A geeks Blog

Novell gets in on the game

2007-03-24T23:21:00.000Z

With this ad!

Hat tip to Dizzy thinks, who also has it here.

Has your phone been busy today?

2007-01-16T15:05:00.000Z

Names and telephone numbers have been changed to protect the guilty!

A few days ago I got a rush job. We had installed a new mail server, and it appeared that it was missing an email address. It was one of those generic ones, like info@

So I rang up the person who wanted the address to see where they wanted it to go. Or rather I tried.

I dialed 01234 567123 (His direct dial)

I get a woman, she said:

"881155."

What???? I think to myself. I say sorry got the wrong number.

I dial again. This time though, I keep an eye on what is appearing on the screen.

I got the same woman. Well obviously there is something very weird going on with the phones. I'll deal with that later. I apologise again, and this time dial the company's main exchange.

"Hello, can I speak to Joe Blogs?"

"yes I'll just put you through"

Ring! Ring!

"881155."

At this point I suspected something was up.

"I am sorry I was just trying to get hold of someone at ABC"

"It wasn't Joe Blogs was it?

"Yes it was"

"He's my husband"

The penny drops. He has got his phone on divert to his home phone for some reason. I asked if Mrs. Blogs had Mr Blogs mobile phone number, she had. I dialed it.

"Hello Joe, has your phone been busy today?"

"No, it's been a bit quiet actually"

"Well, your wife's hasn't!"

Ah well, made me laugh!

Has software protection gone too far?

2006-12-10T19:30:00.000Z

A friend of mine was installing a brand new Sony Vaio. He had obviously done all the registration things and had moved on the installing software. You know, the stuff people actually use.

Well, guess what happened when he got to FireFox 2.0, also nice shiny new software?

Up pops the allegedly helpful "computer protection suite" to say:

"this software is too new"

Now what is that all about? Google was unhelpful. (So was the computer protection suite).

Hat tip to Rob for that one!

Linux tip of the day

2006-11-24T20:34:00.000Z

If you have a busy server, check how big a log file is before trying to open it with your favourite light weight text editor.

Made this mistake today.

One of the mail servers I run for a client gets some email, but gets an horrific amount of spam, and attempts at spam. In fact it looks almost like a concerted denial of service attempt.

I greped the logfile to see how many noqueues it had. 164,000 in 5 days. That is just silly. I then tried to open the logfile to see how many lines it had in it and lost the server.

I almost got in far enough to kill the process but not quick enough. The server had to be rebooted.

The mail log was over 1GB in just 5 days. This mail server only handles one domain.

Just how are ISP's supposed to keep 6 months records of emails? They manage thousands or hundreds of thousands of domains. The log files must grow at a huge rate.

NPI Errors

2006-11-14T13:25:00.000Z

Every so often you get one of those calls...

Caller "Hi, I can't get on the Internet"

Me. "I see. Can you click start, then run, type in cmd, then press return. That should get you up a black box, yes? Good. Type in ipconfig and then press return. What does it say?"

Caller "It says blah blah blah ... Media disconnected"

Me "You couldn't plug it into the network please?"

An NPI error is as you may now have guessed a Not Plugged In Error. If I had a Pound for every one, I'd have quite a few pounds.

Aarrghhhh Microsoft!

2006-11-09T00:06:00.000Z

I have been installing Novell OES, with a few glitches thrown in on the way (which will be the subject of future articles) when I came across another problem I just did not need!

There I am, everything just about tickety boo, when one machine suddenly can log on to the network for toffee.

Obviously a problem with the Novell client for NetWare or a server issue. maybe the lack of slp or similar.

Well, after a lot of fiddling in the direction the error pointed I then noticed that once logged on to the work station only option, the machine would just sit there not bringing up the desktop until I pressed ALT + CTRL + DEL when the desktop would appear. It did not matter how long I left it or didn't.

Odd.

So then I tried to log on to NetWare. Well I got it to authenticate but the logon script just hung. Hmm...

Opened task manager and killed some processes. (iTunes for example). Nothing. I then stopped the print spooler, spoolsv.exe. It sprang into life!

Printing still worked because the spooler would restart and then behave although it then took up 10MB of ram (this just to send jibs to printers, and when it is doing NOTHING).

Very irritating.

Bad Microsoft. Very bad Microsoft.

Still I have a work around, now i just have to fix the spooler process. I looked at this article, but it's advice did not seem to fit. I will look further in the morning.

Passing Bt Engineer scuppers network!

2006-11-06T20:41:00.000Z

Ages ago i set up a nice little server running Arch Linux, with a custom compile of Samba, running very nicely thank you very much.

I set up Bind, DHCP, CUPS, and jut about everything else so that as far as the users running Windows were concerned they may well have been attached to a Windows server (except of course it is rock solid)

Not much bother there then.

Until one day the BT managed router connecting said network to the interweb thingy ceased to function (I presume it was involved in sexual intercourse).

So along came the BT man, with his nice shiny new router to put in place.

By the time he left you could either get on the Internet or the server, but not both.

