown option "-x" usage: more [-dflpcsu] [+linenum | +/pattern] name1 name2 ... WTF? more doesn’t know what “–” means. Okay, time for a patch. uniq $ uniq --help Usage: uniq [OPTION]... [INPUT [OUTPUT]] Ah, so we support an INPUT file and an OUTPUT file…that’s not really unix like IMHO. And what you suppose does: