I have been working in the last weeks in the removal of the last pieces of KDE 3 from the Debian archive and I have found there are a lot of packages that is sad having to remove. If you are looking for a good idea/excuse to learn and improve your KDE 4 / C++ /Qt4 skills, have to do a small application for school or you just feel like some useful coding, here is the list:

• creox real-time guitar effects
• kbarcode barcode and label printing application for KDE
• kbiff KDE mail notification utility
• KKBSwitch keyboard layout indicator for KDE (see this post also)
• kmyfirewall iptables based firewall configuration tool for KDE
• kpogre a graphical administrator tool for PostgreSQL
• kredentials KDE taskbar applet to update kerberos/AFS credentials
• ksociograma technical educational software to make sociograms
• ktechlab circuit simulator for microcontrollers and electronics
• qalculate-kde Powerful and easy to use desktop calculator KDE version
• score-reading-trainer trainer for reading music notes

Note that I do not list here software whose port in KDE 4 is being developed although it is still not finished and therefore it is not packaged in Debian. By the way, even if all those packages are being removed from Debian testing and unstable, they will remain in Squeeze, so you can keep using them or install it from there.

This weekend we did run a booth at Chemnitzer Linuxtage. As always, it was a joy to be at this event. We had great discussions and talks with guests and exhibitors, I also enjoyed a small number of lectures. The booth did run well, beside some quirks. Some pictures can be found here.

Projects I've been working on are, if not bearing fruit, at least showing promise. git-annex is growing up a nice community that nags me about things like Mac OSX and FAT filesystem support. It's great to have their feedback, it's been leading to fast improvement, even though I've only gotten two patches to my haskell code. :) New users are finding Branchable despite us not knowing how to market it. Sometimes a new site springs up overnight fully formed, having been developed on a laptop and git pushed to us. I get a vicarious thrill over whatever our users are doing, be it driving to Mongolia or watering plants with arduino.

Almost a quarter of the way through the challenge now, and still going. I'm back inside for this shot of a new box of coloured pencils this week.

Now that I sent an update about my running activities, I have to report about what I'm doing these weeks in Debian to try keeping a fair balance for those of you who read this blog through Planet Debian. Most January was spent in preparing the release of squeeze. Of course, I didn't work directly on the release, not being involved in the release team. However, last bits of preparation for Debian Installer as well as rushing out the last remaining bits of localization work took most of my time. After the release of squeeze, time came to resume back some activities. First of all, on the l10n front, I resumed the work on "l10n NMUs", trying to get old l10n bugs fixed. I restarted proposing NMUs or, more precisely, help to perform translation updates rounds to these maintainers. Most of them had "old" l10n bugs because of the freeze. So, I indeed did not end up in doing many NMUs...but got several l10n bugs closed anyway. Work being resumed in unstable also lead to many changes in packages' debconf templates (new packages using debconf, packages introducing new templates, etc.). As these are the trigger for Smith reviews (reviews of English in debconf templates and packages' description, this activity, which was very low during the freeze, resumed again (we'll soon celebrate the 4th anniversary of this project). I also decided to invest more time in D-I again. The D-I team is currently more active than it was last years. Thanks to a few individual, work resumed in some areas and bug triaging has been very active. I recently resyned a nice improvement which had been contributed by a user to iso-scan, then polished by Frans Pop. This will allow to choose among several different ISO images when installing Debian from a USB stick while, previously, only the first found was being used. I also worked with a new translator, to prepare the activation of Uyghur translation in D-I. Some work happend in the pkg-fonts team. I had a few fonts adopted by the team, as part of the general effort to get rid of defoma. I sent patches for a few others, but many remain. If you maintain font packages, please help us in getting rid of defoma. Changes are easy to do; ask the team if you need help (pkg-fonts-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org). Samba packages also ate a significant part of my time. First of all, DSA-2175 lead to prepare fixes for samba in squeeze and lenny. Then, upstream released samba 3.5.8 which I uploaded to unstable. I briefly considered trying to get the Stable Release managers approval to push that version in squeeze, but the number of fixes made by upstream was discouraging. So, I chose to examine them slowly and cherry-pick those I consider important enough to warrant an upload for squeeze. More git wizardry learned doing so (thanks to Julien Cristau for his help). And I now have a pending proposal for three of these fixes (that represent 14 atomic patches from upstream) to be included in squeeze.