What he had done was to make his router a DHCP server (as in giving out network addresses and configuration information) with different network information as well. The result was that if your PC got its information from one then it was on the Internet and if it got it from the other then it could get on the server.

All the BT engineer had to actually do is turn his brain on, and query any machine for it's network settings. That would have told him the IP address that he had to set his router to, and to turn DHCP off. Would have taken 2 minutes to find out, and anther 2 to set up the router, as opposed to the several hours he did spend going around in circles buggering things up.

Always remember when on an unfamiliar network, that it helps to check out some very basics before you try to unnecessarily try to reconfigure everything.

Customer conversations

2006-10-29T01:09:00.000Z

Working in IT and dealing with problems or setting up new systems involves talking to customers.

Occasionally these are amusing enough to repeat. Here is one.

I was setting up a new server with file, print, and email. As it happens I was using Novell OES, and GroupWise 7 for Linux, which comes with clients for Windows, Apple Mac, and Linux as well as a web interface.

When setting up email you have a bunch of people who need mail boxes and they have a standard format of email like logonname@somedomain.co.uk or firstname.lastname@ etc....

You also need some alias or group email addresses like sales@ and perhaps the odd one or two for people who have left who's mail you may want to redirect to some one else.

Anyway, so there I am, installing this system, and ask "what about email aliases?"

I get a nine yard long list, which includes many different ways of spelling peoples names people who left ages ago etc.

So I say:

"Why not tell them to f*ck off and learn how to spell?"

Customer
"That does not fit in with our customer focused strategy"

Ah well....

More on email miss spellings another day.

Streuth!

2006-10-27T15:50:00.000+01:00

25,648 Spam mails bounced in one day just using block lists that I implemented yesterday on one server.

Wow that is a lot.

Mind you some of those may be spammers trying again.

Gotcha!

2006-10-26T15:42:00.000+01:00

Got the Spammers by using RBLs.

I put this in my postfix servers main.cf:

maps_rbl_domains = relays.ordb.org,
bl.spamcop.net

smtpd_recipient_restrictions =
permit_mynetworks,
reject_unauth_destination,
reject_maps_rbl,
permit

And now I get to see lots of open relays, probably home PC's taken over as zombies being rejected!

Good.

By the way, Postfix is brilliant, Well done Wietse Venema!

Update. So far on one server alone, 1200 spam emails bounced in 1 1/2 hours!

I'll have to roll it out elswhere.

Update at 17:30

Stopped 3258 spams that way. Bog off spammers!

Arghhh... Spammers

2006-10-26T14:06:00.000+01:00

I hate spammers. Gits.

Just who do these people think is going to get an email addressed to akshdsbfkjsb@somedomain.com?

Why bother? They are just clogging up the internet with rubbish. They are the internets fly tippers.

Gits!

Linux tip of the day

2006-10-25T22:05:00.000+01:00

I am no Linux Nerd god, but I do a bit and come across a really useful tit bit.

Here is one.

Lots of things on Linux (or UNIX) get logged in log files. If something is going wrong it can be useful to look at the log files, that's what they are for. The problem with these log files is they can be big and you may be looking for a needle in a haystack.

However there are tools to help. Here are the ones I use most.

Tail. If you tail a file it shows you the end of the file. Like for example:

tail /var/log/mail

will show the end of the mail log file (assuming that /var/log/mail is your mail log file).

tail -f /var/log/mail

will show you the end of the log file, but will also show you any new bits as they are added. Very handy. So you tail -f the log file, then replicate the fault and the answer pops up on the screen.

Some times though, tailing a log file is hard work as on a busy mail server stuff is flying up the screen at a rate of notts.

That's where grep comes in. You use grep to show you a line in a file which contains a given expression. For example:

grep me@somedomain.com /var/log/mail

will give you every line of the log file that has me@somedomain.com in it. Fantastic.

One of the great things though about the Linux command line is that you can get one command line program to pass its output to another to do something else with it to produce a more refined out put. So how do we find something useful that is about to happen in a log file that is growing quickly?

Here's how:

tail -f /var/log/mail | grep me@somedomain.com

That will show any new lines in the log file that contains the email address.

Of course you need not be looking at a mail log file or for an email address. If you use fetchmail and only want to see what fetchmail is doing rather than the rest of the mail system you would type:

tail -f /var/log/mail | grep fetchmail

(fetchmail normally puts "fetchmail" in any entries it makes in a log file.)

grep can also return lines before and after the line you were looking for. Use -A num for after occurrence and -B num for before.

You can also man grep to get the full manual page, or for an easier on the eye read you can also type man grep into google and read man pages on line.

The "|" is the symbol for pipe. On a UK keyboard you will find it on the bottom left hand side, and will need to press shift to get to it. What it means is pipe the output of this program to that over there. Works very well.

Geeky things I do at work

2006-10-25T21:06:00.000+01:00

Well, I work in IT, so there are many things I do with computers that other people just don't get. Frequently it seems I am almost speaking another language.

Just recently I have bee setting up a server running Novell OES. Oh the joy that some of that has been.

I also do a lot of Linux. Personally my favourite flavour of Linux is Archlinux. I just like the way it is laid out.

More later....