blog.dataforce.org.uk

This post is part of a series.

1. DNS Hosting - Part 1: History
2. DNS Hosting - Part 2: The rewrite (This Post)
3. DNS Hosting - Part 3: Putting it all together

In my previous post about DNS Hosting I discussed the history leading up to when I decided I needed a better personal DNS hosting solution. I decided to code one myself to replace what I had been using previously.

I decided there was a few things that were needed:

• Fully-Featured API
  • I wanted full control over the zone data programmatically, everything should be possible via the API.
  • The API should be fully documented.
• Fully-Featured default web interface.
  • There should be a web interface that fully implements the API. Just because there is an API shouldn’t mean it has to be used to get full functionality.
  • There should exist nothing that only the default web ui can do that can’t be done via the API as well.
• Multi-User support
  • I also host some DNS for people who aren’t me, they should be able to manage their own DNS.
• Domains should be shareable between from users
  • Every user should be able to have their own account
  • User accounts should be able to be granted access to domains that they need to be able to access
    • Different users should have different access levels:
      • Some just need to see the zone data
      • Some need to be able to edit it
      • Some need to be able to grant other users access
• Backend Agnostic
  • The authoritative data for the zones should be stored independently from the software used to serve it to allow changing it easily in future

These were the basic criteria and what I started off with when I designed MyDNSHost.

A while ago I posted a python script that allowed automatically adding labels to GMail messages based on contact groups.

Unfortunately, a side effect of this script was that Google occasionally would lock an account out for “suspicious activity”, and for this reason I stopped using the script.

However recently I looked at Google Apps Scripts to see if this would allow me to recreate this using Google-Approved APIs, and the good news is, yes it does.

The following script implements the same behaviour as the old python script. It checks every thread from the past 2 dates (so today, and yesterday) and then for each message in the thread gets the list of groups the sender is in (if the sender is a contact, and in any groups) and then checks to see if there are labels that match the same name, if so it applies them to the message.

To get this running, create a new project on the Google Apps script page, then paste the code in.

Modify scheduledProcessInbox and processInboxAll to include a label prefix if desired (eg contacts/) and then enable the desired schedule (click on the clock icon in the toolbar). Once this has been scheduled you can run an initial pass over the inbox using processInboxAll() - however this is limited to the last 500 threads.

The code can now be found here on github

Any questions/comments/bugs please leave them here or on github.

First post in over a year! Oops.

For a while now, my home ADSL provider (EntaNET) has provided me with an IPv6 allocation, but I’ve never really used it (Its been on my to-do list for some time) primarily due to the fact that it is unsupported by Endian which I use for my home router/firewall.

However the other day after being asked about IPv6 at my day job, I decided I wanted to get this working, and decided to document it here in case it can assist anyone else in future. (I also finally got round to completing the Hurricane Electric IPv6 Certification up to sage level)

There’s a few things worth noting before we continue here.

1. I use a Draytek Vigor 120 for my adsl modem - this is a PPPoA to PPPoE bridge. This means that my Endian box uses PPPoE to get its Internet connection, and directly receives an IPv4 address via the PPP session. There is no “PPP Half-Bridge” tricks here (such as where Modem does authentication, then DHCPs the address to Endian).
2. Due to Endian lacking support for IPv6 you will need to use SSH to configure this, and any Endian upgrades will probably reverse a fair chunk of it. (Also, some reconfigurations may also undo things) - so with this in mind the rest of this guide assumes you are familiar with SSH and have successfully logged in as root to the Endian box (SSH can be enabled under the “System” section and “SSH Access”).
3. Due to previous requirements, my Endian server is not “pure” in that I have additional packages installed that made this easier. Notably, a complete build environment. This won’t be needed here.
4. This was all done without writing it down, so this documentation is based on my recollection and attempts at replicating various parts on a VirtualBox VM (which can’t do PPPoE…). If I’ve missed anything, please let me know in the comments.
5. This was done with EFW 2.4.0 and may not work in the latest 2.5.1 version.
6. I have only had this running for a few days, so there may be some unforeseen issues with this.

With this in mind, we continue to the actual important stuff!

I recently encountered a problem on a server that I manage where by the oidentd server didn’t seem to be working.

