UK Linux User Groups

For the past few years the anti-spam system I run has been based on a simplified version of something I previously ran commercially.

Although the code is similar in intent there were both explicit feature removals, and simplifications made.

Last month I re-implimented domain-blacklisting - because a single company keeps ignoring requests to remove me.

So LinkedIn.com if you're reading this:

• I've never had an account on your servers.
• I find your junk mail annoying.
• I suspect I'll join your site/service when hell freezes over.

I've also implemented TLD-blacklisting which has been useful.

TLD-blacklisting in my world is not about blocking mail from foo@bar.ph (whether in the envelope sender, or the from: header), instead it is about matching the reverse DNS of the connecting client.

If I recieve a connection from 1.2.3.4 and the reverse DNS of that IP address matches, say, /\.sa$/i then I default to denying it.

My real list is longer, and handled via files:

steve@steve:~$ ls /srv/_global_/blacklisted/tld/ -C ar br cn eg hr in kr lv mn np ph ro sg tg ua ve zw aw cc cy gm hu is kz ma my nu pk rs sk th ug vn be ch cz gr id it lk md mz nz pl ru su tr uy ws bg cl ec hk il ke lt mk no om pt sa sy tw uz za

On average I'm rejecting about 2500 messagse a day at SMTP-time, and 30 messages, or so, hit my SPAM folder after being filtered with CRM114 after being accepted for delivery. (They are largely from @hotmail and @yahoo, along with random compromised machines. The amount of times I see a single mail from a host with RDNS mysql.example.org is staggering.).

(Still looking forward to the development of Haraka, a node.js version of qpsmtpd.)

ObQuote: "Mr. Mystery Guest? Are you still there? " - Die Hard

One of the ideas behind writing these week notes was that it would force me to write at least one post a week. That doesn’t seem to have worked. So here’s a combined post for the last two weeks.

Health

It’s four weeks today since I broke my leg. The leg itself feels fine; it’s just the cast that’s bloody inconvenient. I get around the house pretty well, but I don’t get out much. Last weekend we took a taxi to Blah Blah Blah in Goldhawk Road to celebrate various birthdays. Other than a couple of trips to the hospital that was the first time I’d been out since it happened.

I was considering hobbling down to the pub quiz tonight. But the snow has probably put paid to that idea.

Speaking and Training

I was supposed to be in Romania at the end of last week, but we’ll be rescheduling that trip for later in the year.

I’ve been spending some time preparing for the public Perl courses I’m running at the end of the month. Still a few places left if you’re interested.

Writing

I didn’t write anything new (not even a blog post) but the final part of my three-part tutorial on Modern Perl was published in issue 155 of Linux Format which went on sale this week. I already have an agreement to write another series for them later in the year.

General Business Stuff

I finished moving all of my domains over to a shiny new server. And then I spent a week or so fixing all of the niggling little problems that I found. There still seems to be one outstanding problem with the Mailman configuration.

I bought a new laptop. It’s a Dell XPS 14z. I say bought – actually I’ve ordered and it’ll be delivered in the next ten days.

Buying it was a bit of a nightmare. I ordered it on Wednesday using the HSBC credit card that I got when I moved my company bank account. But unfortunately the credit limit wasn’t high enough (I’d forgotten about a few other things I’d put on t he card) and the transaction was declined.

But the transaction wasn’t declined as I was placing the order. No, it was declined at some point in the following twelve hours. So Dell cancelled my order. They didn’t contact me to find out if I wanted to try another credit card – they just cancelled the order. They didn’t even tell me that they had cancelled the order. I found out as I logged on to my account and checked the order status on Thursday morning.

I spoke to them and gave them the details of another credit card. But apparently they couldn’t just reactivate my existing order, they had to start again from scratch. And for some reason Dell’s web site seems to change from day to day so it took them 24 hours to be able to replicate my order at the same price. But finally on Friday morning I got an email confirming that the order had been placed. For £4 cheaper than the original order.

I can’t help thinking that Dell’s systems are a little overcomplicated.

Films

Watched a few films for the first time. Candyman was terrible. 127 Hours was grim, but gripping. The Troll Hunter was a lot of fun.

