Month: January 2008 (page 2 of 2)
CNN is projecting that Senator Clinton has won the New Hampshire primary. Cool, the race is still on.
Former President Bill Clinton went dumb today. He was working a crowd in a town hall setting and he started complaining about how the media is giving Senator Barack Obama a pass. Oh and his voice cracked; not his finest performance.
He made a mistake. He’s smarter than that and all he has done is shown everyone how frustrated Senator Hillary Clinton’s campaign is. They need to be positive and on message in order to convince voters to pull for her. How about highlighting her accomplishments as a second term NY senator? Or the hard work she did while First Lady?
CNN’s video has an analysis of this at this link. By the way, CNN Video works very well with Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon and Firefox.
Senator Clinton is not the inevitable presidential candidate. One of her opponents, Senator Obama, has raised valid concerns about what she accomplished and what her pride got her (health care initiative anyone?) She points out his lack of experience and he points out that being the First Lady is not the same as being the President.
I hope the Clinton campaign makes the Democratic nomination a real dog fight and that the voters get someone who represents them well and has earned the nod. If this tone keeps up then they’ll just be another also ran candidate.
Yesterday around 12:36 AM my main server mowgli went into a temporay coma (a disk volume fell down and did not get back up) and was not receiving mail.
No problem, thanks to the magic of DNS MX records, mail goes to my backup server dixie. Good thing I was clever and had dixie forward all mail to Optimum Online’s mail relay… when the mail relay got the dembowski.net mail it tried to deliver it to mowgli (who was down) and then back to dixie. The mail dixie got was sent into a loop with my ISP’s mail relay.
Each hop is added to the messages SMTP header and when an MTA sees that it is looping with itself then it typically sends the sender a non-delivery message and discards the original mail.
I lost about 20 hours of mail messages for my domain. Once mowgli was fixed I made a change to mowgli’s Postfix configuration. In the main.cf file I changed this line from
smtpd_recipient_restrictions = permit_sasl_authenticated, permit_mynetworks, reject_unauth_destination, reject_rbl_client zen.spamhaus.org
to now include a whitelist
smtpd_recipient_restrictions = permit_sasl_authenticated, permit_mynetworks, reject_unauth_destination, check_client_access hash:/etc/postfix/whitelist, reject_rbl_client zen.spamhaus.org
The /etc/postfix/whitelist file just contains one line for dixie’s IP address
24.46.186.255 OK
I ran postmap hash:/etc/postfix/whitelist and tested. From dixie I was able to telnet to mowgli on TCP port 25 and send mail by typing in the SMTP commands directly. Before this I would get an error message like
554 Service unavailable; Client host [24.46.186.255] blocked using zen.spamhaus.org; http://www.spamhaus.org/query/bl?ip=24.46.186.255
Now my main server accepts mail just from that IP address on the whitelist before the Spamhaus check occurs. The reject_rbl_client check is still working (open mail relays are BAD) it’s just my one IP address that gets a pass.
The configuration on my backup server dixie was simple. I added to main.cf one line
transport_maps = hash:/etc/postfix/transport
The file /etc/postfix/transport contained
dembowski.net smtp:[mowgli.dembowski.net]
I ran postmap hash:/etc/postfix/transport and restarted postfix. Now when dixie needs to deliver mail to dembowski.net it sends it directly to mowgli. If mowgli is unreachable it will just queue up the mail until mowgli becomes available. Every other domain gets forwarded to my ISP’s mail relay and all is good.
Here’s a lucky guy.
A computer consultant driving a rental car drove onto train tracks Wednesday using the instructions his GPS unit gave him. A train was barreling toward him, but he escaped in time and no one was injured.
CNN.com: Doh! Man follows GPS onto train tracks — when train coming
Some consultants will just do whatever they are told to do.
Last week in Flushing I picked up a couple of MG Gundams with the kids. Both kids know I will build models for them so the boy picked the HG Justice Gundam and the girl picked the HG Shiranui Akatsuki Gundam. I built his model first last time, so this time she gets her model before he does.
I should have learned from the last time I did a Gundam with shiny gloss finishing. I usually cut the parts from the spruce tree, trim the parts with a jewelers file and maybe sand the nub off.
Not with shiny gold colored pieces. The file and sand paper leave scars. I have to cut off each piece with room to spare, trim the excess carefully with the side clippers, and then use an exacto knife to shave off what little is left. Without taking too much off or scratching the finish. I’m almost half way through and it is really tedious.
I’ll post finished pictures once it is done. The model is shiny and it has seams everywhere. A “serious” Gunpla modeler would soak the model in a bleach and water mixture to remove the paint. Then you glue the seams together, mask it and re-paint.
Lucky for me I’m not that serious.
