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I updated the kernel image via aptitude on one of my Debian Sarge servers but after a reboot it didn’t come up again. My first thought was that maybe there was something wrong with the boot loader and since I already wanted to switch from Lilo to Grub I took the opportunity and did just that.

Luckily the changeover is very easy, just follow those steps:

  1. aptitude install grub
  2. grub-install /dev/hda (Replace /dev/hda with the disk you want to install your bootloader on)
  3. update-grub to create the file menu.lst which holds all the information for booting with Grub
  4. Now we have to remove Lilo: aptitude purge lilo

That’s all folks! 🙂

If you want to automatically update the menu.lst whenever you install a new kernel, add the following to /etc/kernel-img.conf:
do_bootloader = no
do_initrd = Yes
postinst_hook = /sbin/update-grub
postrm_hook = /sbin/update-grub

…and now, reboot!

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Inspired by a blog post from Adrian Sutton and the comments beneath it I am now documenting how I train Spamassassin from within Apple Mail.
The setup is fairly straight forward but implies that you at least have a working Spamassassin instance running somewhere and know your way around UNIX a little bit. So I’m just going to explain the rough details to get you going.

  1. Switch on the bayes database for SA. On my Debian box this is done via putting the line use_bayes 1 in the file /etc/spamassassin/local.cf. After that restart SA (eg. /etc/init.d/spamassassin restart)
  2. Let SA put all your Junk Messages in the folder “Junk” in your IMAP Account
  3. Let Apple Mail put all your Junk Messages in the folger “Junk” in your IMAP Account
  4. Install a little Cronjob to have SA learn Spam from your Junk folder and Ham (=not Spam) from your Inbox. The following is my script:
    echo "----learn spam----"
    sa-learn --spam /var/opt/vmail/no-panic.at/flo/Maildir/.Junk/*
    echo "----learn ham----"
    sa-learn --ham /var/opt/vmail/no-panic.at/flo/Maildir/*
    Note: those are just 4 lines, the blog just wrapps the two ‘sa-learn’ lines because of limited horizontal space. Of course you have to change the path to the real location of your ‘Junk’ folder.
  5. Last thing to do is installing the cronjob. Mine looks like this:
    0 */4 * * * /path_to_your/script > /dev/null 2>&1

Actually my setup involves learning from 4 different user accounts, who all use Apple Mail just to get more Ham- & Spam-volume faster.
I hope this is helpfull to you. It works perfectly on my server for over a month now.

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In our effort to get more and more services into our own hands & to be able to blame ourselves and nobody else if something goes wrong,?Hirschy successfully attempted to install MyDNS on a couple of our servers.
We already took a go at it after the second last outage of our fellow DNS provider Awebs (now Quickstep) but didn’t have the time and energy to completely finish the task. Now after the next outage which is still kind of un-explained by the DNS provider we though it’s time to move on.

After a couple of hours of testing and writing a custom update script that replicates our DNS data to the secondary and tertiary nameservers via mysqldump and scp I think we are ready to migrate all our domains to this setup.
Now the only thing left is an answer to my eMail to Quickstep and then we’ll begin moving.

I really hope with those measures all the domains will be saver and suffer from less timeouts. Many thanks to Hirschy for his excellent work 🙂

There is a good HOWTO at Howtoforge that explains the installation of MyDNS and the easy-to-use webfrontend namend MyDNSConfig.

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This article shows how to run a file-, print-, HTTP proxy- DHCP-, and time server for small and medium enterprises (SME) on one single Debian Sarge system. It is very easy to set up, and management is done with an easy-to-use web interface called eBox so once the system is set up, you can forget about the command line.

…not that I would “forget about the commandline” but this could actually come in handy sometimes.

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