For various reasons, I have a customer that would like to try out a Xen virtualization server. Not a big one, more of a test bed for some ideas and also a chance to experience how Xen is to work with. I’m happy to help, I’ve just finished setting up a VMWare ESXi system for a company and that was fun and exciting. Virtualization is the way to go. Anyway, I took a look around for some providers of small size solutions, here are some notes:
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I spent the evening looking for some online storage. I currently make use of spare disk space on the hosting servers (for client storage) and Amazon S3 for backups (using Duplicity). Amazon is great for having one, unlimited account where I can back almost anything up, but it’s not so useful for clients as they need to have a login to up- and down-load files. And using space on the hosting servers has got to be about the most expensive way of handling storage needs. Time to check out some alternatives… Read the rest of this entry »

Thunderbird is one excellent mail client and sometimes it would be useful to have, at least, a look up into a calendar or such like. Mostly I like programs to do one thing and do it well, so an email client would handle email and a calendar would handle dates and appointments. But Thunderbird does have a plugin that handles calendar functionality and makes use of the Sunbird calendars so giving the option of using Sunbird or of using Lightning. There is just one small problem: I run 64 bit Thunderbird on a 64 bit system, and Lightning is only packaged for 32 bit. Read the rest of this entry »

I was just renewing a domain at Easily.co.uk (a large UK registrar) and after the process followed a link to the “Top 10 sites at Easily”. Number 3 was a site cattleprods.co.uk, which seemed a little bit odd unless the British have got a taste for animal (or crowd) control. You can discover the site for yourself, but from a technical standpoint, it’s an excellent use of Flash and from a personal point of view, I’ve just wasted an hour there…

After recently transferring a bunch of mailing lists from Majordomo to Mailman, one of the features that was missed by the users was the ‘–LongSig’ feature of Majordomo. Very useful, but not available in Mailman. Using the ‘–LongSig’ tag in an email meant that anything after that was removed by Mailman and this especially useful if you work in a company that insists on putting 20 lines of boilerplate disclaimers at the end of every email sent. On a mailing list, this can annoy people. Read the rest of this entry »

I don’t usually cover software releases on the blog, but some software is so good and well made that when it reaches a final release stage I can’t help shouting YaHoo and cracking a bottle of champers! Timo Sirainen has been working on Dovecot for nearly five years and has taken a perfectionist attitude towards the way it works. He’s spent the last six months refusing to release a final version and we’ve all watched as the release candidate numbering has crept up to hit rc23. A couple of weeks ago he chose Friday 13th to do the final release, and it has happened. Read the rest of this entry »

Over the last few months my old workhorse desktop computer started to play up and it was clear that it would soon be time to replace it. Or parts of it rather… mainly the graphics card and possibly the mobo. I started looking around for a new barebones setup and decided that I’d go for a Shuttle of some type or another. I ended up with a Shuttle SN25P and here are some PoV on the system as a whole and installing SuSE 10.2 on it. Read the rest of this entry »

Anyone who runs a blog knows about blog spam (or comment spam). Here on this site I run SpamKarma 2 which keeps out 99% of the spam and puts the other 1% in moderation for me to check. But when the number of spam comments reaches into the hundreds per day, then it starts to skew the logs too much. Flattering though it is at first glance to see hundreds of eager visitors each day, closer inspection shows many of them to be comment spammers. So, I started to look at ways to stop them before they got to leave a comment in the first place. Read the rest of this entry »

Yup, I’m going to nominate a Man of the Year (if Time magazine can do it, so can I). And he is: Dr Dave, a card carrying Evil Genius, creator of Spam Karma, the software that protects this blog from spammers and scammers.

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There is an updated version of KdeAm available. This is only a bug fix for situations where the audio is not playing correctly. This was due to a recent change in the sox utils, where the ‘play’ command expected a different style of paramater. Find it on the KdeAm page