Category: Geek (page 36 of 36)

July 25, 2006

Dell is not the company they used to be (Updated)

Dell XPS 700 from CNET's web site After pushing my old PC up hill long enough I ordered a new kick ass Dell XPS 700 with a 24 inch wide LCD panel. I’m getting the black one.

I had received an e-mail about how to check the status online and the estimated ship time was set for over a month when I ordered it. As the time went by I had contacted their customer service and asked if the system was going to be built. I was told that as far as they could tell they would make the date.

I ordered the Dell June 18th Father’s Day. The estimated ship time was today July 25th. As of 10:10AM today Dell’s system sent me the e-mail notifying me that I was in for a disappointment.

So I called the Dell customer number and after 2 minutes of informing the system that I did not know my customer number or order number (I do but I have learned to hate the machines). Eventually I got a real human being.

The call was professional. Phrases such as “Parts are hard to come by” and “if you’d like I can expedite the order” were said. The rep was able to upgrade to next day shipping for me so I am placated for now.

I am on for shipping Tuesday August 1st but unfortunately I expect to get another e-mail. I know that I am getting a new to market system but Dell should be able to gauge availability based on the fact that they have been doing this for a long time.

Dell XPS 700 image from CNET’s web site.

Update: In this day and age, you’d think I’d check via Google or Engadget before calling Dell. Per Dell’s Blog (see item number 2) I expect to be able to upgrade from my ordered Pentium D to the Core 2 Duo.

Core 2 Duo, that’s a bad name it trips up the tongue. On the web site it says “an option of either a free upgrade to a Core 2 Duo processor or a Dell gift card” so naturally I am going for the upgraded processor.

The blog site clearly states that you should wait for Dell to call you, but reading the comments from the customers I figures I would get pro-active and call them. I waited until lunch time and called the number for customer service number.

May 8, 2006

Moving WordPress

This blog was running on Stefan’s DSL connection and with me tinkering with it I was using up his bandwidth. Usually when he was trying to connect to the office and get some work done.

I have a very good connection to the Internet via Optimum Online. It’s a dynamically assigned address but does not change and even if it does I run a dynamic DNS client to tell my DNS server when I’ve moved. So I decided that I would move the blog and change the whole URL. Easy right?

I wanted to create the virtual host blog.dembowski.net on my basement web server dixie.dembowski.net while maintaining both virtual hosts. Oh yeah and use only one IP address.
I wanted to change the host name and the web page URL from http://www.dembowski.net/wordpress/ to http://blog.dembowski.net/.

Setting up the virtual server

I added to my DNS zone dembowski.net a new record for blog.dembowski.net:

blog.dembowski.net. 3600 IN CNAME dixie.dembowski.net.

A while back I switched my server’s Linux distribution from Fedora to SuSE. One of the appeals was that SuSE comes with a reasonable configuration tool called yast.

Yast has a section for creating virtual hosts in Apache, and I thought how hard can this be?

After killing lots of time and totally breaking the web server configuration I ended up removing the Apache packages, deleting /etc/apache2 directory and /etc/sysconfig/apache2 file (options and configs remain even if you remove the software packages).

# rpm -e apache2-mod_php5 apache2-prefork apache2
# rm -rf /etc/apache2 /etc/sysconfig/apache2

I used yast to re-install the same packages, ran the online update, configured apache and got back a basic no frills web server running.

Most Linux distributions have put a conf.d directory in Apache’s configuration directory. It works like this: any file with the extension .conf gets included in the configuration. I knew about this but figured using yast would be easier.

So much for that idea. I went into yast one last time to enable the apache modules php5 and rewrite. Enabling mod_rewrite is not enough, you also need to turn on the FollowSymLinks option or it just does not work.

The configuration file I created in /etc/apache2/conf.d contains the following lines

NameVirtualHost *

<VirtualHost *>
ServerName dixie.dembowski.net
DocumentRoot /srv/www/htdocs
ServerAdmin webmaster@dembowski.net
ErrorLog /var/log/apache2/dixie.dembowski.net-error_log
CustomLog /var/log/apache2/dixie.dembowski.net-access_log combined
</VirtualHost>

<VirtualHost *>
ServerName blog.dembowski.net
DocumentRoot /srv/www/htdocs/wordpress
ServerAdmin webmaster@dembowski.net
RewriteEngine On
<Directory /srv/www/htdocs/wordpress>
Options +FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride All
</Directory>
ErrorLog /var/log/apache2/blog.dembowski.net-error_log
CustomLog /var/log/apache2/blog.dembowski.net-access_log combined
</VirtualHost>

Not too complicated really. Now when I point my web browser to either host name I get two different web pages.

Preparing WordPress

First off read this whole article, and seriously this part. The WordPress documentation is really good and helped a lot. Normally you would want to do one or the other; being a “challenging” person I was determined to do both.

I did NOT read the documentation. There is a step where you need to tell WordPress the URI for referencing itself. The documentation says Update Options -> Logout -> “Do not try to open/view your blog now!” They are not kidding around, WordPress sends you to the web page it thinks it is running on and not the host that it actually is running.