I’ve been investigating Netflix UK and LoveFilm Instant. I think that LoveFilm have a slight edge as their application is already installed on my Bluray player. For Netflix I’d need to use my Wii. I need to see if I can persuade LoveFilm to give me a free trial – as a returning member that doesn’t seem to be their default behaviour.

Related Posts:

• Week Notes 3
• Week Notes
• Week Notes 2
• Credit Card Theft
• Dell Customer Service

53-55 Lichfield St
Wolverhampton
West Midlands
WV1 1EQ‎

Eat, Drink and talk Linux

Event Date and Time:  Wed, 08/02/2012 - 19:30 - 23:00

We’re going out for the Planning Curry for season five of the Ubuntu Podcast this week. Over the years, it has become a tradition for all the presenters to go out for a curry before the start of the season. It’s a time to catch up in person, as we haven’t seen much of each other since the end of the last season. But it’s also a chance to discuss any changes we want to make to the show and throw ideas for new segments around. So, if there’s anything you’d like to see in the new season, whether it’s an idea for a segment or a change to something we already do, please let us know. You can leave a comment on this blog post or get in touch using any of the methods on the show website. Thanks!

Our next meeting will be in the The Discovery Museum on Blandford Square, Newcastle upon Tyne. It will begin at 12:00 (noon), to end two or three hours later, on Saturday 3rd of March, 2012 which follows our regular pattern of the first Saturday each month. You can find us in the classroom on the ground floor, unless there's a last-minute change. If there's a change, we will update this article. If you can't find us when you arrive, ask a member of staff to help you.
Brian Ronald

• Achievement unlocked: completed Halo. Only 11 years late. http://t.co/n4ULECu9 #
• And now… http://t.co/kKiOK0Gw #
• I can understand Kindle books costing as much as paperbacks (ish), but costing more than paperbacks? Madness.
  5.99 vs 7.49, so not just VAT. #
• @twtomcat @rkallensee definitely – i'll be there! #
• @monkchips @geekygirldawn @monkigras wait, what?!

  I skipped #monkigras 'cos of #FOSDEM and now you're telling me I coulda done both?! #

• @monkigras @monkchips @geekygirldawn nah, missed it
  http://t.co/d3GEFlqQ say I should never stop reading twitter. Now on naughty step. #
• I'm off to #FOSDEM this weekend, then BlackBerry #WebWorks hackathon next Monday: http://t.co/xLqZH0kt #webos and then http://t.co/XKSRuuJ5 #
• @fooishbar you doing #FOSDEM then? See you there! #
• Predictive Text, part 2: Not even a month after my predictions for the year, and the first of t… http://t.co/N6wfSNpc #
• Heh, #Starcraft ported to #Tizen running in the emulator: http://t.co/hvZADqqS #
• Off to Brussels for FOSDEM (@ Eurostar Departure Lounge w/ 2 others) http://t.co/Sipvr2DQ #
• Upstairs bar. Annual FOSDEM beer ritual. This probably cost me a fortune in roaming charges to post. Down periscope. http://t.co/ot3QcgYQ #
• Brussels Grand Place with snow http://t.co/Iptxd4RL #
• Patisserie in Brussels. Yum. http://t.co/shLchdVb #
• Rather awesomely, Delirium has free public wifi. Why does my hotel feel the need to charge? #FOSDEM http://t.co/rdimdXJV #
• @therealpadams your presence is demanded upstairs in delirium with @malminhas! #fosdem #catchingupwithawesomepeople #
• @lordmauve @malminhas I am excited! #
• @andrewjskatz @therealpadams Eurostar this morning is the quickest way, failing that then get on the train first thing tomorrow! #FOSDEM #
• @andrewjskatz @therealpadams Monday is next week. This weekend includes #FOSDEM legal track. & beer. & awesome people. & special bonus: snow #
• @twtomcat it's warm and toasty in Delirium. Come join us! #FOSDEM #
• @twtomcat well the bar may be empty at that time #
• I'm at Fosdem w/ 51 others http://t.co/BVQZVhkr #
• Cold and frosty Brussels on the way to #fosdem this morning. #fb http://t.co/dX6tufX4 #
• Excellent #tizen talk by @geekygirldawn – tough crowd, lots of sceptical people given maemo/meego history. Pragmatic responses from Dawn. #
• @stskeeps' talk on "beyond traditional mobile linux": no truly open project to prevent fragmentation. Silly disagreements eg packaging. Yes! #

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Big theatre!