Has anyone tried to obtain the kernel source for the Archos 7 home tablet V2 or the Arnova range (ie, anything Archos is shipping that's based on the RK2818 rather than the RK2808)? If so, what was the response? The source from their site only appears to be for the RK2808 devices.

The first two months of this year have seen me quite busy preparing for my March-April peak of activity. So, most of these were spent accumulating kilometers, mostly on trail runs with mud, slope, obstacles, etc.

• January: 240km, 21h17', 3000m positive slope
• February: 170km, 15h10', 1900m positive slope

January was meant to accumulate kilometers, which succeeded quite well..:-). Not as crazy as November 2010 (close to 300km) but the point was also testing a few long runs, over 25km and up to 32. February saw my first official race, with Bullion half-marathon. This is a nice race which I already ran last year. It features small roads in the Rambouillet Forest. Not the best place to achieve a personal best because the race is not flat, with two hills in the first half. Moreover, I was just recovering from a small flu, so I wasn't really planning to achieve a PB. Still, I managed to do it in 1h39'49", two minutes more than my PB. Moreover, I managed to do it in a small negative split, with first half in 50'38" and second half in 49'11". More encouraging, I ran a 35km solo trail the next week-end after this and completed it fairly well with the pace I plan for the 50km Eco-Trail. Still, that flu introduced some minor perturbation in this preparation and, thus, I included more activity in early March. I was originally planning to run Paris half-marathon on 6th, but an invitation for a friends 50th birthday made me cancel that one. So, most of the first 3 weeks of March were spent in 15-18km style runs, plus running daily to go to and back from work. The last preparation was today with a short 12km run with all equipment needed for Eco-Trail (backpack, 2lit. waterbag) and the targeted pace (10km/h). So, on Saturday, will be the Paris Eco-trail 50km race from Versailles Castle to Eiffel Tower....through woods in the South and South-West neighbourhood, with 1000m positive slope. This will be my first ultra race, so I'm a little bit in a grey area, here. As a consequence, the only ambition is finishing. I expect it to be in aroung 5h30 or so. Most importantly, I have to keep reserves, as, two weeks later, I'll run my yearly Paris marathon. Two long distance races in two weeks...we'll see if I'm crazy or not..:-) Now, I'm heading for a quiet week: grow glucides reserves, eat pasta, do one or two footings...and wait for Saturday! You may want to watch my blog on Sunday to see whether I survived this first stage.

I posted a brief snippet of code on Friday which was my initial stab at a reverse HTTP proxy in Javascript (using node.js). Over the past couple of days I've tidied it up, added a command line parser, and made it flexible enough that it works for me. My node reverse HTTP proxy is now both documented ( a little ) and available for further eyeballs. Usage is pretty much:

$ node ./node-reverse-proxy.js --config ./path/to/config.file.js

The configuration file defines lists of virtual hosts along with the destination back-ends to proxy to - which is usually going to be a server running upon a high port on the loopback adapter, but might not be. In addition to that we can perform rewrites such as:

/**
  * Handler for wildcard host: *.repository.steve.org.uk
  *
  */
'([^.]*).repository.steve.org.uk':
     
        /**
         * Rewrites for static files - these will be handled via a
         * separate virtual host.
         */
        'rules':  
            '^/robots.txt':  'http://repository.steve.org.uk/robots.txt',
            '^/favicon.ico': 'http://repository.steve.org.uk/favicon.ico',
         ,
      ,

That says requests for http://chronicle.repository.steve.org.uk/robots.txt will be redirected to http://repository.steve.org.uk/robots.txt. Alternatively we can invoke javascript for each request matching a pattern:</p.>

    /**
     * static.steve.org.uk will mostly proxy to 127.0.0.1:1008
     * but files beneath /private/ have an IP-based ACL.
     */
    'static.steve.org.uk':
     
        host: 'localhost',
        port: '1008',
        'functions':  
            '/private': (function(orig_host, vhost,req,res)  
                var remote = req.connection.remoteAddress;;
                if ( ( remote != "80.68.85.46" ) &&
                     ( remote != "82.41.51.252" ) &&
                     ( remote != "89.16.161.34") &&
                     ( remote != "89.16.161.98" ) )
                 
                    res.writeHead(403);
                    res.write( "Denied access to " + req.url  + " from " + remote );
                    res.end();
                 
            ),
         
     ,

Fun stuff. It was live for my server, replacing apache, for a few hours today. I need to add some trivial HTTP Basic-Auth handling then it will go back. Otherwise I hope it is vaguely useful to others, and that the provided examples explain things neatly. ObQuote: "Only one thing alive with less than four legs can hear this frequency" - Superman.

