Month: July 2006

Beer!!!

So I bought a beer kit from http://www.mrbeer.com. My first brew is a blackberry stout. I used 2 cans of stout malt extract, a can of blackberries and a cup of molasses. It will ferment for up to 3 weeks, then I’ll bottle and let it sit for many weeks so it can carbonate and the flavors can meld. I’ll end up with 2 gallons of what I hope will be an extra tasty stout with about a 7% alcohol content.

If you’re in the US and like real beer, I recommend looking into a kit like this. It’s inexpensive, fun and easy. Plus you don’t have to drink MGD all night.

Please configure your mailserver properly!

Am I the only one who’s sick of getting bounced email to aliases that never ever ever send email, and spammers are obviously forginging headers? How does spamming my alias with bounces help anything?

Here’s an example:

This is the Postfix program at host smtp.gentoo.org.

I'm sorry to have to inform you that your message could not
be delivered to one or more recipients. It's attached below.

For further assistance, please send mail to postmaster

If you do so, please include this problem report. You can
delete your own text from the attached returned message.

The Postfix program

xxxp@xxxxxx.co.uk (expanded from amd64@gentoo.org): host
a.mx.pengus.net[80.249.110.195] said: 550 This message looks like spam.
This server will not accept spam. (in reply to end of DATA command)

Please, please, please, please configure your mailserver to silently reject spam. bouncing to an innocent group becuse some ass has forged our address does nothing, except makes YOU the spammer.

smartcards

I recently received a replacement smartcard and a RS232 based smartcard reader from Genesi. This time I managed not to brick the cards while setting things up. gentoo seems to have good support for the cards via pcsc-lite and opensc. I was able to accomplish a lot in just a few hours of hacking.

  1. local login support
  2. ssh/ssh-agent support
  3. xscreensaver support
  4. general PAM support(smartcard can be used in place of any PAM password)

The only thing I wish for is some agent to cache my pin number. I suppose I’ll hack out some sort of pam-agent.

Thanks go to Pieter of genesi for sending me more gear.