Older blog entries for Waldo (starting at number 119)

One of my machines got rooted today by a script kiddie. Looks like I forgot to patch the latest wu-ftpd hole, so t0rnkit was installed and my machine became an spamming zombie...ads for a casino. Now I'm trying to fix everything, by installing new binaries, upgrading, repairing, etc. I'm wanting to reinstall with Red Hat 7.1, over the current 6.0 install. I have purchased, original discs for 7.1, but upon booting the installer, I get "install exited abnormally -- recieved (sic) signal 11," and it then tells me that I can reboot. (Gee, could I really?) Alt-F4 shows me that it's "Unable to identify CD-ROM format," and Alt-F3 gives me a series of "Bad magic" and "path is NULL" errors.

Fucking Red Hat.

It's going to be a late night. I can tell already.

I upgraded to the newest version of TWIG on my free mail server this evening. It was fairly painless, I guess, but TWIG is still lousy. I think I'm going to give my users the SquirrelMail option. It looks quite nice, as web-based mail readers go.

Rage 128 Ultra

It was wrong of me to blame my SyncMaster 570V flatscreen for X not working on Mandrake -- turns out it's the Rage 128 Ultra video card. I can find few specific references to this card being supported at all, unfortunately. I'll keep playing, but it seems likely that I'm simply SOL. This is a work machine, so I can't go swapping out video cards or anything. That's too bad -- I was going to try and run Linux for about 1/3 of the day and see if it's possible to get my work done.

"free software will die"

Y'all have had some good thoughts on this. I think that there's a distinction to be made between open source as a process (or a community) and open source as a product. whytheluckystiff pointed out that ska is a community, not a product. The fact is that it's both, but I had irrationally narrowed my thought to think of it as a mere product. Open source and free software are in no particularly danger of dying -- they already exist. But the community? I have no doubt that it will ebb and flow, likely along with the economy and the popularity of various commercial software packages. But I have faith that it won't die. There's just too many of us. :)

SpamBouncer

I would just like to reiterate my undying love for SpamBouncer. Easy to install, easy to configure, works wonderfully. I was having a problem, but it turned out, as always, that I was doing something very stupid. I hope that somebody modifies an MUA to work more closely with SpamBouncer or a similar product, enabling one-click additions of domains to the block list and, better yet, one-click additions of e-mail addresses and domains to the whitelist. If there was ever an itch to be scratched, this would be it.

SyncMaster 570V TFT

I'm having no luck getting my Samsung SyncMaster 570V TFT flatscreen working under X11R6. I suspect that it's the monitor that's the problem, as this Rage 128 is quite standard. I've tried all of the generic settings, but I just don't know enough about LCDs to know what comparable screen that I could specify that's close enough for the purposes of getting X to run. In the meantime, startx generates a black screen and nothing more. I'll try plugging in a CRT and see if that works. When it does, I guess I'll return to fighting it out with X.

"free software will die"

Free software can't die any more than ska can. Ska still exists. The albums are still out there, people still listen to it, it still serves whatever purpose that ska serves. Ska is certainly not popular anymore, and it's altogether popular that open source will, at some point, be less popular than it is right now. Free software has been popular for many years; I've been using it for almost 12 years now. If it stops being so popular, will that affect me? Not particularly. I'll still have it. Just like that Op Ivy album.

The Natural

I just watched The Natural for the bajillionth time. It's something like the greatest movie ever. I'm just saying.

Hackers is on the SciFi channel right now. I know several people that were involved in the creation of this movie, and I've been bugged for some time for not watching it. I hadn't gotten around to it, and when I surfed by it about 20 minutes ago, it seemed like a good idea to catch the last hour.

Oh. My. God. This is horrible. I shudder to think what this must have been like before Emmanuel Goldstein got his chance to fix up the script. "Cheesy" just doesn't do it justice. Cracking is, in this movie, not a skill based venture, but a videogame played with head-mounted displays while flying past images of circuit boards and formulae. The black-hats themselves are rollerblading raver slackers, trip-hop fans and jive-talking, complete with the one black guy and the one girl. There's hardly a realistic word or action,

Enough of that. Merry Christmas, to those of you of that cultural and/or religious persuasion.

Spam

I've set up Spambouncer on three of my mail servers, with great results. It tags nearly all of the mail correctly, though I'm having a bit of trouble getting mail marked as "BLOCKED" to be auto-filtered out via Procmail. It's nice to be seeing less spam. It's really gotten out of control recently.

Exchange Server

At my father's office, they use Windows on the desktop, an NT file server, though I've slowly gotten them using Red Hat over the past few years, which is now providing their POP, IMAP, SMTP, HTTP and some SMB services. Increasingly, an Exchange server appears to be necessary, but the cost is outrageous, so I'm looking at alternate solutions. I was quite pleased to discover Bynari's Insight Suite. The information on the site is quite confusing, but appears that they offer both Linux clients that are fully compatible with Exchange servers, and their own version of the Exchange server that's fully compatible with Outlook clients. (And presumably with their own client, as well.) The licensing cost is a mere $300, which is fantastic. I'll wait for v3.0 to come out in a few weeks before I take a serious look at this, but I'm excited to see that this product exists. I hope that Ximian intends to offer some sort of a similar server that's Outlook-compatible. (For Evolution, they offer the Connector add-on that makes Evolution compatible with Exchange.) This is a truly excellent method of convincing businesses to take their first step into using Linux. Exchange is so shockingly expensive that being able to offer a Linux-based alternative for far less is hard for businesses to pass up.

From the find-your- first-Usenet-post game, here's my deeply-embarassing first (recorded) post:

From: David jaquith (jaquith@hopper.ACS.Virginia.EDU)
Subject: New Board
Newsgroups: alt.bbs.lists
Date: 1993-11-06 23:12:15 PST

There is a new board around, caller Waffles at Midnight. It's at 2400, 14.4K as of 11-10-93. (804)974-9244. Nuthin special, file wise. Has some weird conferences, extremely active. Runs off of VBBS. Try it.

I had actually used Usenet since late 1992, but only UVa groups that weren't carried throughout Usenet, though picked up by a few servers around the US. As of 1993, my nickname was not yet my legal name (I wasn't old enough to file for a name change), so UVa made me have "David Jaquith" as my chfn -f. Oh, and Waffles at Midnight lived a happy, popular life as a Charlottesville, VA-based BBS for a couple of years before going the way of BBSs in general. Too bad I can't still get e-mail at 1:3603/998.

deekayen: Bizarrely, Sendmail is not installed with Mandrake. Postfix is, instead. This left me scratching my head at the time, but I've decided this is the world's method of showing me that I should try out Postfix. But it would be nice if Sendmail were at least an install option.

slef: I don't recall seeing much PHP advocacy here lately.

Well, here it is. PHP is the greatest thing since sliced bread. I don't bother to advocate it because it seems so obvious these days. You don't encounter many oxygen advocates because, hey, we're all breathing. PHP's pretty much at that point these days.