Manual tests worked, but connecting to IRC Servers didn’t.

I tried switching oidentd with ident2 and the same problem.

After switching back, and a bit of debugging later it appeared that the problem was that the IRC Servers were expecting spaces in the ident reply, whereas oidentd wasn’t giving them.

I then quickly threw together an xinet.d-powered ident server with support for spoofing.

Recently I setup gitweb on one of my servers to allow a web-based frontend to any git projects which the users of the server place in their ~/git/ directory.

After playing about with it, I noticed that it allowed for placing a README.html file in the git config directory to allow extra info to be shown on the summary view, managed to get it to pull the README.html file from the actual repository itself, and not the config directory, thus allowing the README.html to be versioned along with everything else, and not require the user to edit it on the server, but rather just edit it locally and push it.

Recently I acquired a T-Mobile G1 to replace my old T-Mobile MDA Vario 2 (HTC Hermes).

All I can say about this phone is that it is quite awesome. I no longer need to run an exchange server to keep my contacts/calendar synced somewhere as the G1 syncs everything to Google Mail/Calendar.

Its a really good phone and I recommend it to anyone who is thinking of getting a new phone, the integration with Google is especially useful, and the full-html (including CSS and javascript) is very nice.

As as I mentioned before I’ve been recently converting an old project to Java.

This old project was an MDI application, and when creating the UI for the conversion, I found the default JDesktopPane to be rather crappy. Google revealed others thought the same, one of the results that turned up was: http://www.javaworld.com/javaworld/jw-05-2001/jw-0525-mdi.html

So, I created DFDesktopPane based on this code, with some extra changes:

• Frames can’t end up with a negative x/y
• Respond to resize events of the JViewport parent
• Iconified icons move themselves to remain inside the desktop at all times.
• Handles maximised frames correctly (desktop doesn’t scroll, option to hide/remove titlebar)

My modified JDesktopPane can be found as here part of my dflibs Google code project.

Other useful things can be found here, take a look and leave any feedback either here or on the project issue tracker

NOTE: The information in this article has been superceeded by this one.

As Noted by Chris recently on IRC, Google Mail lacks a feature in its ability to automatically label/filter messages - you can’t do it based on emails from people in a contact group, short of adding a filter with all their email address on it.

At the time it was mentioned this didn’t affect me, however later when I got round to adding loads of labels/filters in gmail (yay for, nicely coloured inbox!) to nicely separate things for me I also ran into this problem, so came up with the following python script that does it for me.

It checks messages, sees if the sender is in the contacts, then checks each group to see if there is a label with that group name that is not already set, then checks to see if the contact is in the group, and finally sets the label if everything matches up.

I was recently looking at converting an old application from VB6 to Java that used MD5 in its output files as hashes for validation.

The first thing I did was to make a java class that read in the file and checked the hashes, I tried it on a few files and it worked fine, then I found a file that it failed on.

Now, this app wrote all the files using the exact same function, so it seemed odd that 1 of them wouldn’t parse and the rest would.

When I looked at the file closer, I found that this one contained some symbols in the output that the others didn’t - I eventually figured out that the symbol that was causing the problem was the pound sign (£).

Without going into too much detail, this presented a major problem, the string in question was used as part of the password validation for the app (the output files are encrypted using the password as a key), and the java code was getting different results than the old VB6 code, and was unable to decode the file as a result.

So, this sparked my curiosity a bit, the VB6 code I was using wasn’t a built in, it was code I’d gotten elsewhere and used, so I assumed it was faulty code (not that this helped me much, as I needed to get the exact same output, but ignoring that).

Edit: This is now pretty much unneeded, the new version of VirtualBox seems to handle this all nicely on its own.

As I mentioned in my last post, One of the useful advantages of the network boot setup is that I can use it to quickly install virtual machines.

Now a few things:

• My Desktop is a lot more powerful than my server, so I run the virtual machines on it.
• I use virtualbox rather than vmware.
• All the network boot stuff is on my server not my desktop (obviously)

So in order to allow this, virtualbox needed to be setup to bridge to my existing adapter, this was quite straight forward, pretty much exactly as the manual said.