The code examples are in this git repository (git clone git://git.annexia.org/git/libguestfs-talks.git)

Tech Talk is here.

You're gonna catch a cold
From the ice inside your soul
Christina Perri — Jar of Hearts

I bet at four o'clock this morning you weren't in a police station.

Or, at least, if you were I bet you were drunk and I bet it wasn't voluntary.

After the usual Friday night poor showing from my local pub (people who follow me on twitter will be aware that the torture of watching a hundred people think they're affirming their lives by singing Mr Brightside at the top of their voices is a regular part of my balanced weekly diet), I walked home, on a cold and cloudless night. I live about ten minutes walk from town, so the walk's no hardship, except that I was dressed in shirt and no coat and it was, as mentioned, cold.

I need to be clear about this. Ten degrees below zero, Celsius, is seriously chilly when you're standing in it in shirt-sleeves. I'm sure people in actually cold places like Canada or Minneapolis or Refrigeration, North Dakota will be laughing mockingly at this point, but firstly, bugger off, secondly I bet you lot bother to put a coat on when you go out, thirdly it's not two in the morning for you, and fourthly bugger off.

Anyway, I get home and... no door key in my pocket.

You know that feeling when the Fist of Fear grabs your balls when you realise something disastrous has happened? (I don't know what the Fist grabs for women. Feel free to fill me in, or actually maybe not.) Anyway: yeah, that. I went through the usual search-all-pockets-and-then-search-them-all-again routine, just in case a mischievous cold-tolerant leprechaun hid my key from the first search and then put it back, and... no door key. Oh dear.

I'll tell you this; the walk back to the pub again seems a much longer trek. Nowhere near as long as the second return to the house without my key, though, after it turned out no-one had handed it in. And now, what the hell to do, eh? I'm not prescient enough to hide a key in the garden, especially since that's a damned good way to come home one night and find no television where a television used to be, so... locksmith? Do they have 24-hour locksmiths? I can't be the first moron to have done this.

If you're bored today, I have a suggestion for you. Go and find a dude who claims to be a 24-hour locksmith and punch him in his stupid lying face.

Incidentally, how in Jah's name did anyone manage in this situation five years ago without a smartphone, huh?

Not that the internet helps when no-one frigging answers their supposedly-24-hour phone. Also, it turns out that about four of the local 24-hour locksmith companies are actually the same company, who did answer their phone, agreed to send someone, and then after an hour of me standing in the freezing bloody freezing cold confessed that they didn't actually have anyone to send.

It's now half three in the morning, and the shivering is starting to get on my nerves, and I can't get into my house without destroying something like a double-glazed plate glass window which will cost me hundreds of pounds to fix and my hands are shaking enough that I can barely light a cigarette, let alone throw a brick through a door that probably wouldn't break anyway, and I'd like to avoid the police showing up since I have no way of proving that I actually live here except for being able to describe where all the broken bits of skirting-board are, and everywhere is closed and the doors are all locked and it's really spectacularly bone-shudderingly mightily arse-clenchingly ridiculously psychopathically cold, and what to do? I tried sleeping in the shed. Now, cold is not like wind. Being inside a thin empty wooden building does not protect you from it. I was shivering like a jackhammer on a bouncy castle and it was becoming clear, even in my not-very-operational brain state, that lying on the floor at minus ten with only a shirt on could quite possibly lead to me actually freezing to death for real.

Well, if the police came, either I'd get into the house or they'd arrest me, and being arrested would at least make me warm, and right now I'd cut my right hand off if Pol Pot showed up as long as he brought a pair of gloves and some soup.

And then, through the frozen and frosty neurons came the sparkling thought that the police station would be open, wouldn't it?

I actually felt warmer just at the thought. Not much warmer, though.

Anyway, that's how I came to be sitting in the cop shop voluntarily at four am. One lovely copper even made me a cup of tea after I poured out my tale of woe in one long sentence, breaking only for my teeth to chatter together like I was trying to bite through the world.

