I can’t but help think there is a funny cartoon just waiting to pop up behind this story.

A few weeks ago, we went to San Antonio Zoo for a day trip. I have finally had a chance to go through, and upload some of the images from the trip. This is one of my favourite images. There are more here.

I have been curious about building “the ultimate Linux Desktop” for a while, but one of the requirements would be support for my Nikon D70s. As I shoot in RAW format, and that is usually propitiatory per camera manufacturer (Nikon is NEF), some special software is required, so I googled for “Linux Nikon RAW”, and stumbled across this, which runs down a list of software that he uses for all of his editing. Quite interesting, now all I need is a new server/desktop, and lots more money for new lenses.

While I know there are plenty of documents on how to defeat spam with Postfix and various tools, I’m still quite amazed at how effective two options are. They are:

smtpd_sender_restrictions =
                            reject_unknown_sender_domain

And:

smtpd_client_restrictions =
                            cidr:/etc/postfix/access_cidr,
                            check_client_access hash:/etc/postfix/access,
                            reject_rbl_client relays.ordb.org,
                            reject_rbl_client sbl-xbl.spamhaus.org

Now the cidr: line isn’t necessary above, but it’s handy if you want to shut down a whole IP block. The above two configurations have dropped the spam abuse on one of the servers I manage from about 90 or so a day, down to about 25. I was considering adding spamcop.net to the above RBLs, however, they’ve been known to blacklist SourceForge’s servers on a regular basis.

Just jumped onto Freenode, and saw a wallop pop up from christel. She’s a freenode staffer mentioning something about sending condolences, I was a little baffled until I read this. Rob Levin, the administrator from Freenode, was sadly hit by a car whilst riding his bike, and later died in hospital. A very sad day indeed.

This is more of a reference for myself because I keep forgetting it. The command last is used to pull up the login history for the active account. This is a handy little command to see if your account has been a little more active than it should have been (though any good hacker would have erased the information). I also find it handy if I have forgotten the IP address of my home system.

Half way through my vacation last week, my computer started running a little sluggish. Started taking longer to boot up, logins were taking significantly longer, and I started getting a weird error message right after logon.

Ever updated a domain record, and found that your Outlook still caches the old record? I was hit with this last week while on vacation (everything happens on vacation). I had been emailing my boss, when our corporate office changed his record (actually deleted it), and made “live” his actual email account, rather than a forwarder account. I suddenly started getting bounce backs reporting the account didn’t exist any more.

The other day, I somehow stumbled across a video of a Dell Optiplex GX520 being turned off by a cell phone. Most amusing. I even tried copying it for some giggles with the guys at work (I was bored after all). Usually I don’t post silly things like this, but I think I stumbled on another weird occurrence of it. While attempting to remotely login to one of our servers in the office over RDP, I miss-typed my password. This let out the usual PC speaker beep. I had the PC speaker volume cranked all the way up (I’d just been playing games).

When the beep went off, screen flickered, and then nothing… all was quiet… dead… turned off. On powering the laptop back up (a Dell Inspiron 9300), Windows booted just fine, and it behaved as if it was a clean boot. It didn’t give me any pretty warnings about unusual stops, or crashes, or anything like that… Most unusual.

Well, I am apparently unable to take a vacation… ever.

As I previously mentioned, Thursday last week, at about 0200 our main line went down. It was down for about an hour until I got it back up again. Later that morning, I spoke with our line provider SpeakEasy, they did some line tests, and reported a lot of noise on the line. They decided to engage our line provider to have a look at the line. They got back to us and reported the line would have to be replaced, and have set about doing it. This was where it was left on Thursday. The line had stabilized, all was well…