Technical stuff about Perl, Linux and computing & technology in general.
Okay, I’ve been having strange problems where procmail will suddenly stop moving messages to a mailbox.
It works fine for a while, then (with no changes to the recipes) it’ll suddenly stop moving incoming spam to my spam box.
Looking at the procmail log shows it’s failing to write to the mbox file:
Continue reading procmail fails to write to large mailbox
I’ve just written a Perl module to fetch lyrics from www.lyricwiki.org and released it to CPAN.
It’s a fetcher designed to be used with Lyrics::Fetcher module on CPAN">Lyrics::Fetcher (although you can also use it directly without Lyrics::Fetcher).
Get Lyrics::Fetcher::LyricWiki module on CPAN">Lyrics::Fetcher::LyricWiki on CPAN now (it’s just been released and will take a little while to reach all the mirrors so if it’s not there when you read this, give it a little while :) )
I joined Project Honey Pot today. It’s an interesting project using Honey Pots to detect email address harvesters.
I’ve set up a couple of honey pots to help out, and donated several MX records (it’s easy, just create a sub-domain MX record pointed to their server.
Continue reading Project Honey Pot – catch the spammers
As well as my normal development duties I deal with some of the incoming abuse reports at work, and recently I’ve dealt with a number of phishing sites which submit data to a script named “Mr-Brain.php”. A quick Google showed no useful results, so I’m posting about it here.
Continue reading Watch out for “Mr-Brain.php” – phishing script
I’ve started seeing a trend in spam over the last few months increasingly using samples of Linux/Open Source software documentation for the subject line / random text to confuse Bayesian filters. Mostly it doesn’t help them get past SpamAssassin, but they’re trying to be clever and increase their chances. It does seem kind of futile though – technical users generally aren’t stupid enough to respond to spam.
I’ve been using wifi on my Dell Inspiron 1150 laptop courtesy of a D-Link AirPlus DWL-G650+ Wireless Cardbus Adaptor. It’s been a great little card, but there’s no decent native Linux drivers supporting WPA encryption (or, at least, there weren’t when I first installed it). Now I’ve finally decided to move on, and purchased an Intel 2200BG mini-PCI wireless adaptor.
Continue reading Installing Intel IPW2200BG under Linux
Apologies for the slowness and occasional downtime lately – the server this blog is hosted on is a little VPS (a virtual dedicated server) hosted with Bytemark. It’s been a great little server and great value, but I think we’ve outgrown it now.
It only has 80MB RAM allocated, and watching vmstat shows that it swaps like mad reasonably often. I just had to restart MySQL, as presumably the kernel did an OOM kill overnight. I’ve asked for an upgrade to give it more RAM, which should keep things going until we can finish refurbing our new server and whack it in a rack somewhere.
Bash allows for programmable completion, to extend the “hit tab to complete what I started typing for me” functionality. (Programmable completion was added to Bash in 2.04 beta, so if you have a Bash older than that, it won’t work – use bash –version to find out). Here’s a quick guide to setting up bash-completion to make Bash even nicer to use. Continue reading Bash auto-completion
Ever wanted to check the result of a DNS lookup from various DNS servers, perhaps to see how far a recent DNS change has propagated – which servers are giving the new answer, and which still have the old answer cached?
I recently wrote a little Perl script to do just that. My DNS Propagation Checker will query a set of 10 servers at random and show you the results. (Be warned, it may be a little slow at times, because (a) it has to wait for the DNS servers (I might re-write it one day to do the requests concurrently) and (b) my poor little virtual server is a little slow and overloaded right now.
About time I uploaded a new version of my custom SpamAssassin rules, so grab them if you want them.