AltOS 0.9.2 Minor update to ground station software Bdale and I are pleased to announce the release of AltOS version 0.9.2. AltOS is the core of the software for all of the Altus Metrum products. It consists of cc1111-based microcontroller firmware and Java-based ground station software. AltosUI Just a few bug fixes AltOS version 0.9.2 is a minor release with just a couple of fixes:

• Mac OS X graphing repaired. The 0.9 release was missing a file required to support the graphing feature (jcommon.jar). This has been added.
• Fixed multiple flight log downloading. Attempts to download more than one recorded flight log would fail in weird ways. The failures have been addressed and additional diagnostics are presented when things go wrong.
• You can see the AltOS version number in the Configure AltosUI dialog box now. This should make it easier to tell what you ve got installed.
• Post-flight graphing tool. This lets you explore the behaviour of your rocket after flight with a scroll-able and zoom-able chart showing the altitude, speed and acceleration of the airframe along with events recorded by the flight computer. You can export graphs to PNG files, or print them directly.

No Firmware Update AltOS version 0.9.2 does not include any firmware changes. We re still busy testing the Kalman filter code; that ll be in the next major release.

pommed v1.38 is out and adds support for the Early 2011 MacBook Pro machines:

• MacBookPro8,1: 13
• MacBookPro8,2: 15
• MacBookPro8,3: 17

These machines have a new keyboard/trackpad assembly, the WellSpring 5. You ll need a patched kernel or a kernel recent enough that it has the USB HID quirks for the new assembly; that s 2.6.39-rc material. This release also adds a new config item that allows disabling the audio support in pommed entirely. The audio hotkeys are fairly well supported in desktop environments nowadays so you ll probably want that if you re using one.

A bit more than a month ago, I had the random idea to try building and selling a web site, at the same time. The idea was that the more people bid, and requested features, the more I'd work on it. It didn't work out. I got a bit of money out of it, but certainly not enough to cover my time at an hourly rate. I suppose the lesson is that a month simply isn't a lot of time for something to mature: it'd probably be best to work on something on and off for a year, give it some time for traffic to build up, and so on, if the goal is to sell it. However, in any case, I think I'm pretty convinced that my next projects, like LiberWriter, will involve for-pay products. At heart, I'm not really a business guy, so picking the simplest possible business model probably makes sense: you pay me, I give you something. Hopefully, I'll be able to write about those in the "you win some column", but I thought I'd let people know how the experiment went.

Quite probably, the best thing got for myself during the last year was my Kindle. I just love it! It has changed the way I interact with knowledge, and saved me from hours of boredom. But it has also taught me the value of scribbling along the book pages and of underlining passages. Yes, I hold a deep regard for my regular (paper) books, and I never scribble on them, not even on text books. In any case, I can scribble on a post-it or something like that. Still, when you underline or comment on a passage in the Kindle, what can you do with your annotation? Well, not much. Annotations (called clippings in Kindlespeak) are stored on an easily accessible My Clippings.txt text file, very easy to parse and work with. So, I devoted yesterday evening to coming up with a first prototype of an app that I think can be very useful if you use clippings extensively: It displays each clipping with its base information separately, allows you to filter on the specific book to which each clipping is related as well as on the clipping type. So, if it interests you, clone it away from github!

git://github.com/gwolf/kindleclip.git

Written in Ruby, Gtk (Glade). No further libraries are (currently?) needed. The code is far from beautiful, but is a first stab towards functionality. Any comments welcome!

I found the following quote from Stefano's DPL platform interesting:

When faced with the dilemma, I've favored ditching some DPL tasks and communicating or taking notes about the others, instead of the other way around.

It takes someone who really knows Debian to realize that sometimes communicating about what's being done is more important than doing more.

