Recently in Ubuntu Category

Tweaking Spam Filters

By Michele Neylon on July 11, 2010 9:10 AM | No Comments | No TrackBacks

I've been running my own mail server for this domain and several others for a few years. I could have used our main mail servers, but I like messing around with the server settings and trying out new things.

One thing that I hadn't been checking too stringently on my inbound email was SPF.
Sure, I had it set up on several of my domains so that anyone else getting mail from me would be "happy".
Switching it to more stringent settings and checking SPF inbound, however, has proven to be worth the few minutes it took to set it up - over 100 mails blocked in less than 24 hours!

I opted to install postfix-policyd-spf-perl as I'm using Postfix. Configuration was pretty easy - just adding a couple of lines to the main.cf and master.cf (the man page gives you the most up to date configuration settings)

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Ubuntu Gets A Visual MakeOver

By Michele Neylon on March 4, 2010 1:27 AM | No Comments | No TrackBacks

Ubuntu, which is one of the more popular Linux distributions these days, has unveiled a completely new look.

It's got a new logo:

And a whole new range of styles for just about every other visual asset associated with the brand, both online and on the users' desktops.

The new look is very slick compared to the "old" image of Linux distributions as being ugly, yet functional

Full details here

Thanks to Laura for mentioning it earlier this evening

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Cleaning Up Old Configs On Ubuntu / Debian

By Michele Neylon on March 1, 2010 9:08 PM | No Comments | No TrackBacks

Image via Wikipedia

This is more for my own use than anyone else...

If you remove a package in Debian / Ubuntu you often end up with legacy configuration files lying around.

Running the following command removes all the crud left lying around your system and may fix silly issues that you run into. As it's Linux, there's probably about 10 other ways to do this!

Here's the command:

sudo aptitude purge `dpkg --get-selections | grep deinstall | awk '{print $1}'`

Enjoy!

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Logging Email From PHP Scripts

By Michele Neylon on April 27, 2009 7:47 PM | 2 Comments

This is more a note for myself than anything else ...

By default a lot of php scripts will send emails that appear as coming from the Apache user, which makes tracking down a rogue script really annoying and time-consuming.

You end up with entries in the mail logs similar to this one:

Apr 27 18:22:29 servername postfix/qmgr[23581]: 0F53421C1FA: from=<www-data@servername.com>, size=929, nrcpt=1 (queue active)

Which isn't particularly helpful if you have more than one site (vhost) on a particular server.

Making it a bit saner can be done via a simple addition to the Apache vhost config:

php_admin_value sendmail_path '/usr/sbin/sendmail -t -i -f address@domain.tld'

So now any emails sent from that vhost will reference the email specified instead of the Apache user:

Apr 27 19:40:34 servername postfix/qmgr[2469]: 16A8F21C1FA: from=<address@domain.tld>, size=358, nrcpt=1 (queue active)

There are other additions to Php that can log the path to the script itself, though until such time as someone makes it available for Debian / Ubuntu I don't really fancy having to compile it in manually

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Ubuntu Jaunty Upgrade Not A Pleasant Experience

By Michele Neylon on April 25, 2009 2:10 PM | 5 Comments

So I decided last night I'd upgrade my Ubuntu desktop to the latest release...

The upgrade process itself was quite painless, but the post-upgrade "cleanup" is driving me mad.

After rebooting into the new version of Ubuntu the audio had stopped working. Loading up alsamixer from the command line and playing around with it for a while eventually resolved that.. though it was pretty much a case of "hit and miss" working out which option would resolved it.

So now I have sound again...

Tracker shipped without a full set of binaries and was eating CPU (see bug report here)

What I didn't have, either, was the ability to click on links in Thunderbird. Sure, I could click on them, but nothing happened. The resolution to that issue was to do a fresh install of Thunderbird, as I may have had an "odd" version installed (no idea how, but since it's now working I'm not going to complain too loudly!)

Evolution, which would have been an option to consider instead of Thunderbird, does not support Microsoft Exchange 2007, so that's no use to me either.

I watch video files using VLC, but that's also changed quite annoyingly, so instead of having the player controls in the same window as the video you're watching, you now end up with two windows. I spent about half an hour trying to work out if there was some sane way of changing that behaviour, but I still haven't found it.

Other annoyances ...

Every time anyone logs onto MSN or ICQ you get a disproportionately large notification on your screen.

There are probably loads of really nice features in the latest release, but I wouldn't rush to do an upgrade

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Pidgin on Ubuntu - Alternative Installation Method

By Michele Neylon on April 5, 2009 3:31 PM | 1 Comment

I've been having some issues with Pidgin on my Ubuntu desktop since I upgraded recently. No matter what happens it seems to be using a lot more CPU than I would like as well as crashing randomly.