Restoring the web server files and directory onto the new box was not a problem. And the mysql backup was edited with vi and I changed all of the references from http://www.dembowski.net/wordpress/ to http://blog.dembowski.net/. I had to have missed one because every time I went to the web page http://blog.dembowski.net/ I was sent to the old server whenever I clicked on anything including the admin web pages.

There probably is a better way to do this but I eventually just put into my workstations hosts file the IP address of the new box and claimed it was www.dembowski.net. Just to play it safe I shut down the old web server, logged into the new box and fixed all of the options with the new info. Once I was all done I removed the bogus entry in my hosts file.

WordPress’s PHP scripts on my box kept running out of memory and crashed. I changed the file /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini and changed the memory_limit from 8M to 1632M That seems to have taken care of it.

All that was left to do is make sure that anyone going to the old web page gets sent to the new one. On the old server I changed the .htaccess file in the wordpress directory to now read

RewriteEngine On
RedirectMatch ^/wordpress/(.*) http://blog.dembowski.net/$1 [L,R]

Apache’s mod_rewrite rocks. This took any web requests for http://www.dembowski.net/wordpress/anything and redirected the web browser to go to the new URL with http://blog.dembowski.net/anything.

Blog successfully migrated to a new host and a new directory. Next up putting SSL back on one of my virtual web servers.

January 14, 2006

Google Pack

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.

. . .

Bundle_sm 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.

January 5, 2006

Optimum Online Boost

I have had Optimum Online Boost for a few days. It’s not bad and here is what they offer (from the website):

Faster speed, up to 30 Mbps down and up to Mbps up.
Total of 15 e-mail addresses, 1GB each.
Different setup’s for creating web sites.
Domain registration.
Web hosting.
15 custom e-mail addresses (some.joe@yourdomain.com).
The ability to host your own web server or e-mail server.

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.

January 2, 2006

Basement server installed

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

receive mail for dembowski.net and epyon-1.com
use TLS encryption if possible
check the sender’s IP address against Spamhaus
greylist the traffic
virus scan the mail
rate the content for spam

Bookofpostfix 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.

December 29, 2005

Optimum Online Boost (Verizon vs Cablevision is good)

I may be able to host my server in my basement after all.

When I lived at the old house, I had Time Warner Cable for surfing the web, and Acedsl. The DSL line was for hosting my domain in my house, I was given a /29 address block to use.

DSL was okay, but due to distance limitations I was getting 768 kbps up and down. With TWC I was getting ~1 to 2 Mbps down, don’t know how fast up stream.

Last year when my family moved to Long Island I found that there was no DSL available here, and Cablevision was only offering dynamic addresses and blocked ports 80 and 25. Running a mail/web server was not doable.

Now for an additional $10/month (if you are a voice subscriber already) Optimum Online offers unblocking ports 25 and 80 and provides a DDNS client. Also they uncap the speed so down stream is now up to 30 Mbps, upstream is up to 2 Mbps.

That’s pretty respectable. See http://www.speakeasy.net/speedtest/ for a good speed test. I selected the Washington, DC server. Here is a graphic of the results I just got.

10641 kbps down, 1733 kbps up. Just plain sick. If I can work it out, I may setup a server in my basement.

November 25, 2005

Jacek and Connie Visited

Today Jacek and Connie were in Long Island and dropped by for some food.

November 25, 2005

New web page

As mentioned below, the old web page was really old and stale.

This one may not be much better but at least I can update it easier and fool around with WordPress.

The old web page can be found here.

November 24, 2005

Welcome to my server.

Paraphrasing from the original web page:

Welcome to the Dembowski.net Consulting home Page.

The majority of our work has been related to firewalls, IP routing w/UNIX based servers, and mail systems of different types (SMTP connectivity).

Around 1994 the forces of the universe conspired to change my method of employment from a regular salaried employee to a paid by the hour consultant. This has various pros and cons.

My main interest for a long time has been IP networking. This naturally led to my getting very involved firewalls such as the TIS Firewall Tool kit, Checkpoint Firewall-1, and Gauntlet.

It also meant that I got involved in UNIX and variant operating systems such as Linux. When I got involved in Intel based UNIX all that was available at that time was SCO. That system had a Digiboard and 15 WYSE-50 terminals. The support from SCO was “we don’t support that hardware. Buy a real computer and than call us back.” So when my brother Ed introduced me to Slackware Linux I was dubious. The operating system at that time was 0.99pl11! But it worked with our hardware and was more UNIX than SCO (IMHO).

I’ve been using Linux for several years now. I’ve moved from Slackware to RedHat because the package management was superior, now I just stay because I’ve gotten used to the setup. From Redhat to Fedora.

This box is running Fedora Core 1 and handles our e-mail and web page. It’s running on a dual processor P3 933MHz with 256MB of RAM.

The text never really got updated and is well silly. I think all home/hobbyist web sites really want a running log.

November 24, 2005

1997. I think.

The original web page for www.dembowski.net has not changed since 1997. At the time the tools that existed on the Internet were Netscape and some not very good Microsoft Office tools. On the server side the pages were static.

Now in 2005 there are tons of tools. This blog is currently using WordPress 1.5.2. I selected WordPress because it is free, works with a MySQL database, and PHP.

My server has those tools so here we are.