Month: August 2004

Audio in last entry was bad. Try this one.

Found this gem here.
Rep. Ed Schrock lookin’ for some hot man lovin’.
OMG.
I first saw the threat to “out” a Republican representative about a month ago, I guess. My guess was Eric Cantor. Ed Schrock was somewhere just ahead of Randy Forbes.
It’s not funny…..
……but, yeah it is. hahah.

Interesting article in Slate about the entertainment acts at the Republican Convention.
Britney Spears might be there.
But I’d much rather meet…..

Ah, but partying with Republicans is still uncomfortable. It reminds me a bit of a PLP function at Taliban State.

So, for the past few months, I’ve been prepping a new mail server for the station. The one that we had been using was really becoming taxed. It was a retired salesperson’s machine, running Debian Woody. When it had fifty pop accounts with no filtering it was fine. Double the number of accounts, add in spamassassin, and make about 30% of those users imap users, and you’ve got a machine that is smokin’.
Last year, we built this dual xeon machine to act as a server for some new billing software. We were kind of a testbed for this software, and, well, it sucked. So, they went back to the old stuff, and I had this free big baller machine. For a time, it served as a streaming audio host. Then it served as a fileserver for a time.
I decided to make it into the new mail server. At 757 Tech, I’d set up a virtual hosting mail server using qmail, vpopmail, etc. It works pretty well, and it’s got some nice features as far as web administration. Best of all, you don’t need an account on the machine for each address. Stlll, it was a pain in the ass to set up, and it’s difficult to maintain. I’d also done the conversion of users.757.org from sendmail to postfix.
I had pretty much decided that I wanted to use either qmail or postfix for the new machine, as they’re more secure than a gigantic setuid binary. Qmail, of course, has the djb-induced weirdness that comes along with qmail, but it doesn’t bother me that much. It is, however, a bitch to setup, especially if you want it to do more than just deliver mail.
I fiddled around with qmail and some of the virus/spam tools that ride atop it….qscanq, qmailscanner, etc. Never could get it working the way I’d like, and they eat an extraordinary amount of resources. Postfix was a bit easier to setup. Again, just setting it up to do unix mail is easy. Combining it with SpamAssassin, and ClamAV, well, that’s a different story. It seems that most people use either MailScanner or Amavis. I tried both, and was thoroughly unimpressed.
In the meantime, I’d setup exim4 on freebsd for my home machine. Bascially all the MTA on that machine does is deliver mail locally, and forward outbound mail to Cox’s smtp server. But I was impressed with how simple it was to set up from ports, and so I started looking more closely at it. Lo and behold, there’s this exiscan patch that does virus and spam scanning from within Exim without a nasty perl script. Better yet, it doesn’t use the helper programs (clamdscan and spamc), rather, it interfaces with the daemons directly.
So, I settled on doing that. It rocks! Had some trouble doing the conversion, mainly with accounts that had been set up on the old machine between the time I duplicated the accounts, and the time I did the switchover. I wrote a script to call mb2md for each user to convert the old mail spools to maildir.
Only glitch I ran into really was a problem unrelated to the MTA. For some reason, the box gets caught in the D state with quotas enabled on the home directory. I disabled the quotas, and everything is working fine. I’ve got like 140GB for the users homes, so I don’t anticipate a problem anytime soon. The tarball moving the mail from the old machine was 2GB.
Still ironing out the minor glitches, but it seems to be sending and receivng mail as it should, blocking worms, etc. etc.

