Previously, I had setup an Ubuntu Karmic box to install Boxee from the apt.boxee.tv APT repository. Since this repository appears to be unmaintained, I’m now reverting back to manual Boxee installs until an updated repository becomes available.
I haven’t been getting any SPAM lately, so I thought I’d turn on catch-all to see what happens. Accepting mail for invalid recepients (e.g. anything @mydomain) caused about twice as much SPAM to be attempted, but still nothing got through to my Inbox:
------------------------------------ Stats for Feb 2010 ------------------------------------ Ham SpamC SpamR SpamM HamC 192 126 1951 0 0 -------------------------------------------------------------- 2269 Total messages 2077 Total Spam (Caught + Missed + Rejected) 91.53% Spam as % of all mail 93.93% % of Spam rejected by Postfix at SMTP time 0% False positive rate (Ham misclassified as Spam) 0% False negative rate (Spam misclassified as Ham) 100.00% Spam catch rate (Spam filter accuracy) --------------------------------------------------------------
As you can see, Postfix got most of it, then SpamAssasin got the rest. I heart Postfix and SpamAssassin. 
Did a fresh install of Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic) on an old Inspiron E1505, only to find Wi-Fi not working. Fortunately the fix was easy.
Following a recent update, started getting errors copying files to a WebDAV mount point:
cp: cannot create regular file `./todo': File exists
Here’s a simple solution to run multiple instances of Firefox, each with own user profile (and thus cookies, extensions and themes), all running as separate processes. Useful for troubleshooting and to keep one misbehaving site from crashing all your firefox windows (I’m guilty of running way too many at once).
Got thousands of tar archives being transferred from various machines to one repository. Found that some of the archives are bad, either because the network transfer didn’t complete or the archive process was interrupted on the machine that created the archive (due to insufficient disk space, etc). Whatever the cause, needed a method to verify the archive integrity.
Tar provides options for verify the archive integrity by comparing it with the file system. In this case, I needed the ability to verify the archive without access to the original file system.
The BASH one liner below will find all archives below current directory, loop through each one attempting to list its contents, discard the archive content list, capture and log the tar command’s exit status along with archive name and redirect both to a log. Exit status of 0 means the archive is good, 2 means it’s bad (haven’t seen a 1). Redirecting output to /dev/null while capturing exit status turned out trickier than I thought, but this seems to work well:
1 | for f in $(find . -name "*tar.bz2"); do tar tfj $f &> /dev/null; err="$?"; echo $err $f >> tar-check.list; done |
The split command is one gem of a Giant Dork tool, but it expects to be given the number of lines to split a file along. It’s easy enough to fire up a calculator to do this, but sometimes a programmatic method is desirable. Here’s a bashism that’ll do it:
1 | split -l $(echo $(( $(cat sourcefile | wc -l) / 3))) sourcefile sourcefile. |
Had to setup an FTP server at work (yuck), guides I found elsewhere didn’t do exactly what I was after, so it took some trial and error to achieve the setup I needed.
If you aren’t using StartSSL for your SSL certificate needs, you should take a hard look in the mirror and ask if the outrageous prices aged established Certificate Authorities charge are still justified. After all, it’s the same encryption — what you’re paying for is browser support. Well, from the consumer perspective, rigor of the validation process is even more important — ironically, I found StartCom validation process for their $40 Class 2 certificates to be far more rigorous than the “established” players who charge twenty times that.
When I first took a StartCom cert for a spin a couple of years ago, the issue I had was spotty browser support. Today, I’m happy to report that web browser support for the free StartSSL certificate is excellent. Well, almost…
Boxee folks helpfully host an APT repository (http://apt.boxee.tv/), but, as of this writing, only for Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy) and 8.10 (Intrepid). But if you happen to run a later version such as 9.04 (Jaunty) or 9.10 (Karmic), you could still install from the Boxee repository through the magic of APT pinning. This method should work just as well with later versions of Ubuntu also.