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Drupal

by | Jan 12, 2006 | blogging, evilzenscientist, Linux, Uncategorized

My sister is the Akela of a cub pack back home in England. She wanted something ‘on the web’ – she now has a blog and a website.

I looked at all sorts of options for building the website – it needed to be easy to use, minimal maintenance, good functionality – but also secure, not resource hungry and obviously run on Apache, PHP and MySQL.

I eventually selected Drupal.  It has an active developer community; the architecture and structure was logical; the security seems good. Best of all it’s easy enough for non-IT people to use.

Mail, spam and viruses – update

by | Jan 9, 2006 | evilzenscientist, Linux, Uncategorized

I experimented several times during the holidays on various configurations of SpamAssassin and the like. I finally settled on something I liked and was easy to manage.

I found an addition to IPcop that added these services in a controllable manner – CopFilter – http://www.copFilter.org.

CopFilter plugs into IPcop and adds (for me) an SMTP proxy, ClamAV, SpamAssassin – as well as giving me a really simple web UI to manage things. Best of all all of the components are GPL.

I’ve trained the anti-spam – and it’s really working better so far than my own manual tweaking on a seperate server. 🙂

So far so good – I’ll keep track of the performance and post the results later.

Mail, spam and viruses

by | Dec 6, 2005 | evilzenscientist, Linux, Uncategorized

Sigh.

I keep tweaking and tightening my anti-spam rules for my mail server – but the amount of inbound spam is getting crazy. I’m catching about 95% of bad mail – and getting all viruses – but I’m looking at switching to a dedicated inbound mail filter.

I’m probably going to run SpamAssassin and ClamAV running on SLES9.

Windows XP passwords

by | Dec 2, 2005 | evilzenscientist, Linux, Uncategorized

Don’t ask why – but I had need to reset an Administrator password on a Windows XP workstation today.

I had forgotten the password, it was locked out, the machine wasn’t in AD – and I was stuck.

Luckily there are a wealth of tools to help in this situation – including this. Petter Nordahl-Hagen has written a stunning Linux based boot floppy that just fixes things like this in seconds. Thanks Petter.