For the users of Debian Squeeze we, the KVIrc maintainers, plan to upload the soon-to-be-released upstream bug fix release 4.0.4, packages of RC2 are available. RC2 is most likely going to be identical to the final 4.0.4 release. The update will be, if the SRMs agree (still need to ask them, but I wanted to wait for the final version before I do that), uploaded to stable-proposed-updates, maybe squeeze-updates and fix a few nasty bugs, which some users might experience, including graphical glitches when used under Gnome (upstream bug #1010), some crashes (e.g. upstream bugs #878, #879, #1093, #1098 and some without bug numbers like r4796), a regression in the Perl scripting support and a lot of translation updates (btw: if you use KVIrc and the translation for your mothertounge is lacking, consider to help! Coordinate your efforts on IRC.) Apart from that I just uploaded a new SVN snapshot of 4.1 into Sid, the next will follow in about ten days unless you report bugs, which make an earlier upload necessary. ;-)

Thanks to my recent promotion allowing me to commit directly in Org-mode, I've moved Org-contacts into the contrib directory of the Orgmode distribution.

A bit of history One of the greatest criticisms of Debian is that its release cycles are too long. Debian stable release is seen as often as Ubuntu s LTS release. As a server solution this doesn t present a problem at all, it can even seen as a pro. However, for desktop use and for your average Joe who needs to have the latest software and is unable to get it, this may well present a problem. Of course he can always turn to backports to get what he needs but by the time you have finished reading this very sentence, Joe has already moved to Ubuntu. For those who are completely unaware how things work within Debian, let me try to shed some light. Debian has 3 main branches:

• stable
• testing
• unstable

Unstable , is a branch used mainly by developers, where the latest changes to the software they are working on are made. Usually, after approximately 10 days this software is pushed to testing , branch which is going to become next Debian stable release. For comparison, in the process of a new Ubuntu release at one point in this process, changes from testing/unstable are frozen where Ubuntu fixes bugs until they are ready to release new Ubuntu release. Debian s testing branch is said by some to be more stable then most of the stable distributions out there. Last but not least is stable branch, which follows the (in)famous mantra it s released when it s ready , although last two releases have been released in a more timely manner. Okay, so what is Debian CUT? The idea stretches back more then 2 years, to Joey Hess proposing the idea of Constantly Usable Testing . For users/developers who can t wait ~2 years to see new Debian release, they usually turn to Debian testing branch. To clarify, testing images are released weekly, but most of us in Debian don t recommend you jump to testing by installing it from weekly image, but rather by upgrading from stable. To make the situation even worse, these builds frequently don t work due to all the changes that have been pushed from unstable. But this is where Constantly Usable Testing idea comes in, where the installer is always installable and you re already using what s going to be next stable release. You wouldn t have to worry about whether the next update is going to break your system, but would get regular security updates, while the big updates would come in shape of new testing snapshot versions. Frequency of release of these snapshots is ought to be on monthly basis, so you can plan on seeing the next release on April 6th (exactly one month after the current release, provided of course if there are no showstopper bugs). To sum it all up, you wouldn t have to wait ~2 years before new Stable release shows up, nor (in case you have already switched to testing) would you have to worry whether your next update will break your system. You would get your updates in form of timely (ie: monthly) snapshots until it s time for major milestone which would turn out to be new Debian release. Even though this might be long term goal, in these early stages no one can guarantees this. Rolling release? The simplest way to explain this concept is that there are two types of Linux distributions: one with milestone version numbers and other where new updates keep coming through their rolling release cycles. Some of the rolling distributions are Gentoo and Arch Linux, while on the other side you have RedHat and Suse. Novell announced that OpenSuse is moving to rolling release with project codename Tumbleweed. It s also worth mentioning that Debian already has its rolling counters and perfect examples are: LMDE and aptosid. It is a way to continuously develop software, a way that best fits Debian as a platform where software is continuously developed. Especially because most of its greatest values could get lost with the release of that big stable version . Perfect case of that could be the almost drop of Chromium in Squeeze. Another great example could be Android, which is criticised most for its versioning. Companies are refusing to release new Android versions to their current phones, because they want you to buy new phone with latest Android version, even though your current one is perfectly capable of running latest Android. Personally, I m sure the future will reveal that rolling releases are the future, towards which all Linux platforms should be heading. Perhaps the definition of rolling releases I gave earlier is why I believe this project has such bright future ahead of it. Debian would be somewhat of a hybrid of this definition, it would be rolling release until it s time to mark a big milestone with a version number, and before you know it, we re rolling again. Unofficial Debian Monthly Testing Snapshot Release (version 2011.03 final) Michael Gilbert took on a big responsibility, trying experimentally to prove the feasibility of such a project. He has released a first wheezy snapshot installer (versioned 2011.03) as a test for the development community to try out and evaluate. Please read official announcement along with download links. While you can use this snapshot to have constantly working installer, after it is installed you could move to testing altogether if you wish. Conclusion As I have already mentioned, this project is still in the development/experimental stage, which makes all of this its very conception. Also, apart from rumors of Ubuntu becoming rolling release, if Ubuntu is to get its rolling release this how it s going to get it If you d like to find out more about Debian CUT, I suggest you read Raphael Hertzog s article A constantly usable testing distribution for Debian , and watch the video of Joey Hess CUT BoF on DebConf10 in NYC. Of course, if you d like to get involved into this project, please use the project s mailing list. If you have any comments, please do share, as I d be happy to answer any of your questions.

