Computers

I hate SPAM, and GoDaddy is Useless!

Computers, Hosting, Security, Websites / By / / , / 8 minutes of reading

After the debacle with my CenturyLink DSL last summer, I had to make a quick decision on alternatives to hosting my own domain, email and web. I ended up being off the network for two weeks when CenturyLink couldn’t figure out how to restore my DSL server when they did an upgrade that I had already cancelled. Many years ago, I used a domain-hosting service called DomainDiscover that registered my domains and DNS, redirected web requests inside of a frame, and relayed email from a virtual domain to my ISP account. After I started running Apple’s OS X Server, though, I realized that I could provide most of those services myself, on my own home server. My ISP, NeTrack, who was later acquired by Indra’s Net, provided a static IP address, so hosting my own domain was fairly straight-forward. Once I started running my own services locally, I decided that it wasn’t necessary to be paying DomainDiscover for the other services that I wasn’t using any longer. All I really needed was a domain registrar. Checking on pricing, it seemed that GoDaddy was about the least expensive, and while nobody had a great customer service record, GoDaddy was large and established, so I transferred my domain registrations to them. So, when my DSL was down for an extended period of time, I did some quick checking, and discovered that GoDaddy had recently started using CPanel virtual Linux hosting, and had hosting plans on sale for half-price, so it was only about $5/month, as I […]

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Apple released a BASH Shell Security Update for Shellshock, kinda…

Computers, Macintosh, Security / By / / , , / 1 minute of reading

While Apple has released a security update to address the “shellshock” vulnerability in the bash shell, they have not made it available through Software Update! See the support page at: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1222 for links to the downloads and installation instructions. Update: Apple has rolled the bash shell update into Security Update 2014-005. See the details at: https://support.apple.com/kb/HT6531 Presumably, the fix is also included in OS X 10.10 “Yosemite” (https://support.apple.com/kb/HT6535) which was released yesterday.

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Text Processing

Computers, Unix / By / / / 3 minutes of reading

I spent quite a bit of time working on that BSD UNIX system at BGSU, as it was the only way to print to the Imagen 8/300 laser printer! It was an early Canon engine, but I’m not certain what page description languages it supported. I wrote most of my documentation on the VAX, using vi to edit the text, and troff (actually it was ditroff) to process the output. One of the manuals that I prepared was a guide to all of the computing facilities on campus, including many tables, so I used the tbl and eqn packages from the “Documenters Workbench” as preprocessors. Unix Text Processing, by Dale Dougherty and Tim O’Reilly, was published by Hayden Books in 1987, back when O’Reilly & Associates wrote technical documentation for hire. Hayden later took the book out of print, but Dale and Tim retained the copyright and have decided to make it available through their web site under Creative Commons’ Attribution License. It’s available through O’Reilly & Associates Open Books project as a PDF of scanned images (about 27Mb.) of the original document. Some members of the groff mailing list have transcribed the document back into its original source, with the intention of updating the material. They have posted the source, along with PostScript and PDF versions on Larry Koller’s website. I’m also interested in DocBook, a standard generalized markup language (SGML) system for text processing that can produce output for HTML and printed output like RTF or PDF from

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Welcome Back!

Computers, Drupal, Macintosh, Websites / By / / , , , , , , / 2 minutes of reading

After many months in the dark, I have recovered the last of the pieces from my old Mac Mini G4, so that all of my services — DNS, Open Directory, Email (Postfix, Cyrus, SpamAssassin, ClamAV, MailMan), MySQL, and Drupal with updated PHP, since Apple’s default PHP install doesn’t include any of the necessary modules. First my external drive for TimeMachine backups died… I replaced it with a new drive, but it had to complete a new, full backup. During the full backup, the external drive that the server was running from died from old age… After several partially successful attempts to recover the data using DiskWarrior, I tried to reconstruct the old Mini, but wasn’t able to get it to boot up… I thought that I had recovered enough of the data that I could use it to migrate to the new server, but the server migration wizard would die partway through. After manually rebuilding Mail under 10.7 with Server 1.0, I found that when I updated to 10.8 and Server 2.0 that the migration wizard couldn’t even move my data and configuration from 10.7… So I had to manually rebuild DNS and Mail once again… I have since migrated from an old 32-bit G4 Mini, to a newer 64-bit Intel Core 2 Duo, with 8Gb of RAM. I’ve gone from OS X Server 10.5.8 to 10.7 and on to 10.8.2 Mountain Lion, with Server 2.2.1. I’ve had to manually install MailMan, since that is no longer included with Server.

