Mostly about my amusement
Kids do say the darndest things.
Last night the family went to a Spanish restaurant in Smithtown (15 minute drive). The food was good and everyone enjoyed themselves. The kids got sufficiently wired but after walking them around they came back to reality.
On the drive home something happened and my son let out an “Oh Sugar!”
With the snow forecast (we got 12 to 14 inches of snow) I unpacked the snow thrower Saturday morning. It’s a 6.5 horsepower gas powered contraption.
Saturday we started getting snow. Sunday morning and afternoon I got to use the snow thrower. Originally I did not want to get one as I thought we did not really get that much snow.
After doing the entire driveway I am glad that we got one. It was very time consuming but it worked. I guess that means I am a fully domesticated home owner.
This is the second snow thrower that we’ve gotten. The first one was an 11.5 HP monster that did not even fit into my Dad’s mini-van. There was an issue with missing parts and eventually we got the monster returned. Looking at the documentation the old one was good for my driveway, the 3 neighbours driveways, and the street.
The one that we got afterwards worked really well but the day was not complete until we heard from my cousin Peter who called to say
“Hey it’s too bad you returned the old one. That’s a lot of snow out there.”
Should have taken before and after pictures.
Recently the maker of the StarForce apparently threatened to sue an author on Boing Boing for talking about his bad experience with their copy protection driver scam. This made me laugh since I removed a game partly because it installed StarForce drivers.
For Christmas my brother Alek got me the Brothers in Arms: Earned in Blood video game. Normally this would be a good match since I enjoy playing first person shooters. The game looked okay but they got many little things wrong. The cinematic cut scenes were awful. I was frequently somewhere far from where the people talking in the scene were. And my character was frozen in place while a conversation was going on. I found the game play to be a little stifled.
But what really turned me off was the copy protection system. After I installed and tried to run the game, I got a message stating that I had to reboot in order to activate the driver. Driver? I had installed a game not a piece of hardware. Why did they need a driver?
The driver was part of the StarForce copy protection scam. From the web site for “StarForce Drivers Removal” the text says
Some versions of StarForce Copy Protection will install dedicated drivers on your PC. Those drivers are necessary for the StarForce specific CD/DVD checking procedure, only. They do not include any hidden functionality. The drivers are active only at execution of the protected application. StarForce constantly improves their drivers to keep them compatible with the latest versions of Windows operating systems.
See http://www.onlinesecurity-on.com/protect.phtml?c=55 for more information. Google is your friend.
The underlining in the text is mine, but that statement is just nonsense. The real reason they install the drivers is to interfere with your system should you have the CD in the drive when you try to use a CD-ROM burner. So even if you are not running the game the drivers run and interfere with your system as the game publisher feels appropriate.
I installed a game. Looking at the back of the box I see that they do sorta warn the user with some disclaimer. Now I normally dislike that I need to keep the CD in the drive when I play the game but I do it. Call of Duty 2 and F.E.A.R. are like that. But AFAIK no drivers are installed and those two games are great.
Windows XP Pro (any version of Windows really) is an unstable environment. And at no time did I see any problems with my system that I could point to the StarForce drivers and say “Them! They hurt my box!” But installing drivers needlessly is just plain stupid. If Ubisoft wants to check the CD by running code when I actually play their game, well I think that’s rude but okay. But to have their drivers installed and running when I am not even playing their game? Nuts.
I removed the game and the drivers and in the future will check the game before I buy. I will look at the back of the game for this warning and not buy it. Game publishers who use this protection scam seriously do not get it. Game piracy may be a problem but people who pirate games get around all the protection. Installing drivers just hurts the end user. This is a game, not launch-the-missiles-now software.
Happy Chinese New Year! This is the Year of the Dog and we celebrated by visiting Lily’s family in Queens. The kids love abusing their cousins so it was all good.
In reality we just enjoyed the time off. This is the first time in a long time that Lily has really had a day off; this is a very busy time of year for her at work.
I think this coming week we may want to take the kids out to eat but today Flushing and Chinatown ought to be a mad house if you are driving and looking for a place to park. Weekends 11am – 2pm are normally just bad but today with everyone out and about it really would push me over the edge just looking for parking.
Anyone remember the Kurt Vonnegut Commencement speech that never happened? Wear sunscreen? The text was great, and sounded very cool. It’s just Kurt Vonnegut did not pen it nor deliver it.
I was browsing some blogs, and found a reference to this. Guy Kawasaki wrote a speech and apparently gave it a few times. It is a fun read.
Friday I installed Ubuntu on my laptop.
The operation was a success but the laptop died. Something in what I did made the NTFS partition an “unmountable_boot_volume” so I could run Ubuntu perfectly but could not get my Windows XP working.