Recently there has been some major developments in DebConf11 organization. In short, I will list some of the most important.

Website

Official DC11 website has finally been completed and now contains a great deal of information for those interested in attending this years conference. Some of the most notable changes include:

Navigation

Frontpage now contains a small menu with links to most important parts of website, like About, Registration, Contact Sidebar menu is now divided in 3 categories:

• The Conference Links to pages which are directly connected with the Conference like About DC, Debian Day, Registration, Call for Papers, Talk Schedules, Payments Most of these links are hidden at the moment, and will be until the registration is open, to avoid any unnecessary confusion.
• More Information Basic information for attendees like Important Dates, Accommodations, Venue, Visa Everything you need to know about your stay in Banja Luka.
• Practical While these pages have almost nothing to do with the Conference itself, they do provide a vast information about city, getting to Bosnia, some practical information, as well as the Map of the whole city made my me :)

New Pages added

• How Can I Help This page contains some basic information for anyone who wants to help out. Weather by volunteering, sponsoring, or just by adding a banner on their website
  DC11: How Can I Help?
• Contact Instead of just sending visitors to mailto, we replaced it by a page which contains ALL contact information, emails AND phone numbers (which will be added just before DebCamp starts).
  DC11: Contact
• Sponsorship Just like with the contact page, we made a page to be more user friendly to any interested parties or individuals, and contains most important info, such as sponsorship levels and contact address.
  DC11: Sponsorship
• About DebConf11 Actually it s just a page with a content copied from frontpage (which is now used for something else).
  DC11: About DebConf11

New features:

• Documentation Is now used to store all important documents and records for public use and sharing, like brochures, official government documents, important public mails, as well as the recordings of all IRC meeting logs. Can be found at:
  DC11: Documentation
• Frontpage: Navigation To ensure the main goal of website, information availability, frontpage has been redesigned to provide maximum accessibility as well as easy access to any part of the website. DC11: Frontpage
• Frontpage: Latest News To keep the public and attendees well informed of any important events and developments, we decided to add latest news section. Note however, that if you want to stay completely informed of any changes and updates, we still recommend subscribing to our mailing list, which can be found under contact page.
  DC11: Frontpage
• Map of Banja Luka Because of lack of data on Google Maps and Open Street Map, as well as some other minor local maps, we made a small map of almost whole city and added around 60 or 70 locations which we consider to be of importance for our attendees. Such locations include hotels, parking spots, restaurants, bars, clubs, petrol stations, taxi stations, etc. This page uses simple JavaScript and is not dragable . Therefore we added Index Location to auto-locate the needed locations, as well as the legend to clarify the category of locations. Pointing your mouse over a certain location will open a small bubble with some info on that location/object. We should also point out that some of this data may not be 100% correct (ie working hours may be off ). Map is available at:
  DC11: Banja Luka City Map

Bosnian language

Site is now available on Bosnian language for native speaking attendees, should they have problems with English version. Every page is available on both languages, which can be changed by clicking on ba/en flag in upper left corner, or DC11: Bosnian Version.

