blog.dataforce.org.uk

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.

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.

On a daily basis, I get around 800 emails to my email accounts, of which most of it is spam.

Now as good as thunderbird is at detecting spam, even it fails at a lot of the spam I receive, leaving me with around 100-200 spam per day that gets into my inbox.

I’ve dealt with and accepted this for over a year now, before a discussion on IRC made me decide to do something about it. (When I say discussion, I mean Chris pasted one line showing how good the UTD-Hosting mail server was at preventing junk getting to him)

So, I recently (Today and yesterday) started prodding my postfix config to help with the problem.

I (Along with Chris ‘MD87’ Smith and Greg ‘Greboid’ Holmes have recently started working on DMDirc (again, only this time its in Java to help towards the original aim of the project to be a decent, truly cross platform IRC Client)

Its coming along quite well :)

You can track the progress, (and download the current release which is 0.1) at the Google Code Project or the Project Website

Lemme know what you think.

With the release of windows vista, comes the start-of-the-end for Windows XP. with its EOL (End-Of-Life) date now set at January 30th 2008 (that’s less than a year away), people (by people I mean windows users) who are unable to upgrade to vista (due to Lack of computing power or so) or don’t want it (its crap, proprietary, riddled with DRM and probably bugs - Microsoft are already producing SP1!) need to start looking for alternatives, unless they want to stay using an unsupported (this means no more bug/security fixes) Operating System.

Imo, The best alternative is some derivative of Linux. (Although there is others such as MacOS x86 although its not supported on non-mac hardware, FreeBSD but I don’t think its desktop oriented, and others such as beOS or so)

As of Saturday 27/1/07 I have started using KUbuntu Linux as the main OS on my desktop, as a trial to see how well I can get by without my “trusty” windows installation.