Happy New Year

Ryanbike, climbing, cold, Foto, helmet, nikon, winter

My last few postings were all a bit technical, so this one is going to be  a bit more “normal”. I hope every reading this had nice Christmas and New Years celebrations.

It is a cold as heck here, but still no snow. My guess is that it won’t snow here whis winter, just cold and windy weather.

I must admit I haven’t been climbing for about a month. I really need to get back to the gym and train more. I want to shoot some nice pictures during climbing outdoors this year (not just from the bottom or top, I want to shoot pictures while in the route). And to be able to do that, I really need more finger strength to be able to keep the pace when the holds start getting crimpy.

I haven’t been on my bike the last months either, but considering how cold it is out there … I guess that can be excused.

Without going into too much detail, I’m planing on buying 2 new lenses for my Nikon. They should give me a few new possibilities (which reminds me that I really need to clean up my picture gallery). And I should have a look at my helmet camera, the last thing I shot with that was an indoor climbing session.

Moving Exim/Spamassassin/Cyrus -> Debian config

Ryancyrus, Debian, exim, imap, linux, mail, spam, spamassassin

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.

Useful Software for MSI Wind

Ryan7 Comments on Useful Software for MSI Windfirmware, msi wind, software

So I’ve had my Wind for a few weeks now. I think I’ll share some stuff I’ve stumbled upon (or searched).

The latest Firmware – A little tip, it will only update your BIOS if you have AC power plugged in (and it will give you a error message that has nothing to do with the power source if you don’t). The “hassle” of upgrading the firmware is defiantly worth it, built in overclocking (if something goes wacky and your keyboard doesn’t respond anymore. don’t fret, just unplug ac and battery for 30 sec.).

eeeRotate – Software to rotate your screen & touch pad. Now you can read eEbooks with the screen turned 90°. Defiantly a must for anyone who reads lots of documents on the go.

BTProx This little application can automatically lock your PC if it looses connection to a bluetooth device (e.g. your cell phone), useful in case you forget to manually lock your PC when you rush out of the room.

Alternate Microsoft Bluetooth stack – An alternative to your built in Bluetooth drivers. Theese are from Microsoft and work (for me) a whole lot better with applications.

Download Statusbar A download  addon for Firefox, puts the downloads in the statusbar. Less clutter, better overview.

iFox Graphite Theme that uses less space. I turn off the bookmark toolbar and put the addressbar up in the same row as the menu, saves space (and don’t the magic F11 key for fullscreen browsing ;-))