Design

As you may have noticed, the official page received a small face lift. New header with the Government building, a small token of appreciation for all the help the Government is providing; as well as some minor changes in CSS and color scheme. While talking about design, we d like to thank Leandro G mez for his help with the header.

Sponsorship Sponsorship Levels

As agreed on the meeting, which took place on 22. of February, [Meeting logs], following sponsorship levels will be used for this years conference:

• Steel < 1.000
• Bronze > 1.000
• Silver > 5.000
• Gold > 10.000
• Platinum > 20.000

Main reason for lowering amounts is due to last years results of high increase in the same. As for the benefits of these levels, the only thing changed is t-shirts / bags places; we believe t-shirts are much more noticeable than bags, and have therefore been promoted to Silver, while bags have been downgraded to Bronze. For a full list of requirements and benefits, please visit: DC11: Sponsorship Sponsorship Brochure

Sponsorship brochures have finally been completed and are available for a public distribution. The brochures are available in 3 qualities: low, high and original. Low and high quality brochures, ~6Mb and ~8Mb respectively, are for normal distribution to our sponsors, while original quality, at around 240Mb, is intended for maximum quality printing. Just as with the website, each quality is available in both Bosnian and English. Current version of the brochure is 1.1 and is most likely the final one. These brochures are available at Documentation page: DC11: Documentation >> Documents made by Local Team Or download them directly:

• Sponsorship Brochure LQ [en]
• Sponsorship Brochure HQ [en]
• Sponsorship Brochure OQ [en]
• Sponsorship Brochure LQ [ba]
• Sponsorship Brochure HQ [ba]
• Sponsorship Brochure OQ [ba]

Also, I d like to thank Mirosal Remetic for making a great template and Pablo Duboue for some very valuable suggestions regarding the structure of the brochure.

Visas and Customs Rules

Many questions have been raised regarding Bosnian visa regime. We got in contact with the embassy and they clarified who can enter our country with(out) Visa. The list can be found on DC11 Wiki: Visa regime. It also states, which countries have a privilidge of ID-only entrance. If your country is not listed, that means you will need visa. If you want to know what exactly you need to get one, please visit the this official Government page and chose your country from a drop-down menu. As for the visa itself, as well as the list of Customs Rules, please read DC11: Visa.

Also, thanks to Darjan Prtic for getting the list from the Government officials.

So, what s next?

If you think, that is it for now, you are dead wrong. At this very moment following is being organized and developed:

• Registration Registration Team is currently hacking penta and modifying it for this years needs and conditions. We expect to have registrations open by the end of March / beginning of April.
• Travel and getting to Banja Luka Being one of the greatest obstacle, Travel Team is working hard on finding best routes for attendees and mapping the city
• Sponsorship With final decision and agreement for sponsorship levels and brochures ready for public distribution, Sponsorship Team is now actively looking for new sponsors, global and local, preparing various promotional material, as well as planning our advertising strategy.

Final word

Well, these are pretty much the highlights of some recent and some future developments of DebConf11 organizational team. Mind you, there s a lot more going on, but I tried to give a small summary from the inside. Should you be interested in attending, helping out, sponsoring or just have some questions, feel free to ask them on our mailing list at: debconf11-localteam@lists.debconf.org. I should inform you that this is a public mailing list and its archives are available for a broader public. If you do not wish for your mail to be made public, please direct any enquiry directly to me trough the Contact Form or any other member of Core Local Team, Adnan Hodzic or Velimir Iveljic.

