http://www.united-domains.de is currently (till march 31st) offering free world maps with TLDs printed in the countries to bloggers who fullfill a few criteria. nothing wild, basicaly you just have to spread the word about the event, make sure the links appear in the posting and send them a mail. easy ๐
The offer is good as long as supplies last, so with some luck I may still get one. Cool. Have a look for yourself http://www.domain-karte.de
I just stumbled accross this website: https://ssl.euserv.de/produkte/vserver/betatest.php where you can order a vServer for free during the beta phase. The beta phase is planned to last till the end of 2009. For more details, have a look at the link (there are a few thing not allowed to use the server for, mainly high traffic and illegal stuff).
An order key is required, just have a look at the tags of this posting …. one of them is a bit “strange” ๐
Sorry for the problem with the website. Seems my DNS Provider decided to do a rollback and the old IP was active for dopefish.de (www.dopefish.de still worked). Both DNS entries now point to the new IP again.
In my last posting I forgot to mention I set up an account over at Deviant Art where I am posting pictures of mine I actually find worthwhile looking at. Not that I find the rest of my pictures outright bad, but they are more average and sorted by events/vacations. The ones I post at Deviant Art are pictures I find are above (my) average and worth the time to have a look. Currently not too many, but the collection will hopefully grow.
Last weekend my htpc didn’t record a show it should have, turned out it couldn’t fetch EPG data anymore (and therefore didn’t know the show was running, I should have it email me if it completely runs out of EPG data). Anyway, I thought updating the system would be a good idea … fixing EPG was easy, fixing the stuff the update broke took me 2 days. The solution was easy, restore the original /etc/X11/xorg.conf since the one the update generated kinda broke GLX on my Nvidia 6200 which resulted in the wierdest problems. The Myth GUI worked partially, live TV etc. was no problem, but the menus didn’t show (or only parts showed).ย The first step was to chmod -x the script myth uses to shutdown the pc, you have aboud 15 second to do so after the pc has started because ofย “ok, I’m running … ok, the frontend stopped(crashed), I’ll shutdown in 15 seconds”.ย After finding out, that the new xorg.conf from ubuntu 8.10 sucks for me, the solution was an easy “cp /etc/X11/xorg.conf /etc/X11/xorg.conf.backup && cp /etc/X11/xorg.conf.old /etc/X11/xorg.conf”
I started plaing a new browsergame this week, Kings Age. It’s a simple”build cities, expand, fight” thing. But the graphics are ok, and it’s easy to play (log in once a day and put some actions in the queue).
I’ve been putting off moving my mail system to the new server for a few weeks now since the old system was configured from scratch using the original config files and not the debian style config files. The differences in the Exim config are extreme. Debian splits the one large config file into lots of smaller files. This is great if: you never worked with exim before, you aren’t trying to migrate an existing configuration that is in one large file, and you don’t have all kinds of custom stuff like imap, spamassassin, greylisting mixed in. Yeah, not me. Even though I find the “one large file” a whole lot faster and easier to read, the Debian way has one big advantage: it is way easier for external scripts and packages to drop their custom config into exim. They just add a file to the right directory and thats it.
So I decided to go for it and merge my custom stuff into the Debain config. Greylisting worked out-of-the-box, spamassassin needed some minor tweaks, exim was (more or less) easy. The p.i.t.a. with exim is when you know exactly what is missing and where it would be configured, but because of “smart debian scripts” you have to find some config in an unrelated script and put the value there so it gets put in the right placeholder.
Here is a little summary in case I ever do this again and need to see if I forgot something:
– cyrus: copy /var/spool/cyrus/mail/ , /var/lib/cyrus/user/ , use cyradm to add the user.blargh account and /usr/sbin/cyrreconstruct -rf user (don’t forget the sieve filters)
– getmail: nothing special here, just copy config and add cronjob
– spamassassin: alter exim acl to set noscan for auth’d connections and have spamassassin scan everything not “noscan” (because per default local mail isn’t scanned, that includes everything we pick up via getmail)
– exim: check update-exim4.conf.conf for stupid entries, remember to turn on TLS (imap can use the same certificates), since we are using sasl for imap, have smtp auth use the same database (plain_saslauthd_server), turn on TLS by creating a file conf.d/main/00_exim4-config_localmacros with “MAIN_TLS_ENABLE = true” in it
Now that I’m done I found a pretty detailed German website with steps to set up such a system E-Mail-Server mit Debian, Exim und Cyrus. I did the exim router/transports a bit differently to have a bit more control over what goes where when. Still, defiantly worth reading if you are thinking about building such a system.