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. By default VIM will not look in that directory. To fix this I’m creating some symlinks from my local .vim directory:

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. Well… at least your private key is still safe (for now).

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 created two partitions on the 512 MB sized stick: /boot and /.

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:

1. postfix, only used for queuing and forwarding the mail
2. openSSH, for setting up a tunnel

OpenSSH config You will need to create a ssh tunnel to your mail server. This is the command I use:

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. But I couldn’t read it…

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. Dit address record heeft het IP adres van jouw host. Ik zal het hier over het domein miek.nl hebben. Ik ga verder niet in op de details die je moet regelen omdat voor elkaar te krijgen.

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. For the management I’m going with puppet and for the versioning I choose git.

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:

Installing Ubuntu (the modern way)

Right now I’m installing Ubuntu (gutsy) on some PC. The default install CD from ubuntu forces you to do this in X-window. And it all runs from a live-cd…. It’s slow and not usefull, and looking over my shoulder I see it has crashed in ‘Detecting Filesystems’…. Great.

I also hit an issue where the bottom of the installer program (ubuigity they call it) wasn’t completely visible on the screen, so I couldn’t click the forward buttons. I’m downloading the alternate install CD right now. That at least works quickly and ok.