Technology & MSG

A few months ago Verizon decided to block outgoing SMTP connections from its residential customers. It doesn’t matter whether you’ve got dial-up, DSL, or FIOS. The thinking was that zombies could be prevented from sending out spam. I’m not sure how that strategy is working out, but it does make getting daily reports from your [...]

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For the last couple days, the cron job for updating my SpamAssassin rule set has been throwing an error:
Argument “1.39_01″ isn’t numeric in subroutine entry at /usr/bin/sa-update line 81.
It turns out this is a bug with the Archive::Tar module that was released a few days ago, not SpamAssassin or CentOS per se. The fix — [...]

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Vixie cron supports jitter, an extremely easy way to stagger cron jobs and prevent them all from starting at once. From the FreeBSD cron man page:
-j jitter
Enable time jitter. Prior to executing commands, cron will sleep a random number of seconds in the range [...]

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When I set up software RAID, I have any errors sent to me via email. I recently found the following email in my inbox.
From: mdadm monitoring
To: root@foo.tld
Subject: DegradedArray event on /dev/md0:foo.tld
This is an automatically generated mail message from mdadm running on foo.tld
A DegradedArray event had been detected on md device /dev/md0.
Faithfully yours, etc.

That’s it. [...]

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S/MIME message don’t interact well with RT. If you send an S/MIME email to the system, you will likely receive the nondescript “no value sent for required parameter ‘message’” error. The mail administrator will see EX_TEMPFAIL errors (if using Sendmail). One solution is to remove MIME data from incoming messages destined for RT.
The following was [...]

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While not as simple as its automated hardware counterparts, software RAID under Red Hat Linux provides some level of redundancy. While setting up the arrays is somewhat of a hassle, rebuilding a member disk after a failure is a simple one-line command.
After coming into some recently purchased Itanium-based servers, it became apparent during the setup [...]

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I was just handed a copy of Wide Open Magazine. Still wrapped in clear plastic wrap, it proclaims to be “The Red Hat Magazine for Open Source Professionals and Advocates.” A rather bold statement when you consider it’s their premiere issue.
My coworker received three copies of this magazine, and he figured I might be interested. [...]

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After years working with BSD and Linux, this morning I was limited by rm. Apparently there is a maximum number of files that can be passed as arguments to rm. Thankfully, there’s an easy workaround.
Using rm to delete files is as natural to many as breathing, particularly in the BSD/Linux community. Whether it be removing [...]

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