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Missing Updates?

Computers, Macintosh, Security / By / / 3 minutes of reading

Like most of us, I’ve come to rely on Apple’s Software Update to tell me when new updates are available. It seems that most third-party software has its own built-in mechanism for checking for updates as well, so I hardly ever go to http://www.VersionTracker.com or http://www.MacUpdate.com to look for new releases any more. I’ve discovered in the past few weeks, though, that I’ve missed some updates, because the built-in updaters haven’t alerted me that new software was available. One of these packages is the Adobe Acrobat Reader, now just called “Reader.” I know that it has its own updater, but version 9 never told me that version 10 was available! I had updated Reader up to 9.41, but it doesn’t offer to upgrade to Reader 10, which came out back in October! I had seen an article on the web that mentioned that Reader X wasn’t susceptible to the latest malware attack. I didn’t remember getting Reader X, so I opened Reader, and checked the version number in the About box — 9.41. I manually ran “Check for Updates” and the Updater ran, and told me that I had the latest version. I went to Adobe’s website (http://get.adobe.com/reader/), though, and found that 10.0 was available. I had to manually download and install version 10 last week, but its told me today that version 10.0.1 is available (and its updating right now!). Another one of the other updates that I hadn’t gotten was for the “Flip for Mac WMV” plug-in that allows playing Windows-format video

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What Cables Should Cost

Audio, Computers, Mobile / By / / / 2 minutes of reading

Since my son Eric has gone to college, and taken his Sony PS3 with him, I didn’t have any way to watch Blu-Ray movies any more. While Christmas shopping, I realized that Walmart had quite a few Blu-Ray movies priced as low as $8 each, nearly the same price for the same movie on DVD. I decided that it was time to buy a Blu-Ray player. After reading a few reviews, and shopping around a bit, I found a decent deal on a Sony BDP-S370 on sale at Sears. When I hooked it up, I realized that I was going to need another HDMI cable to get the full resolution. I had my previous DVD player hooked up using a Component Video cable, but that seems to only support up to 1080i, not 1080p that I can get using HDMI. I checked the prices on the HDMI cables at Walmart when I picked up a few Blu-Ray movies, and found their best deal was a 6-foot HDMI cable from Vizio for $28. Instead, I’ve ordered online from Monoprice. They have 6-foot HDMI cables for about $3 each. So I ordered 4 of them, in different colors, so that I can tell them apart when I hook things up. I also found they had a Component Video cable for Melissa’s WII for about $3.30, and one with Composite and S-Video for $2.72. Even with the $7.75 or so for shipping, the total for the order came to only $26. So I saved a couple of bucks over Walmart’s cheapest price, but I’m getting 6 cables

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Y2K10 Bug

Computers, Macintosh / By / / , , , , , , / 1 minute of reading

Since the beginning of the year, I’ve noticed that I had started to catch good email in my Mac OS X Server’s email spam filter. It was odd, since it generally works quite well, and rarely catches any “false positives.” This morning at my office, one of the guys I work with was having to patch one of our systems because of a “Y2K10 bug” where the date isn’t interpreted correctly. Later, I noticed on Slashdot there was a story about the Y2K10 bug affecting a large number of systems around the world. I did a quick search for Spamassassin, and found that it was suffering from a bug in a date rule! Apple has a technical note on the issue: Mac OS X Server v10.5 and 10.6 use SpamAssassin to filter “spam” from inbound messages; SpamAssassin includes a rule that increases the spam score for any inbound message sent on or after January 1, 2010. This increased score may cause some inbound messages sent on or after January 1, 2010 to be inadvertently filtered as spam. There is an updated spamassassin rule that fixes the problem as well. Run the command: sudo sa-update –nogpg to apply the new rule. The –nogpg flag is needed for OS X Server since it doesn’t have GPG installed by default.