So, I’m back in suburban Poquoson for the first time in about two months. I just kind of fell into my bed and it’s like…..ahhhhhhhhhhhh.
Why am I here? A few reasons…..
1. I forgot a cable I need later on today when I’m going to be working on the new mail server at work (FreeBSD+Exim4+Exiscan+ClamAV+SpamAssassin, y’all).
2. Dogs. Beauregard tried to block my path to the door when I left last night.
3. This fucking mouse who’s decided he wants to live with me. I suppose I should relate the saga…..
It must have been Monday. I was having trouble sleeping, so I was messing around in the living room. I put my glasses and my watch inside my cap, and put the cap on the bar separating the kitchen and the living room. Went, and sat back down on the couch. A bit later, I heard something in that general area. I see something run around, down the hall, and into the bathroom. I explored the bathroom pretty thoroughly, and didn’t see anything. I looked around to see if I could see any mouse turds or anything, and didn’t see anything. Went to work Monday Night, and everything was fine.
Tuesday morning, came home, no sign of mouse. So I’m thinking that perhaps in my alcohol-induced state, I was hallucinating. Went to sleep, and slept fine…didn’t hear anything all day. Got up, started getting ready for work, sitting on the can…..and the little fucker shoots out from underneath the sink and out the door. He ran under the washer this time. So, I finished up and went to work.
On the way home, I stopped at Wal-Mart, and bought a mouse disposal kit. Included were pellets, two mechanical traps, and two glue traps. I set out a mechanical trap in the general area where I’d seen the little bastard the most, with some of the pellets on the foot. Again, during the day, nothing. So, I went to work.
When I got home, the trap hadn’t tripped, but all the pellets were gone. Now I’m thinking, “shit, fucker is going to up and die inside the wall.” I reloaded the trap and went to bed. While I was sleeping yesterday, I kept hearing sounds coming from near the window in the bedroom. When I got up, I showered, and as I’m getting dressed, I see the fucker scamper behind a comforter that’s stowed in the corner of the room. Behind the comforter is a hole that Drew cut while he was running CAT-5 through the place. Now, it’s on bitch. Before I left for the peninsula, I set a glue trap up underneath the hole. The hole is a good three inches up the wall from the baseboard, so if it’s coming out there, there’s really no way it can avoid the trap underneath.
When I got back, the trap was moved a good foot away, and, of course, no mouse inside said trap. So I spackled the hole. I knew he was inside the wall. Went into the computer room, and started messing around. After a few hours, I hear things behind the wall……hmmmph. Okay, maybe I’ve trapped him and he’s looking for a way out. He found a way out — where the CAT-5 exits in the closet. I had the broom with me, and when the little fucker got sight of me, he ran back into the closet and into the hole.
I stuck the glue trap under there, and came home. We shall see who wins this one.
I do have a few questions about it though…..where the fuck did he get in, and how the hell can I get rid of him.

I posted the following on /.
—
Agnostics are intellectual cowards. Reason tells you that there is no god.
Take evolution for example….
If you’ve ever taken a college biology class, you would be able to see that evolution occurs. Comparative Morphology, predictible genetic mutation, etc. etc. It’s backed by years of scientific research.
Then you have the Genesis Myth. God created the earth in seven days, and the whole thing is ohh, about six thousand years old.
The agnostic, by his refusal to choose, gives each equal creedance. It’s insanity, really. But it’s a convienient position for armchair philosophers to take, because it placates people. Think of it as the John Kerry position.
I am an atheist. Period. To steal a phrase, I want to believe. A mountain of evidence prevents me from doing so. Douglas Adams had a rather compelling piece on it in his final book. Some of Ayn Rand’s writings on the subject are also interesting.
—
I’m sure life would be easier for me, perhaps more pleasent, if I could believe. I know people of faith derive a great amount of comfort from it. I just can’t make that leap.
I think often atheism gets a bad name because some atheists have been immoral, irrational people. Oh, Stalin would be a good example. The Cold War took on an aspect of free nations of faith against godless statism. That was fine for the time perhaps, and useful, because it pointed to one of the fallacies of Soviet docterine. Nobody should be executed for believing things that are wrong. There are people who believe that we didn’t land on the moon… There are people who believe that LBJ shot JFK… There are people who believe a plane didn’t hit the Pentagon on 9/11… There are even people who believe that humans were created when aliens came to earth, then they fucked monkeys to make worker drones to mine gold, and we are those drones… And that’s oooookay. No reason to off those people.
There are also those who believe that by not adopting a religious code, you’re free to commit the seven deadly sins at will…
There are still many good moral teachings in religion. I tend to think that leading a life where you place restrictions on your behavior is ultimately a good thing. Right and Wrong are pretty easy to define, but again, you have to have the courage to do it, then adhere to it.

“Besides,” he continued, “when I read the list of people who are supporting Kerry, if I wasn’t already a Bush supporter, I would have immediately switched. Linda Ronstadt? Don Henley? Geez, that’s a good reason right there to vote for Bush.”
Full story here. Bwahaha.

Bush daughters……

So, I’m insomniac again, and don’t know what to do about it. I need a nagging wife or something who’ll put me to sleep.
I should go grocery shopping. Might do that if I’m still awake in half an hour.

I’m going to go out on a limb here, as I polish off my last beer before I sleep, and guess that John Kerry wouldn’t drink a PBR.
He’d want something like a Belgian White to go with his Philly Cheesesteak made with Swiss Cheese. Heh.
John Edwards, maybe.
And we know dubya drank too much, so he doesn’t anymore. But I bet his daughters would. Jenna, Barb……stop by anytime. I got cold ones in the fridge.