Entries by jeremy

How to configure an SMTP Black Hole

Requirement:  Build a web server that will receive email for a particular domain and discard it immediately (and silently). I started with a canned Debian 9 system at OVH, but this should work with other and older Debian versions too. Log in as root and make sure you’re all up to date: apt-get update && apt-get […]

How to remotely run Disk Repair (fsck) on OS X

The first thing you should do is make sure your remote control program is running properly at startup.  I’m using TeamViewer so I just added it to the main user’s startup items.  If you’re using VNC on your mac you probably don’t have to do anything special once it’s enabled. The problem with Disk Repair […]

Remove junk from a default Debian Linux install

Just some stuff to get rid of when building a basic-ish LAMP server in a VM: apt-get –purge remove gnome* baobab bluez brasero brasero-common cdrdao cheese cheese-common dvd+rw-tools ekiga empathy empathy-common eog espeak espeak-data evolution evolution-common evolution-data-server evolution-data-server-common evolution-exchange evolution-plugins evolution-webcal fancontrol foo2zjs foomatic-db foomatic-db-engine foomatic-filters foomatic-filters-ppds gstreamer0.10-* hamster-applet hp-ppd hpijs hplip hplip-cups hplip-data inkscape […]

Move swap partitions off of RAID1 array

After upgrading my new server from Lenny to Squeeze, I noticed that the iWeb default install on this machine had the swap partition on a mirror.  Not that I expect this machine to be doing much swapping, but I figured I should fix it anyways.  To destroy the array and make those partitions “plain” swap […]

phpMyAdmin – Wrong permissions on configuration file, should not be world writable!

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]If you install phpMyAdmin on your web host and all you see when you access www.yoursite.com/phpmyadmin (or whatever) is “Wrong permissions on configuration file, should not be world writable!” you are supposed to just change the permissions of /phpmyadmin/config.inc.php to not be world writable (i.e. chmod 755 config.inc.php, or by using your FTP client). Some […]

Powershell: Automated Weekly Status Reports

This is a pretty simple Powershell script that generates a random weekly status report and emails it. I wrote this script because it is important that I produce a weekly status report at my place of employment. The report is graded based on if it was submitted at all and secondly if it was submitted […]

Beagleboard: Upgrading from Debian 5 to Debian 6

I recently wanted/needed to upgrade Debian on my Beagleboard. The original Debian install was done following the instructions over at elinux.org. when I update distributions I usually prefer doing a clean install but since 90+% of my time on the Beagleboard is done while working remotely I thought I would give the upgrade route a […]

My .docx file opens as a .zip in Outlook Web Access – WTF?

TF is that Exchange 2003 doesn’t know about these new-fangled file extensions so it looks at the headers and sees that they are zip-compressed and assumes they are ZIP files… We just need to add the proper MIME types to Exchange which will in turn set up the attachment properly in OWA. Open Exchange System […]

Make Windows Server 2003 use external NNTP servers in just a few steps:

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]For future reference, running these commands in a shell is much faster than trying to follow Microsoft’s Knowledge Base instructions (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/816042). C:> w32tm /config /manualpeerlist:”0.pool.ntp.org 1.pool.ntp.org 2.pool.ntp.org”,0x8 /syncfromflags:MANUAL C:> w32tm /config /update C:> net stop w32time C:> net start w32time C:> w32tm /resync /nowait Thanks to Dave Nickason who posted this in 2008 to the […]

OpenVPN Bridge under VMware ESXi

So, as these things go, I spent 2 days looking at my OpenVPN config files and bridging setup before finding the solution to my problem was elsewhere. A little background: I created a new OpenVPN VM using the Debian Squeeze net install CD, configured it to match what was already working on a physical Windows […]

Quick way to disable IPv6 – Debian Squeeze (6)

echo “# Disable IPv6” >> /etc/sysctl.conf echo “net.ipv6.conf.all.disable_ipv6 = 1” >> /etc/sysctl.conf echo “#” >> /etc/sysctl.conf reboot Oh yeah, and if exim freaks out, vi /etc/exim4/update-exim4.conf.conf and change dc_local_interfaces so it reads dc_local_interfaces=’127.0.0.1′

Examining the Western Digital Raptor WD360GD

It is not a mystery to performance enthusiasts that hard drives are typically the slowest part of any computer.  I’ve always been curious about the Western Digital Raptor series of hard drives.  The original series was released in 2003 which makes this technology six years old.  Being “old” technology one can now purchase WD Raptor […]

We got a robot – a Roomba 530

Sometimes you get an idea, Canadian Tire has a sale and tada you have a brand new Roomba to play with.  In this case a Roomba 530.  The Roomba has been very well documented and there are plenty of reviews out there so I’m not going to do that here. With a 16 month old […]