Police stations: while I appreciate that you're generally there to deal with miscreants and so on, it wouldn't kill you to get rid of two screwed-to-the-ground plastic chairs and put in, say, a chaise longue. After switching my phone to airplane mode I managed to eke out enough battery life that I could sit and read while huddled up against the radiator for five hours until nine o'clock this morning, whereupon I went and fetched the spare key from my estate agent after the longest and coldest and most sleepless night I have ever experienced.

So, tips, for surviving a similar situation.

1. Have a spare key. Note: I do not have a spare key hidden in my garden, burglars, so don't go looking for it. I do not know how to have a spare key somewhere where you can get at it but thieves cannot; suggestions welcomed.
2. Have a girlfriend so that there's someone to let you back in.
3. Next time you see a policeman, be nice to him.

I think I might have a nap now.

The other day I had someone ask if there's a nice solution to the following problem:

Multiple web development virtual machines but only one external IP address.

The quick solution is to port forward on different ports to each virtual machine. For example 81 goes to VM1, 82 goes to VM2, 83 goes to VM3 etc. Which granted, would work, but isn't a "neat" solution.

Using mod_proxy under Apache is a much better solution to this problem.

Deploy a "front-end" server running Apache and mod_proxy. Create a virtual host for each virtual server and then using mod_proxy, reverse proxy to the virtual server. Port forward from the WAN to your front-end Apache server running mod_proxy.

Here's what an example config would look like on the front-end Apache server:

<VirtualHost 213.131.192.201:80> ServerName cust1.dev.domain.com ServerAdmin webmaster@cust1.dev.domain.com ProxyRequests off ProxyPreserveHost on ProxyPass / http://192.168.0.100/ ProxyPassReverse / http://192.168.0.100/ <Proxy *> Order allow,deny Allow from all </Proxy> ErrorLog /var/log/apache2/cust1.dev.domain.com.log CustomLog /var/log/apache2/cust1.dev.domain.com.err.log combined </VirtualHost> <VirtualHost 213.131.192.201:80> ServerName cust2.dev.domain.com ServerAdmin webmaster@cust2.dev.domain.com ProxyRequests off ProxyPreserveHost on ProxyPass / http://192.168.0.101/ ProxyPassReverse / http://192.168.0.101/ <Proxy *> Order allow,deny Allow from all </Proxy> ErrorLog /var/log/apache2/cust2.dev.domain.com.log CustomLog /var/log/apache2/cust2.dev.domain.com.err.log combined </VirtualHost>

Requests for cust1.dev.domain.com would be reverse proxied to 192.168.0.100 and requests for cust2.dev.domain.com would be reverse proxied to 192.168.0.101. All with one external IP address and one port forward rule.

Just one of the many uses of mod_proxy. You can also use it for SSL bridging and SSL offloading. Neat!

Sometimes two campaigns that I care about a lot pick the same day to hold an awareness-raising drive. It happened again on Tuesday.

The one I took part in was advertising the Stop ACTA London Protest on Sat 11 Feb. The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (#ACTA) is a plurilateral international agreement on enforcement of so-called “intellectual property rights” – copyrights, trademarks and so on. It’ll have major implications for freedom of expression, access to culture and privacy. It will also harm international trade and stifle cooperation. (More background at EDRI or a fairly large AJE page – thanks to Occupy Bristol for the AJE link.)

So the one I didn’t support at the time was the Move Your Money UK launch day. That’s a great idea too, suggesting that if we, the 99%, are actually unhappy with the big banks and their titled leaders, we should move as much as possible out of those banks and into financial institutions that we control. As you might expect for someone whose first memory of mutuals is a trust account at the local building society, I support that too. I still have building society accounts, as well as banking with the co-op bank and recently joining my local credit union. I’ve moved my money. Why don’t you?

I didn’t try to support both campaigns simultaneously on social networks because I thought it would reduce the number of people who saw my message. I backed the ACTA protest because a lot of my networks were already discussing Move Your Money and I thought Stop ACTA would benefit more. Was that the right decision? Who can tell? What would you have done?

Not even a month after my predictions for the year, and the first of them has failed. I said:

No IPO for Facebook: This could go either way. My bet is it will be very late 2012 or early 2013

They said:

Facebook unveils $5bn stock market flotation plans

Hrmph. Thanks Zuckerberg, you impatient hasty prediction-killer!

