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Change control: SLES 10 updates August 22, 2008

Posted by evilzenscientist in : CAB, Linux, patching , add a comment

Planned upgrades this weekend

SLES 10 SP1 –> SP2 for both x86 and x64

 

How-to: http://www.novell.com/support/viewContent.do?externalId=7000387

Local update: http://www.novell.com/support/documentLink.do?externalID=3065146

Release notes: http://www.novell.com/documentation/sles10/release-notes_sp2/release-notes_sp2.html

Strange world July 5, 2008

Posted by evilzenscientist in : Linux , add a comment

I travelled wearing my black Ximian staff shirt; then I got stopped in the airport by a Gnome fanboy who told me that the Ximian Desktop rocked!

Linux will not displace Windows – proof August 31, 2007

Posted by evilzenscientist in : Linux, fun stuff , 1 comment so far

Haha. This was forwarded to me and made me smile.

Why Linux will not displace Windows

Here’s the incredible response:

You are kidding arent you ?
 
Are you saying that this linux can run on a computer without windows underneath it, at all ? As in, without a boot disk, without any drivers, and without any services ?
That sounds preposterous to me.
If it were true (and I doubt it), then companies would be selling computers without a windows. This clearly is not happening, so there must be some error in your calculations. I hope you realise that windows is more than just Office ? Its a whole system that runs the computer from start to finish, and that is a very difficult thing to acheive. A lot of people dont realise this.
Microsoft just spent $9 billion and many years to create Vista, so it does not sound reasonable that some new alternative could just snap into existence overnight like that. It would take billions of dollars and a massive effort to achieve. IBM tried, and spent a huge amount of money developing OS/2 but could never keep up with Windows. Apple tried to create their own system for years, but finally gave up recently and moved to Intel and Microsoft.
Its just not possible that a freeware like the Linux could be extended to the point where it runs the entire computer fron start to finish, without using some of the more critical parts of windows. Not possible.
I think you need to re-examine your assumptions.
 
Posted by: jerryleecooper Posted on: 03/14/07

Of mail servers December 28, 2006

Posted by evilzenscientist in : Linux, Technology, evilzenscientist , add a comment

I wrote about moving my primary mail server to SLES 10 and Netmail 3.5.2 a month ago.

Everything has been working really well – great uptime, better performance, another box moved to SLES 10..

Except for one little thing. Grania has been commenting that some of her email is missing.

Well – it’s not been in the inbound SpamAssassin kill files; it’s not stuck on the mail server; there are no errors with connectivity; no problems with DNS or MX records. The mail has been from all over – so it’s not someone like Yahoo being picky. Also normal mail has been coming in fine – so we’ve not been blackholed.

Tonight I decided to hunt down the problem.

It was me. I missed one step for the migration of mail; to use Netmail rules and forwarding the AutoReply agent needs creating and configuring.

The AutoReply Agent also enables users to forward their messages to another e-mail address. Users can specify if they want to retain a copy of the message in their NetMail mailbox or forward the message to the designated address.

Ooops. I missed that one. Three mouse clicks later and everything is back to normal.

I just trawled the aliases and there were over 400 mails to forward to the real mailboxes.

Bayes learning, SpamAssassin, Novell NetMail and Copfilter November 17, 2006

Posted by evilzenscientist in : Linux, Technology, evilzenscientist, fun stuff , 2 comments

 

I use IPcop and Copfilter as my firewall/spam/email filtering gateway. Free and easy. Scales well.

I’ve had problems with Copfilter running the Bayesian learning for spam assassin; in short copfilter runs a wrapper script to call into sa-learn.pl.

I found that the IMAP->message_to_file was just sitting waiting for input from the NetMail server I run. Simple fix; add a timeout to IMAP reads and increase the IMAP buffer size. This should let me get all of the body text for learning, and timeout on massive inline images.

I logged a bug and posted a fix to the DMZS-sa-learn.pl script

my $imap = Mail::IMAPClient->new(
Server => ‘foo.com:143′,
User => ’spamtrainer’,
Password => ‘longpassword’,
Debug => ‘1′,
#ezs edits
Timeout => ‘5′,
Buffer => ‘65536′,
);

Spam training is working perfectly now – Copfilter is eating its way through 3600 spam and about 6000 ham (non spam) messages.

Collanos September 8, 2006

Posted by evilzenscientist in : 'Web 2.0', Linux, evilzenscientist , add a comment

A colleague from Novell moved to Collanos – I looked at their products – and it’s interesting.

The Collanos Workplace seems to fill several of my needs for working with my team:

- document sharing and management
- team task lists
- discussions
- cross platform

Most importantly – the model is peer-to-peer. That means that none of my ‘corporate data’ ever lives on someone elses server. That was one of the major downsides to using something like Backpack or Basecamp. (Cool – but kinda interesting from a risk and security angle).

By having this ‘built’ and in the web it also means I don’t have to build an internal server, manage it, keep it safe, back it up – and also use VPN to get data in and out of it.

Feedback soon. I’ve sent the team the data – we should be running in a couple of days.

WordPress on openSUSE August 1, 2006

Posted by evilzenscientist in : Evangelism, Linux, Novell, blogging, evilzenscientist, wordpress , add a comment

openSUSE

I’m writing a wiki article on installing WordPress on openSUSE.

The aim is to have this done this week in time for WordCamp.

WordPress 2.0.4 July 28, 2006

Posted by evilzenscientist in : Linux, evilzenscientist, wordpress , add a comment

WordPress 2.0.4 is now out; it’s got a hefty security fix in it – so strongly recommended.

Novell PR using del.icio.us

Posted by evilzenscientist in : Linux, Novell, blogging, evilzenscientist , add a comment

Interesting update.

Novell’s PR agency are using del.icio.us to track press for the release of SUSE Linux Enterprise 10.

The link is here http://del.icio.us/SHIFT.Communications.Novell.SUSELinuxEnterprise10

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 July 17, 2006

Posted by evilzenscientist in : Linux, Technology, evilzenscientist, wordpress , add a comment

Your Linux is ready
I just updated two servers in the office to SLES 10 – officially launched today.

Things have improved since the internal alpha and beta releases – no problems so far – and very good hardware detection.

I’m writing a document on installing WordPress on SLES 10 – I’ll have that out soon.

[Edit - SLES 10 and WordPress 2.0.3 are running nicely together in my tests. I'll update the Evil ZEN Scientist blog server tonight and see where that gets me.]

This blog is now running on SLES 10 – woo!

# tail /etc/SuSE-release
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 (i586)
VERSION = 10