I ve just written some small scripts to help me manage spam emergencies on a mail server. I ve been doing this thing with a bit of manual effort for a while, but after having done it once from a phone I want to optimise it a bit to reduce painful typing.My observation is that when a system I run is used as an outbound mail relay for spamming I will notice this reasonably quickly by the queues getting big. Some portion of mail that is queued is delayed due to general network issues and anti-spam measures that neither accept nor reject mail cause a typical spam message to be more likely to be queued than a typical non-spam message. So I look for accounts that send large amounts of mail.The biggest mail server I run (and the only one to have an outbound spam problem) is configured to not allow users to fake their sender address (IE use an address from gmail.com or another server) unless they pay extra. So the spam I deal with tends to have a valid origin email address that I can use.Queue CountingThe following command provides a sorted list of the accounts that have the most mail in the queue. This usually means a maximum of 2 or 3 spammers at the end of the list:mailq grep ^[A-F0-9] cut -c 42-80 sort uniq -c sort -n tailThe following function declaration makes the command get-top-sender find the sender with the largest number of queue entries (which has been a spammer every time I ve checked such things) and assign their email address to the environment variable $TOP_SENDER. It has to be a shell function so that the environment variable will be set in the context of the shell and available to child processes.function get-top-sender() TOP_SENDER_LINE=$(mailq grep ^[A-F0-9] cut -c 42-80 sort uniq -c sort -n tail -1) ; export TOP_SENDER=$(echo $TOP_SENDER_LINE cut -f2 -d\ ) ; TOP_COUNT=$(echo $TOP_SENDER_LINE cut -f1 -d\ ); echo "Top Sender is $TOP_SENDER with $TOP_COUNT messages" ; Viewing the QueueThe following script uses the first parameter or the environment variable $TOP_SENDER to specify the user who s mail should be read. In the normal course of events user email won t be read by the sysadmin, but if we are to determine whether a slew of email is spam or not there s no other way. So far I haven t seen a large number of queued messages not be spam, but I expect it ll happen eventually and the user will be happy that I checked it instead of locking their account and deleting all the queued mail. For readers who don t do sysadmin work, this is why we always have entries in the Terms of Service about the possibility of your email being read to fix technical problems or to investigate possible breaches of the ToS from your end.#!/bin/bash
set -e
mkdir -p ~/tmp/$$
cd ~/tmp/$$
if [ "$1" != "" ]; then
TOP_SENDER="$1"
fi
if [ "$TOP_SENDER" = "" ]; then
echo "Specify the sender on the command-line or in \$TOP_SENDER"
exit 1
fi
for n in $(mailq grep ^[A-F0-9].*$TOP_SENDER cut -c 1-10) ; do
FILE=$(echo $n sed -e "s/^\(.\)/\/var\/spool\/postfix\/deferred\/\1\/\1/" -e "s/ .*$//")
if [ -f "$FILE" ]; then
postcat "$FILE" > $n
else
echo "File $FILE missing, probably active"
fi
done
less *
rm -rf ~/tmp/$$Note that this needs to be done with a single less command so that I can terminate it by pressing q and easily go to the next file with :n . It does waste some server resources by running postcat on all queue files relating to the user in question, but that doesn t matter, servers are supposed to be powerful enough to cope with some inefficiency in processing uncommon operations.The Final CommandAfter that I have a script that connects by ssh to all outbound mail relays and deletes bad messages from the queues and then connects to the database server to lock the account that was used for sending the mail. I m not publishing it because it s specific to the servers I run.So when NAGIOS reports that the queue is too large I have one script to find the most likely culprit, one script to view the queued email from that account, and a final script to lock the account and purge the spam.I ve also added a reminder of the command names to /etc/motd as I don t want to be running ls and set on a phone to discover command names that I ve forgotten.Any suggestions for improvements to this will be welcome.

A while back I was working on a mod_rewrite compatible proxy server written in C. The reason for this is that my current webhost uses Apache2 in front ofa number of thttpd processes, and I'd like to remove apache and use something smaller/faster/neater. Dividing things up I'm running about ten domains, and only around half of them use mod_rewrite rules - small enough perhaps to port the rules, large enough to make it annoying. Upon reflection I think the thing to do is to replace apache with javascript - via node.js. Writing proxies with node.js is almost ridiculously simple - in fact doing anything HTTP-like is very very simple thanks to the bundled libraries. Time will tell whether this is a waste of time or not, but I'm confident I could listen upon *:80 and route requests to localhost:N for a few domains. As a trivial toy I wrote a simple transforming proxy last night which performed simple rewrites as it passed traffic about. Another fun, and possibly useful, thing I put together was a node.js port of the simple httpstat.us website. That server would have been easy to write in any number of languages, but in node it was almost too easy. Update - here is my rewriting node.js-based reverse-proxy. ObQuote: "I just need you to stop being nice to me unless you're gonna marry me. " - He's just not that into you.

Just (on) a very short notice: the streams are up! See the DebConf10 webpage for URLs and schedule. Enjoy! (We are using GeoIP and you might want to try different browsers )