Mandriva or as some of us remember it Mandrake is in it’s death throes yet again, it would seem they are in financial difficulties and may have to go into liquidation. At the time of writing this post they have had a reprieve till mid February thanks to a donation by the Paris Region Economic Development Agency however their future looks decidedly dicey to say the least.

Mandriva is like the Woolworth’s of the Linux world, everyone has heard of it, everyone has visited it , a small amount of people use it, but now it’s probably past saving EVERYONE is lamenting it’s demise. ”So why are you blogging about it Pete?” I’ll tell you why, I saw a story from Slashdot on G+ that was just such utter bollocks I felt the need to vent my spleen.

Released in 1998 and based on Red Hat 5.1 (RH being non proprietary at the time) Mandrake (Mandriva) was probably ahead of it’s time in respect of trying to get people to pay for Linux by running the Mandrake Club. Basically the club, which was closed in 2009, was a paid membership, yearly fee, in bronze, silver or gold, and optional corp status. It gave you access to releases before the public. Members also got access to the Powerpack edition for free, ( 2 releases per year). Powerpack have proprietary drivers, a (legal) DVD player and the offical Adobe reader. It also gave access to dedicated update and download mirrors, meaning better performance, It also provided a closed forum and support, help desk etc. Thereby being amongst the first to offer in effect support contracts for their products.

Like most people Mandriva was always my first choice when offering a Linux distro to a new user until Ubuntu became more stable around 2006 having first hit the streets in 2004 this, from a user stand point, Ubuntu may have been one of the first nails in the Mandriva coffin. Other distributions such as Red Hat focused on the Server and enterprise customer offering business support contracts from around 2003 onwards and also have one of the largest, extensive and professionally recognised training programs within the Linux community today. Canonical, which owns Ubuntu (Or as they like to term it “Canonical is the parent company of Ubuntu.”) has only recently within the last few years started to make some headway in the Server and support market. Mandriva never sought that business model, their aim was to support their desktop user base, this was innovative in that currently pretty much all the distributions leave desktop support to the community via forums and wiki’s.

Even a cursory search will reveal some of the main reasons for Mandriva’s problems have been managerial and poor promotional ability, contrary to the post on slashdot which seems to believe the only way for a successful Linux Distribution business model is to follow Red Hat’s path, Mandriva still has the right idea as nobody is offering an affordable desktop support package. True Mandriva tried it and failed but was that their fault? Or was it just that the community, at that time, was not ready to start paying for something that they had downloaded for free? Times are changing and so is the FOSS user base, maybe there’s still hope for them. My spies tell me there are whispers of a possible Russian deal that maybe brokered at FOSDEM, I certainly hope so.

Today (1st Feb 2012) I will be doing my live Ubuntu Q+A session at 12pm Pacific / 3pm Eastern / 8pm UK / 9pm Europe. You can join the videocast here (anyone can view, but if you want to ask a question you should register an account with ustream.tv first).

All questions are welcome!

A new Unity has been pushed into the Unity team’s PPA and we need testers to help give it a run for it’s money before it is accepted into Precise. Nick has all the details of how to participate in the testing right here. You will need to be running Precise to participate in the testing.

You can also find help if you get stuck in #ubuntu-unity on Freenode. Happy testing!

I am running it now and the multi-monitor improvements in Precise are so much better than they used to be.

Tech Talk — the superior technical presentation software — is back!

(Not surprisingly this coincides with me doing a presentation at FOSDEM this weekend …)

The new version has been rebuilt around WebKit (all the work for this was done by Dan Berrange). Mozilla were never really serious about “MozEmbed”, and in practice it crashed all the time. WebKit (or KHTML as we like to call it) is built from the ground up for embedding and it is rock solid, so it was just better to switch.

Also in this development version is support for VTE, which is a simpler way to display terminal output. Any shell script called *.term is rendered in a built-in VTE terminal emulator. You can still use *.sh for shell scripts that you want to run during your presentation (eg. for using your own terminal, or just running arbitrary programs).

Tech Talk PSE is available from git or in Fedora Rawhide.