[ t h e f r a g g l e . c o m ]

I decided to buy a portable hard disk this week for my trip to germany, so that I can ensure I don’t run out of CF space.

It’s a vosonic vp2160, and at £109 for a 60gb model I’m pretty happy. It happily reads my CF card fresh from the camera, and copies over all the images pretty speedily.

The interface is super simple and easy to use, it doesn’t play music or anything like that, but all I wanted it for was to store pictures on till I get home and can process the images.

The USB2.0 interface is speedy enough to copy over files i’ve copied to the disk, and also allows you to use the device as a CF/MMC/whatever reader for your PC, which is handy. It’s pretty handy too how you can charge the Li-ion battery via USB too (you have to plug two usb connectors into your pc, but that’s no biggie really)

What really impressed me the most, however, is how it actually seems to suggest you should be fine upgrading the hard disk at some point. They include (amongst the power adapter to charge it up and the install cd for win98 drivers etc) a mini screwdriver to uncouple the back off it, which reveals a bog standard fujitsu 2.5″ hard disk. So if I decide 60gb isn’t enough in this little device I will be able to have a good go at upgrading the hard disk!.

I also purchased a Creative Zen Vision:M 30gb today too today to tide me for my trip to germany, but will druel more at that when it arrives tomorrow

I’ve been using exim for a while with virtual domain support, and thought it be best to document what I did somewhere.

For a long time I wondered how I might actually support virtual domains in exim 4 and held off by just dumping all mail from all domains into my mailbox (how gosh darn lazy is that).

I finally got bothered enough to, and found a lot of easy to follow help on the internets (google), and came up with the following additions to my exim4.conf :


domainlist localdomains = dsearch;/etc/exim4/virtual : @ : localhost

and in the routers section

begin routers
...
vdom_aliases:
driver = redirect
allow_defer
allow_fail
domains = dsearch;/etc/exim4/virtual
data = ${expand:${lookup{$local_part}lsearch*@{/etc/exim4/virtual/$domain}}}
retry_use_local_part
pipe_transport = address_pipe
file_transport = address_file
no_more


As you can see there is a directory called /etc/exim4/virtual, which contains several files, each of which define the aliases for a domain, an example file in that directory could look like:
filename: thefraggle.com


* : :fail:
chris : chris@localhost


As you can see this looks pretty simalar to the sendmail aliases file, but requires no rebuilding (if you have used sendmail at some point, you’ll know that you need to issue a “newaliases” command.

Anyway, hopefully that wasn’t too painful, any improvements, suggestions and other observations welcome!

Well reading popeys blog entry on how many servers he has, and what he uses them for made me feel a bit better than I did previously, about running more than one server of my own for personal use. I only have three servers, and a workstation and a laptop; maybe I don’t waste as much electricity as I thought I did

• etch.thefraggle.com – Debian etch, xen vps from bitfolk; general webserver for www.thefraggle.com, and master mail server.
• sarge.thefraggle.com – Debian etch, xen vps from bitfolk; run’s IRCd’s for blitzed.org and nixhelp.org and tertiary mail exchanger.
• beastie.thefraggle.com – FreeBSD-6.2-stable on an old p2 400mhz 128mb ram; used to run an ircd for nixhelp, and thefraggle.com website, but now has been retired to being a development machine and tertiary mail exchanger.
• laptop – centrino duo 1.7ghz 1gb ram; work laptop with winxp / debian etch for work stuff

There’s actually another box there, my dads p4 3ghz, that I have pretty much nicked off him for day to day internetting . I suppose the fact that I have three servers kind of means I am pretty geeky?

Would be interesting if anyone reading this also commented with what they use .

Came up against the strangest problem the other day, which in the end made it blatantly clear that the most simple 1st checks should always be done; that is things like disk space etc.

A server I have access too uses LDAP for user info and Kerberos5 for realm authentication. It was reported that this server wasn’t letting anyone login via ssh, and the only way that I was able to login, was via the console connection for the box (so essentially the only way to connect was locally).

I was able to prove that LDAP lookups were working, by simply id’ing on user accounts I knew to not exist locally which were stored in LDAP. I was also able to init a kerberos ticket when logged in, and login as ldap/krb5 users “locally”.

After a while of faffing about, enabling debug logging on sshd and so on, it dawned on me to check the disk space, thanks to an odd I/O moan in the sshd debug log. Low and behold! the partition where the kerberos key cache for ssh was completely full!

It goes to show that even simple checks like that which sometimes seem noddy, should always be done!

A while back at work I had to create a configuration for an internal squid http accelerator, and thought “hey, wouldn’t it be neat if I could load balance thefraggle.com with this method”.

Now, usually Squid is used to act as a caching proxy server, which means that client http requests are sent to the proxy server, the proxy server then goes out onto the web and attempts to grab the request, and returns the entry back to the client; in the process caching the pages (depending on the way the cache has been set up).

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