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Home-built Computer

Computers, FreeBSD, Linux / By / / 2 minutes of reading

I had been running an AMD-based machine (I refuse to refer to this as a PC as this has too many negative connotations!) that I assembled myself. Although I had intended to run FreeBSD on this machine when I built it, I ran into problems with one of the pre-release updates to version 5.3 where the filesystem became corrupted. After unsuccessfully trying everything that I could think of to recover the disk, I gave up, and reformatted the drive to install Fedora Core Linux. I’m still following the progress of FreeBSD, but decided to take the opportunity to check out the current state of the Linux world… Here are the specifications: Case: ThermalTake Xaser III V2000+ All aluminum, completely tool-less, locking, seven variable-speed fans with filters, speed controls, and temperature monitor, 12 drive bays, 420W Power Supply. Motherboard: Asus A7V8X VIA KT400 chip set, 8x AGP, DDR400 memory support, On-board Promise FastTrack 376 Serial-ATA RAID, Broadcom 4401 Fast Ethernet (10/100), USB 2.0, FireWire, and Audio. Processor: AMD Athlon XP 2600 Barton core, 333MHz FSB Heatsink/Fan: ThermalTake Extreme Volcano 12 66-fin Copper Heat sink, 80mm Triple-Blade Fan, 72.92 CFM Graphics Card: ATI Radeon 9550, 256Mb AGP8X Memory: CORSAIR ValueSelect 1GB (Model #: VS1GBKIT400) 1GB (2 x 512MB) 184-Pin DDR SDRAM Unbuffered DDR 400 (PC 3200) Dual Channel Kit System Memory 333MHz DDR Disk: Maxtor 120Gb Serial ATA Disk Drive Serial ATA (150mb/s), 8Mb Cache Optical Drive: Sony DVD/CD-RW Drive I have passed this machine on to Eric so that he would

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UNIX

Computers, Unix / By / / 2 minutes of reading

My first exposure to UNIX was in college at Bowling Green State University (BGSU), where I worked for the University Computer Services department as a student Documentation Assistant. We had a DEC VAX 11/785 that was running 4.2 BSD. While I was there, it was upgraded to 4.3 BSD, and then to DEC Ultrix. The first set of Ultrix manuals that we received were the same as the 4.3 BSD set, except for the cover! Even the footer on every page still said 4.3 BSD! My favorite operating systems are all derived from UNIX. Like the VAX that was running the original Berkeley distributions, FreeBSD is based on the same source code. Mac OS X is actually based on the FreeBSD kernel, combined with the Mach micro-kernel. I also like Linux, which is an independently written kernel based on UNIX design principles. FreeBSD and Linux Since my first experiences with UNIX were with BSD, and Mac OS X is based on BSD UNIX, I have also developed an interest in the open-source operating system FreeBSD. I’m running on a home-built machine at home (I refuse to refer to this as a PC as this has too many negative connotations!) that I assembled myself. I’d been tracking FreeBSD 5.3-CURRENT for some time, as I’m using a serial ATA hard drive that wasn’t supported in the 4.9-STABLE branch. Right now I’m running Ubuntu. I’ve also got an aging Dell laptop with a couple of interchangeable hard drives. One of the drives has

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MacinTech

Computers, Macintosh / By / / 1 minute of reading

I was one of the founders of the MacinTech Users Group, and have been involved with it for many years. My direct involvement has waned lately, as other commitments for work and family have made the schedule too much to juggle… Links to MacinTech The web site for the MacinTech Users Group is http://www.MacinTech.org. To subscribe to the MacinTech mailing list, please visit MacinTech Email Subscriptions page. There is also a web site for the MacinTech Multimedia Special Interest Group at http://www.MacinTechSIG.org.

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