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Strange world

by | Jul 5, 2008 | Linux, Uncategorized

I travelled wearing my black Ximian staff shirt; then I got stopped in the airport by a Gnome fanboy who told me that the Ximian Desktop rocked!

Linux will not displace Windows – proof

by | Aug 31, 2007 | fun stuff, Linux, Uncategorized

Haha. This was forwarded to me and made me smile.

Why Linux will not displace Windows

Here’s the incredible response:

You are kidding arent you ?
 
Are you saying that this linux can run on a computer without windows underneath it, at all ? As in, without a boot disk, without any drivers, and without any services ?
That sounds preposterous to me.
If it were true (and I doubt it), then companies would be selling computers without a windows. This clearly is not happening, so there must be some error in your calculations. I hope you realise that windows is more than just Office ? Its a whole system that runs the computer from start to finish, and that is a very difficult thing to acheive. A lot of people dont realise this.
Microsoft just spent $9 billion and many years to create Vista, so it does not sound reasonable that some new alternative could just snap into existence overnight like that. It would take billions of dollars and a massive effort to achieve. IBM tried, and spent a huge amount of money developing OS/2 but could never keep up with Windows. Apple tried to create their own system for years, but finally gave up recently and moved to Intel and Microsoft.
Its just not possible that a freeware like the Linux could be extended to the point where it runs the entire computer fron start to finish, without using some of the more critical parts of windows. Not possible.
I think you need to re-examine your assumptions.
 
Posted by: jerryleecooper Posted on: 03/14/07

Of mail servers

by | Dec 28, 2006 | evilzenscientist, Linux, Technology, Uncategorized

I wrote about moving my primary mail server to SLES 10 and Netmail 3.5.2 a month ago.

Everything has been working really well – great uptime, better performance, another box moved to SLES 10..

Except for one little thing. Grania has been commenting that some of her email is missing.

Well – it’s not been in the inbound SpamAssassin kill files; it’s not stuck on the mail server; there are no errors with connectivity; no problems with DNS or MX records. The mail has been from all over – so it’s not someone like Yahoo being picky. Also normal mail has been coming in fine – so we’ve not been blackholed.

Tonight I decided to hunt down the problem.

It was me. I missed one step for the migration of mail; to use Netmail rules and forwarding the AutoReply agent needs creating and configuring.

The AutoReply Agent also enables users to forward their messages to another e-mail address. Users can specify if they want to retain a copy of the message in their NetMail mailbox or forward the message to the designated address.

Ooops. I missed that one. Three mouse clicks later and everything is back to normal.

I just trawled the aliases and there were over 400 mails to forward to the real mailboxes.

Bayes learning, SpamAssassin, Novell NetMail and Copfilter

by | Nov 17, 2006 | evilzenscientist, fun stuff, Linux, Technology, Uncategorized

 

I use IPcop and Copfilter as my firewall/spam/email filtering gateway. Free and easy. Scales well.

I’ve had problems with Copfilter running the Bayesian learning for spam assassin; in short copfilter runs a wrapper script to call into sa-learn.pl.

I found that the IMAP->message_to_file was just sitting waiting for input from the NetMail server I run. Simple fix; add a timeout to IMAP reads and increase the IMAP buffer size. This should let me get all of the body text for learning, and timeout on massive inline images.

I logged a bug and posted a fix to the DMZS-sa-learn.pl script

my $imap = Mail::IMAPClient->new(
Server => ‘foo.com:143’,
User => ‘spamtrainer’,
Password => ‘longpassword’,
Debug => ‘1’,
#ezs edits
Timeout => ‘5’,
Buffer => ‘65536’,
);

Spam training is working perfectly now – Copfilter is eating its way through 3600 spam and about 6000 ham (non spam) messages.

Collanos

by | Sep 8, 2006 | 'Web 2.0', evilzenscientist, Linux, Uncategorized

A colleague from Novell moved to Collanos – I looked at their products – and it’s interesting.

The Collanos Workplace seems to fill several of my needs for working with my team:

– document sharing and management
– team task lists
– discussions
– cross platform

Most importantly – the model is peer-to-peer. That means that none of my ‘corporate data’ ever lives on someone elses server. That was one of the major downsides to using something like Backpack or Basecamp. (Cool – but kinda interesting from a risk and security angle).

By having this ‘built’ and in the web it also means I don’t have to build an internal server, manage it, keep it safe, back it up – and also use VPN to get data in and out of it.

Feedback soon. I’ve sent the team the data – we should be running in a couple of days.