In order to fix this I'm currently trying a different installation method which has been provided by the Pidgin developers:

Ubuntu ships Pidgin but does not update it after a release (except for security issues). For those users who desire new releases of Pidgin, we have packaged Pidgin in a PPA. If you encounter problems with these packages, try building from source and report the bug.

To setup the PPA, copy-and-paste these commands into a terminal:
sudo apt-key adv --recv-keys --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com \
      67265eb522bdd6b1c69e66ed7fb8bee0a1f196a8
. /etc/lsb-release
echo deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/pidgin-developers/ppa/ubuntu \
      $DISTRIB_CODENAME main | \
      sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/pidgin-ppa.list

Once this PPA is setup, Pidgin updates will show up in Update Manager along with the usual Ubuntu updates. The PPA will need to be re-setup only after upgrading Ubuntu.

Whether this installation method will rectify my CPU spikes issues or not remains to be seen, but I'm willing to try just about anything at this juncture!

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Pidgin 2.5.5

By Michele Neylon on March 10, 2009 6:54 PM

I hadn't had any issues with either Pidgin or Adium since the minor issue back in January.

However, as of yesterday, ICQ was refusing to work on Pidgin.

Seemingly there was a new release of Pidgin (2.5.5), however Ubuntu hadn't released a packaged version.

Since Pidgin is open source and they release the source files it is possible for a user to create their own Ubuntu / Debian package (.deb), however I don't like doing that unless I really really have to.

Fortunately there are other people out there who are more than capable of packaging files, so you can get a working set of .deb files here.

In order to install the new version of Pidgin you will need to remove the old one first. You won't lose your configuration settings by removing the old version (unless you purge it completely). You can probably do that via the UI, however it's just as easy to do it from the command line as root:
apt-get remove pidgin

Download all the .deb files from the site I linked to above and install each of them using:
dpkg -i filename.deb

The last one you install should be pidgin itself (the version I got was pidgin_2.5.5-1~getdeb1_i386.deb), so the command would be:
dpkg -i pidgin_2.5.5-1~getdeb1_i386.deb

It seems to be working fine now, so I'm happy.

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Cross Browser Testing Makes Sense

By Michele Neylon on December 16, 2008 10:15 PM | 38 Comments

Trying to get sites to display identically across multiple browsers and multiple operating systems is awkward. This site probably doesn't display particularly well on all browsers, but I'm not a professional web designer / developer, so you'll have to excuse me. It's also not a corporate / business website trying to sell products or services to the public.

Screenclick, however, is a business website.

Earlier this evening I decided to visit it on my Mac using Firefox. Apart from the really annoying splash page, which doesn't do anything useful, the main page does not load correctly in Firefox 3 on the Mac:

Now if you open the same page in Safari you seem something totally different:

Why?

Seemingly somebody decided to use Microsoft's Silverlight, but didn't bother to do a simple plugin check that would either prompt the user to install the plugin or gracefully degrade.

I won't be able to view their site on my Linux desktop either, as Silverlight isn't available for Linux (there is a port, but last time I checked there wasn't a native Debian / Ubuntu version available)

UPDATE: I've now moved to my Ubuntu Linux desktop and this is what I get:

The wonderfully helpful splash page (do they honestly expect me to continue browsing after seeing that?)

and the inner page (for some odd reason it's actually telling me that I need Silverlight now, whereas it wasn't on my Mac!)

PS: For a slightly different view on the Screenclick site check out Hugh's post

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Mackers SMS Script Rocks!

By Michele Neylon on November 24, 2008 1:56 PM | 1 Comment

I've used the Mackers SMS script on and off over the last couple of years, but I don't think I've ever mentioned how cool and useful it is.

I tried to get the OSX desktop widget to work, but it threw a rather annoying and unhelpful error message. Fortunately the Debian / Ubuntu version is a total breeze to install, so I was up and running again in a couple of minutes.

I'm not a very heavy texter, but I can't see the point in paying for something if I don't have to ie. I get a certain number of free texts every month, so I might as well use them!

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Linux Is Bad For Your Health

By Michele Neylon on July 31, 2008 1:43 PM | 2 Comments

Whoever is behind XKCD is a genius.

Today's gem is pure geek, but linux zealots will appreciate it (click to enlarge):

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Recently in Ubuntu Category

Tweaking Spam Filters

Ubuntu Gets A Visual MakeOver

Cleaning Up Old Configs On Ubuntu / Debian

Logging Email From PHP Scripts

Ubuntu Jaunty Upgrade Not A Pleasant Experience

Pidgin on Ubuntu - Alternative Installation Method

Pidgin 2.5.5

Cross Browser Testing Makes Sense

Mackers SMS Script Rocks!

Linux Is Bad For Your Health

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