. . .
Okay I re-installed everything from scratch. This time I added Google Pack. The appeal to me is that it has most of the software I want in one place. The installation was pretty smooth and I had planned to put all those programs on my laptop anyway.
The Norton 2005 A/V that came with it was odd. I had to run live update and reboot something like 5 times and kept running live update. It definitely has a recycled feel to it. In 6 months my subscription will be up, I’ll see what will be available after that.
I have had Optimum Online Boost for a few days. It’s not bad and here is what they offer (from the website):
The last one grabbed me and you can un-block ports 25 and 80 (SMTP and HTTP). The rest is probably not bad; I just don’t really have much use for items 2 through 6 myself. If I were doing the home business thing that might work for me.
The speed is great but at some point we hit “ludicrous speed”. The servers I am downloading from aren’t that well connected so no “light speed is to slow” for me.
There is a catch: the IP address is dynamically assigned. Static IP addresses are not yet offered. For hosting a server this is not really a problem since they offer different dynamic DNS clients for Linux and for Windows.
For sending e-mail from your domain, this might be an issue. My current address is 24.46.186.255. If you check my address in Multi-RBL you can see that that IP address is on a ban list of both njabl.org and sorbs.net, so anyone I send mail to who subscribes will not accept mail from a server in my basement.
I used to use SORBS, now I use Spamhaus, they seem to have a more accurate hit rate for me. The dynamic address is not a show stopper since I use another server I maintain to deliver my e-mail.
Still having a static IP address would be more attractive. I have spoken with the tech support at Optimum Online about this, they don’t offer it but are contemplating doing so in the future.
SUSE not Fedora
My Internet gateway at home is a old Dell XPS 450. It’s a PII running at 450Mhz, has a 30GB IDE drive, and 256MB RAM. No cd-rom drive, I removed it when it broke a few years ago. When I need to install an operating system, I temporarily attach a DVD drive.
I was previously running Fedora Core 3 on it. Fedora is okay, but it is on an aggressive development schedule. For example Fedora Core 2 was released May 18, 2004, patches are currently supported by the Fedora Legacy Project. That’s how the model works, the main project works on releases and patches for a small amount of time. Then the Legacy project takes over the patches. It’s all well documented and explained.
My problem is the amount of time for main project support is too short. I don’t want to keep installing a new Linux distribution, but I do want timely patches. The legacy project is pretty good, but they definitely have resource issues. The current Fedora Core gets patched quickly as you expect. But in order to stay current you should have the latest release.
The SUSE ftp server has patches for the 9.0 release, which came out October 2003. That is the kind of support I am looking for. I downloaded the SUSE Linux OSS 10.0 CD images, ran a script to create a DVD image. I burnt the DVD, attached a drive to my old box and installed away.
Postfix, Spamassassin, anti-virus, Oh My
Now that ports 25 and 80 are no longer blocked, I wanted to use the basement box as a backup mail server.
I want the server to
I installed the SUSE package for Postfix and configured it to only accept mail for my domains, open mail relays are BAD. I referred to The Book of Postfix for guidance; Postfix is now a breeze. The only thing I deviated from was to generate a self signed certificate as so
openssl req -new -newkey rsa:1024 -days 3650 -nodes -x509 -keyout dixie.dembowski.net.pem -out dixie.dembowski.net.pem
This created a self signed key and certificate with an expiration of 10 years. That is the pem file that I refer to in my postfix main.cf file.
Greylisting is the number one most effective thing I have added to kill spam. It works like this: a mail server connects to my server and tries to deliver mail. The servers IP address, the sender’s e-mail address, and the recipient’s address goes into a database. Instead of accepting the mail, my server sends back a 450 code, which basically says “Not now I’m busy. Try back in 5 minutes”. A RFC compliant mail server will attempt to re-send later, and all further attempts (after 300 seconds) from the IP address, sender e-mail, recipient e-mail combination will be accepted.
Spammers typically do not try to re-send, and the sender’s e-mail is often random so they never get in at all. See http://isg.ee.ethz.ch/tools/postgrey/ for more info, this is a very effective means to control unwanted mail.
I downloaded a postgrey RPM from http://www.lfarkas.org/linux/packages/el3/i386/SRPMS/postgrey-1.23-0.src.rpm and modified the postgrey.sysv file to match SUSE. Rebuilt package and installed.
I added the SUSE packages for Spamassassin, ClamAV, and Amavisd-new for content filtering.
A few tests and all was done. I modified my MX records for my domains, and have been receiving mail on my new box. This server does not attempt to deilver e-mail except to the destination servers for my two domains.
