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.

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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…

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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.

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On CentOS 5.4, the vnstat cron job generates an error:

Error: Unable create database backup "/var/lib/vnstat/.venet0".

By default, vnstat cron job runs as “nobody”, yet the database file “/var/lib/vnstat/venet0″ was owned by root, changing its ownership to “nobody”, fixed the problem:

chown nobody:nobody /var/lib/vnstat/*

I liked Jason’s solution of passing a file list to du via xargs to produce results sorted by size in human readable format, but wanted ability to limit file list by name and age. Combining the find command with du, worked out nicely:

find . -name "*tar.bz2" -mmin -120 -ls | sort -k7rn | awk '{print$NF}' | xargs du -sh
122M	./sls-monitor/830144.tar.bz2
98M	./sls-monitor/830156.tar.bz2
67M	./sls-off1/905895.tar.bz2
50M	./sls-off1/893748.tar.bz2
16M	./sls-off1/893759.tar.bz2
7.3M	./sls-off1/905897.tar.bz2
5.1M	./sls-off1/854850.tar.bz2
4.4M	./sls-monitor/804331.tar.bz2
3.8M	./sls-monitor/804333.tar.bz2
612K	./sls-off1/893755.tar.bz2
512K	./sls-off1/905898.tar.bz2

When syncing files over a trusted network, where speed matters more than someone’s ability to see contents of the transfer, might want to run rsync as a daemon instead of using remote shell as the transport.

In my tests, running rsync as a daemon produces file transfers almost twice as fast as when rsyncing over SSH.

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Dec 09 was the first month I had achieved 100% spam catch rate since I started filtering my own mail a few years ago. Thanks, SpamAssassin Bayes plugin! Merry Xmas to you as well!

------------------------------------
Stats for Dec 2009
------------------------------------
Ham	SpamC	SpamR	SpamM	HamC
160	392	1273	0	0
--------------------------------------------------------------
1825		Total messages
1665		Total Spam (Caught + Missed + Rejected)
91.23%		Spam as % of all mail
76.45%		% 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)
--------------------------------------------------------------

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