This post is a little more of a rant than I usually make, but I think its warranted. If you don’t know what a feedback loop is, read here. I’m not sure who thinks its a good idea to replace all instances of an email addresses in a feedback loop with [redacted]@feedbackloopcompany.com, but it is …
If something happens that requires you to recreate /dev/null on your *nix system. Don’t fret, it’s easy. The most recent issue I had was that a Capistrano recipe inadvertently clobbered /dev/null. The file looked like this: 12[root@web1 ~]# ls -l /dev/null -rw-r--r-- 1 capistrano engineering 0 May 26 04:02 /dev/null Thankfully to bring it back …
This is the first in a multipart series on better SPAM fighting through log parsing. I have found that better Systems Administration can usually be achieved through proper log handling and analysis. In fact, I will use the data from one of the secondary mail servers in my personal mail setup in order to demonstrate …
I was looking for way to make my SPAM filtering more effective and came across this great tool from Mike Cappella called amavisd-logwatch. On his web site, it says he doesn’t like waiting for package maintainers, so its just a tarball. Since my installs are Debian based, I created a deb for it. My .deb …
There are so many variations on the original and good old useful version of Linux top that I figured I would list a few of the ones that I find handy on occasion. As with anything else, they all have their usefulness and each one can be more useful than any other at a particular …
I have Google’d around asked a lot of smart people and still can’t come up with a solid answer. More specifically, the question I have is: Why, when sending emails to certain domains, do I get the error: 451 Could not load DRD for domain Because I deal with fairly large mailing lists, I see …
I spent a while trying to set up DKIM with Postfix on CentOS 5.2. I read the HOWTOs on HOWToForge written by Andrew Colin Kissa (aka TopDog) who subsequently helped me towards getting this setup working. My setup is that I have a mail spooler and multiple mail senders. This is to say that the …
I use a lot of VPS and often times, they don’t actually have yum to make my life easier. So here is a quick HOWTO on installing yum on a CentOS box. This assumes that you have rpm and wget already installed. Note: This will only work on CentOS 5.2 while the mirror is still …
I came up against the interesting problem of putting multiple stand alone apache tomcat instances with different virtual host names on the same machine that all needed to be accessible via port 80 (on the same IP). There is always mod_jk, but that seems like a bit too much to fix a simple problem. Being …
Since I know I am not the first (or the last) to make a typo in logrotate and not catch it for a while…someone else must have been in the position of having to delete a lot of files in the same manner. I recently learned that, as usual, there is more than one way …
