Tagged Content

Calling Marlo Stanfield

Submitted by justin on

A couple of years ago, it came to my attention that Marlo Stanfield's # is 410-915-0909. The reason this was particularly notable for me was that 410-915, a block of numbers with a storied history, is allocated to Baltimore-Washington Telephone Company (BWTel), where I manage the technical operations. So, I whipped up an audio clip, dropped it on a server, and routed 410-915-0909 to it. Voilà. Marlo was back in business. I told a few friends, then forgot about Marlo for a while.

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fail2ban SASL

Submitted by justin on

I installed fail2ban on a mail server yesterday, to deal with a specific hassle related to a huge number of hits to our (clients-who-send-mail) SMTP infrastructure. It did little good. I became aware the problem was that the authentication attempts were via SASL. So, I enabled SASL. Nothing. Then I found a good forum post. Long story short, modify /etc/fail2ban/filter.d/sasl.conf as follows:

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Government Research, Innovation

Submitted by justin on

In recent months, a number of prominent conservatives have decried US Government loan guarantees to (relatively) early-stage companies in the green power industry. The biggest of these, of course, has been Solyndra. Simultaneously, they attack emissions and fuel efficiency standards on vehicles, power plants, etc. These disingenuous attacks ignore a basic, fundamental truth about the vast majority of modern innovation: it stands on the shoulders of Government-funded research. I know, heresy. The obvious example, of course is the Internet.

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Why should I care about a spectrum crisis?

Submitted by justin on

While I'm reasonably certain the discussion of spectrum crisis isn't a daily conversation around America's dinner tables, It's certainly a prominent part of my Google Reader feed. Way too prominent, I've begun to think. Almost as bad as rumors of this new cell phone or that new cell phone. Yawn. Then again, maybe this is something we should be looking at differently.

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Installing PHP on Debian without Apache

Submitted by justin on

When I recently went to install PHP on a server on which I did *not* want Apache, I learned that a simple, "apt-get install php5" will install Apache. A quick look at the depends, though, and the following sequence worked. Yes, I'm aware commands can be combined. I chose multiple steps.
sudo apt-get install php5-common
sudo apt-get install php5-cgi
sudo apt-get install php5
The php5-cgi package fulfills the depends that would otherwise be fulfilled by Apache. -jbn

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Custom Authentication for Drupal

Submitted by justin on

I recently had a need to write a custom authentication module for Drupal 6. I struggled to find a good example from which to work. As anyone researching the topic knows, Drupal 6 dropped the couple of hooks that were in Drupal 5 that made custom authentication a brainless activity. It turns out, Drupal 6 isn't all that hard, once you know what to do. The below is my work, which I built after studying the user and the ldap authentication modules. Note that the below code will fail all logins. Why? To save you from yourself. Down towards the end there's a "if (1==1)". Yeap.

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Freeswitch Installation

Submitted by justin on

I recently needed to install Freeswitch for a singular reason: to register to another server when a SIP client registered to it. (What I call "register on register"). As I went, I decided to document the process of installing and configuring. This server is running Debian 5.0.2, and is a virtual container on top of another Debian lenny install, utilizing the OpenVZ virtualization infrastructure. Note: During my first install, the container only had 1 GB of space. About half of that gets taken up by Debian. For whatever reason, that turned out to not be enough.

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Debian, locales, and puppet

Submitted by justin on

Having gotten sick and tired of receiving error messages like this:
perl: warning: Setting locale failed.
perl: warning: Please check that your locale settings:
LANGUAGE = (unset),
LC_ALL = (unset),
LANG = "en_US.UTF-8"
are supported and installed on your system.
perl: warning: Falling back to the standard locale ("C").
I decided to solve the problem once and for all. We use puppet to manage machines, so this should be - and is - straight forward. /etc/puppet/modules/locales/files/locales.gen:
#

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The Quest for Wind Power

Submitted by justin on

When the state initially deregulated the electricity market, I had little use for it. It wasn't that I loved our monopoly provider, BGE, it was more that I really didn't believe I would benefit from deregulation. A year or two ago, I finally found a benefit: Pepco Energy Services offered to sell me 100% wind power at at premium over the price of regular power. (For what it's worth, BGE's supply is, I believe, coal and nuclear).

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Generic Apache Redirect to Add www to Domain Name

Submitted by justin on

It's common to want to add "www" to a domain name, so that users typing in the "non-www" domain name, will get to the right site. It's important to implement this with a 301 redirect so that search engines recognize that there is only one true and real site. The traditional way to do this is:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^euphline.com$
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.euphline.com/$1 [R=301,L]

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