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smtp with telnet

Paul Westbrook | 15 January, 2006 19:37

I can never remember the smtp commands when I am trying to test out a change to my mail servers.  This page gives examples of sending smtp commands through telnet.

One thing that is missing is that when testing authenticated smtp connections, you need to replace HELO with EHLO

Technorati Tags: smtp, system admin

Definition of broadband

Paul Westbrook | 14 January, 2006 19:50

We are staying in a Residence Inn for a while, and they claim to have high-speed internet in each room.  They are accomplishing this by making a 802.11b network available to all the rooms.

Is there a minimum definition of what can be considered high-speed internet connection?  This network connection is pretty slow.  The ping times from here to google.com, are in the 1000 - 2000 ms range, which is pretty poor.
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Airport Express sharing Wireless

Paul Westbrook | 13 January, 2006 21:51

We are staying in a place, for a little while, that has a 802.11 network.  I wanted to try to  bring our Vonage ATA with us, so we could still receive phone calls.

I brought a Airport Express, thinking that I could use it to be a gateway from the wireless network to the Vonage ATA.  Unfortunatelly, this doesn't work.  Even though you can share a wired connection with wireless clients, when you set up the Airport Express to get it's network connection as a Wireless client, it disables the Ethernet port.

I assume that this is is because they don't want to take market from the Airport Extreme.

Technorati Tags: Airport Express

Setting up postfix

Paul Westbrook | 12 January, 2006 21:25

When I set up the mail server, I had some interesting problems. 

Fedora Core 2 comes with Sendmail installed by default.  I like using Postfix, so installed a Postfix and redhat-switch-mail.  I ran redhat-switch-mail, and switch the MTA to Postfix.  I then configured Postfix to only not relay mail spam mail, and only accept mail for our domains.

When I started Postfix, I noticed that a bunch of spam messages were getting through and being relayed.  I immediately shutdown Postfix so I could figure out what was going on.  It looks like the redhat-switch-mail program didn't actually removed the Sendmail xinit.d file.  So the Sendmail was accepting messages without any filtering, and was forwarding it to Postfix.  I immediately disabled this script.
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Picture of car with new springs

Paul Westbrook | 12 January, 2006 02:44

I finally got around to taking a picture of our Sentra with the new springs. I'd have to say, I really do like the way that the car handles now.

With the springs:

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moved servers

Paul Westbrook | 12 January, 2006 00:50

I finally moved the rest of my sites from the server in our house to an external VPS.  Now when we move, all of the sites will be available.

When moving this blog, I did have to deal with the difference in mysql version number as I did before, but I found out that if you specify --skip-opt, the output is more compatible with versions of mysql earlier than 4.1.
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iTunes security with MiniStore

Paul Westbrook | 11 January, 2006 12:10

Some people are considering iTunes to be malware for the MiniStore feature of iTunes 6.0.2.  They say that it is a violation of privacy that iTunes is sending information about your music to external servers.  This happens even if you are not explicitly in the iTunes Music Store.

There doesn't appear to be any personal information, other than the currently selected tracks, sent to the servers.  I can think that there should be an option that the user could set to disable this feature.  I personally, will leave this feature enabled.  In fact, I want the recommendations to show for the currently playing track, and not just the currently selected track.
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Linksys KiSS DP-600

Paul Westbrook | 09 January, 2006 20:00

Linksys is coming out with a network DVD player that supports HD DVDs (in Windows Media Video format) and music files.  It has a 802.11g connection to access the video and audio files.  In addition, it can access the Internet to access online weather forecasts, games  and Video-On Demand.

It looks like it used to be the KISS DP-600, I assume that Linksys just bought it.  Unfortunately, it looks like this is only available in Europe.

[via Gizmodo, HD Beat]

Technorati Tags: DP-600, Linksys

Oyster Speakers

Paul Westbrook | 09 January, 2006 19:10

I listened to the Geek News Central podcast recapping CES, and it mentioned Oyster Speakers.  It sounds like they will be coming out with speakers that will get the audio from a 802.11 signal.  They mentioned that it is possible to use them as a stereo setup, or in a surround sound system.

They mentioned that the speakers would be available later in 2006, and would be about $500 for a pair.  This would be a lot cheaper than the Polk Netstreams speakers.

Technorati Tags: 802.11, Netstreams, Oyster Speakers, speakers

Securing MySQL

Paul Westbrook | 09 January, 2006 18:51

This page has some good instructions for securing a MySQL installation.

Technorati Tags: mysql, security

Hopes for the MacWorld Keynote

Paul Westbrook | 09 January, 2006 13:28

I am hoping that Apple announces a new Mac mini, that comes with FrontRow installed.  Since I have decide to move most of the external facing services from my server at home to a VPS, the main thing that my server is being used for is hosting my music.

If Apple announces a Mac mini that comes with FrontRow, I would go out and buy one and put all of my music on it and connect it to my TV.  Also, the DVI connection and the 1920 x 1200 resolution, would allow videos to look great.

Technorati Tags: FrontRow, Mac mini

Details of Mail.app's IMAP implementation

Paul Westbrook | 08 January, 2006 16:22

Transitioning between different mail servers is very easy when using IMAP.  All that you need to do is to configure your mail client for both accounts, and then just drag the mail messages and folders between the two.

I did this to move the mail to the new server, and I noticed some interesting things in Mail.app when transferring these messages.

1. When copying a folder that has both mail messages and other folder, the messages in the root folder sometimes didn't get copied
2. Mail doesn't deal well with a IMAP accout that is above it's disk space quota.  It just states "Unknown Error".  (Thunderbird handles this well.)

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Moving mysql database

Paul Westbrook | 07 January, 2006 22:35

In the process of moving to a Fedora Core 2 server, I have had to move some databases from one machine to another.  At first, I tried to just copy the database files, and then restart mysql.  This didn't work.  I then realized that Fedora Core 2 has version 3.23 of mysql, while Fedora Core 4 has version 4.1.

I then tried to run mysqldump, and then run that .sql file on Fedora Core 2, but I kept getting messages like this:

ERROR 1064 at line 21: You have an error in your SQL syntax near 'ENGINE=MyISAM DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1' at line 11

I was able to work around this by removing the "ENGINE=MyISAM DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1" string from each of the CREATE TABLE commands.  I knew that this wouldn't cause a problem since in mysql version 3.23 and later MyISAM was the default engine type.

Technorati Tags: Fedora, mysql

Configuring cyrus imapd

Paul Westbrook | 07 January, 2006 20:31

It has been a long time since I configured cyrus imap.  I found these instructions that worked pretty well.

Also, a while ago I posted some instructions that I used to setup ssl for imap.  I just found that the cyrus-imapd rpm includes a Makefile that can create the ssl certs.

Technorati Tags: cyrus imapd

building db4 for Fedora Core 2

Paul Westbrook | 07 January, 2006 18:52

I am in the process of setting up a VPS to host my web and mail server.  With Tektonic, the latest version of Fedora that is available is Fedora Core 2.  The version of db4 that was included with Fedora Core 2 had a problem with non Intel CPUs.  Bug 91933 at Red Hat's Bugzilla system describes this problem.

This bug report also has a work around.  It requires rebuilding db4 with
spec file that doesn't use posix mutexes.

Here is the spec file

Here is a patch file

Here is a needed wrapper script.

Technorati Tags: db4, Fedora

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