by ezs | Apr 14, 2008 | evilzenscientist, Uncategorized
I finally moved the mail service to Google Apps.
I looked long and hard; and even thought about moving the mail to a hosted environment for a few months.
Finally I tested out the google hosted email service – and it looks pretty good.
On the positives:
- fully hosted, in the cloud service
- backup, restore and availability are all looked after
- anti-virus is included
- anti-spam is fantastic
- web mail, POP and IMAP services
- 6GB ++ per user
- it’s FREE!
The only downsides are around:
- questions about privacy
- no SLA on the free service
At the end of the day this frees up two servers running multiple services; and saves me the backup and availability headaches.
eDirectory/Novell NetMail
It should also give family a better experience (webmail/POP to a google datacenter rather than to my server) and give me more bandwidth to play with.
by ezs | Apr 5, 2008 | evilzenscientist, Uncategorized
This was released at the end of last week – and it’s running on one of my blogs (this one – www.evilzenscientist.com)
Still running 2.3.x on the others – mainly for the Gallery 2 integration plugin WPG2.
WPG2 is a great plugin, ozgreg and capt_kirk have done a great job of making the join between the blogging and photo gallery worlds. Apparantly some heavy lifting is needed to integrate with WP2.5.
by ezs | Apr 4, 2008 | evilzenscientist, Uncategorized
One of the things I get to plan is moving the IT infrastructure. Pulling the plugs and moving the servers is the easy part; but what about the DSL, static IP, mail, MX records, DNS..
I think I’ve found a solution for the mail (hosting the mail server) and the DNS is already moved out and re-hosted on two different DNS servers. Might be just web-mail for a week or so – but that’s more than enough.
The blogs and photos will be offline while the servers are on the move – the rest of the infrastructure is just internal stuff; NAS, print, authentication etc.
Any hints and tips from those that have moved SLES and Windows 2003 servers before?
by ezs | Apr 4, 2008 | evilzenscientist, Uncategorized
Slowly but surely moving towards general availability.
Download from here.
by ezs | Mar 30, 2008 | evilzenscientist, Uncategorized
I’ve got three Apple Airport Express units to stream music around the house. They work really well – and when used with Rogue Amoeba Airfoil I can play pretty much any music now via Airtunes.
However… I’ve had a sticky problem for the last year – 50% of the time iTunes or Airfoil just can’t see all of the Airport Express boxes. I’ve spent a lot of time researching Bonjour (aka Rendezvous, zero touch, multicast DNS) and doing packet traces. No joy. Everything looks fine; the multicast DNS is working fine over 5353; the radius is within limits; firewalls are non-blocking; the data is not crossing a router. I was stumped.
Tonight I think I fixed the issue. As part of de-cluttering for the impeding house move I took my last 802.11b device off the wireless subnet and bumped the configuration to be exclusively 802.11g. Instantly everything started working.
So in summary: Airport Express, Airtunes, iTunes and Airfoil really work well on an exclusive 802.11g network.
Hope this helps someone else.
by ezs | Mar 25, 2008 | evilzenscientist, Uncategorized
Most hotel internet connections use an outbound SMTP proxy to store and forward email.
I’m never happy with that – it means that my mail could be delayed/lost/corrupted/tampered with/read on the way.
[Note: I know – SMTP is SMTP – it’s not secure; it’s like writing a postcard – but if I can avoid that proxy – it’s one less set of eyes..]
I’ve now configured Thunderbird to connect to a high port that’s NATted back down to port 25; I’ve also forced TLS to the mail server.
In theory that should keep my outbound mail (or really internal mail that only sits on my web server) a bit safer.
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