nutmeg's blog

Following up on the previous entry I have now got a exim4.conf that has survived basic testing. I have checked exim4 -bt for all major routers and found and fixed a fair number of bugs in the initial version.

Any further changes I would (like to) make would result in different behavior than the current exim v3 setup, so I am not wasting time on that until somebody from debian-admin says they want me to.

Conservative suggestions include copying the "deny local_parts = funky characters" settings from the default configuration, disabling domain-literals (or at least accepting only incoming postmaster@[local.ip] instead of only outgoing), and perhaps recipient verification.

Today I have spent a little bit of time on trying to provide an exim4.conf for the Debian hosts, which currently still feature exim v3. I started by grabbing a couple of /etc/exim/exim.conf from a number of Debian hosts. And only after a ls -l I was surprised, although the comment on the top of the file says # It is installed as part of the debian.org package -- don't edit this file all the seven exim.confs were slightly different. I tried to guess which one was the newest revision and chose merkel's configuration as starting point.
convert4r4 produced a good starting point. It only completely fails to convert ${lookup{alice:uid}lsearch{}{$value}} to ${extract{uid}{${lookup{alice}lsearch{}}}}. I fixed these and went throught the file line by line, cleaning it up and rearranging comments and have now got something that probably (I have not made any tests yet) makes exim4 behave as exim v3 did. It is available as ~ametzler/exim4.conf.merkel on merkel.d.o.
I was quite surprised that LDAP is not accessed directly and even more that receiver_verify was not set. I wonder whether this was done intentionally against dictionary attacks or whether the default was accepted.

I somehow seem to have managed to get my bookmarks-page (intentionally not linked here, just remove "/blog/debian/" from my blog's URL) blacklisted by google. The crawler has practically stopped indexing my site at July 15th.
I do not now how that happened - afaict my robots.txt is ok, but I would appreciate cross-checks. I guess Google took me having having a pointer to the site in my signature and sending a couple of mails as google-spamming.

Well, now that the phonelines are working again I was able to upload a couple of pictures of our local flooding in Au. At least there were no casualities here, but the damage is extensive. We were lucky and have not got any water in the house, but e.g. the local car-dealership is simply gone.

With glibc 2.3.5 in unstable we have again reached the point in time which makes it unwise to install (almost all) packages from unstable on a stable system, as upgrading libc6 to unstable would be necessary, too. This should soon trigger a strong interest in backports for sarge, I guess a sarge directory will soon appear on backports.org.

As early adopter (and to force me to actually test my packages) I have again started to provide backports of exim4. Feel free to add
deb http://www.bebt.de/debian/ sarge exim4
to your sources.list. Sources are available on the same site, just replace deb with deb-src. - The interdiff to unstable's 4.52-2 only consists of a one-line-patch to debian/control, downgrading the Build-Depends.

Since December 2004 I have been using a vserver provided by vlinux or my personal hosting. Its main purpose is e-mail. - Acting as my outgoing smarthost and dealing with my incoming mail (exim with clamav/greylistd/spamassassin and dovecot), which the small variant is just fast enough for.

All told I am quite happy with it, however there are some limitations.
Some syscalls are diabled e.g. the bind9-binary as shipped by Debian will not run which I sidestep by using the evil dnscache instead) and I find setrlimit(RLIMIT_NPROC) failed: Operation not permitted in my logfile everyday.
The second big restriction is that I really only have got one IP, the public one. 127.0.0.1/8 is not available for running internal services (like the dnscache) on.

As there is not much hope for a mozilla (security) upgrade in sarge I have built 1.7.11 myself. I started with the diff for 2:1.7.10-1, adapted the Build-Depends (sarge has no libxau-dev but xlibs-static-dev) and dropped the patch needed for building with freetype2 2.1.10-1 but breaking building against freetype2 2.1.7-2.4.

Shortly afterwards I thought the effort had been wasted but although DSA-775 refers to mozilla it just includes a fix for mozilla-firefox.

The package works for me, but I am only using the browser-part without extension packages. If you are adventurous feel free to use them.
deb http://downhill.aus.cc/debian/ sarge mozilla

It looks like I have read Hornblower in the wrong order by following the sequence of events instead of the sequence of publishing. This seems to have influenced my perception partially by emphasizing the growing-up aspect. However I was not completely deluded, as Antti-Juhani at least confirms that "the Hornblower stories are not character-intensive."

FWIW I also do read and enjoy stuff with not-so-deep characterisation (there is couple of Star Wars books, for example...) but this was not what I was loooking for at the time.

O'Brian's novels were published in written in historical order, and imho the first one (Master and Commander) is the correct starting point, and if you do not like this one, there is little hope that starting with a different one might have produced a different impression.

During the last few months I have searched for something similar to Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey/Maturin series I have given up on that now. Most of the historical seafaring adventures I took a look at are the likes of CS Forester's Hornblower saga: "Bland, usually depressed teenage hero rises from midshipman to admiral." The main target audience are teenage boys, the story is driven by professional success and coming of age problems. (There are variations, e.g. Dewey Lambdin's Alan Lewrie series throws in some Flashman-like elements with only succeeding in making the main character less likable to me.)

O'Brian simply offers more of everything. The characters - which start full grown, we do not have to nurse them through puberty - are of surprising depth, there is witty humour instead of teenage depressions, nevertheless the action sequences are thrilling and meticoulosly choreographed.