Make a diff!
Site-news, administrative things etc. about numlock.ch
..not yet, but almost ;) I need to find another anti-spam solution as by now, way too many comment spam postings pass MTB. And even those that don’t pass seem to confuse MT and leave my latest comments/pings list in a mess.
Promising candidate: SCode
Or should I write my own anti-spam plugin for MT? :)
Just added Moritz’ blog to my blogroll :) I’m looking forward to trying his gmailfs ebuild for Gentoo as soon as possible :) (Unfortunately, I’ll be very busy for the next two weeks though)
A blog-spam notification e-mail sent by MT-Blacklist conveniently contains a link to de-spam the according comment. Unfortunately, all URLs start with “http://”, meaning that the request (and hence your credentials) are sent as plain-text. To force using HTTPS (encrypted HTTP) for anything related to MT-Blacklist, you can add the following line to your Apache configuration (this is an example, adjust it to match your server layout):
<VirtualHost 192.168.1.6:80> # other redirects here Redirect permanent /cgi-bin/mt/plugins/Blacklist https://news.numlock.ch/cgi-bin/mt/plugins/Blacklist </VirtualHost>
and restart Apache (for Apache2 on Gentoo: “/etc/init.d/apache2 restart”)
Addendum: Opened a GMail account a couple of weeks ago (thanks to Moritz for the invite – pretty clever marketing on behalf of Google, BTW :) My add is mettlerd@.
Note: Please do not send any mails to that account yet as first I’ll have to define what I will use it for.. actually, I have an account with much more free space already (read: my private own mail server ;)
[*LOL*. Addendum to the addendum: Forgot to mention – The reason for posting this entry was actually the fact that Moritz made Gentoo ebuilds for GMailFS . Unfortunately, the Gentoo policy regarding libgmail/GMailFS ebuilds is very strict.]
Downloaded the newly available plugin-pack for MT 3.1x and installed MTB-2.0b. For comments, the same restrictions as before apply.
So far, MTB-2.0b seems to work, despite of some “unaesthetic” perl warnings (“Use of uninitialized value in XY”) displayed on MTB’s admin screen ;)
I’ve just upgraded to Movable Type 3.11 which once again comes with amazingly many new features, among others dynamic PHP publishing, post scheduling and sub-categories (full feature list).
I had to uninstall MT-Blacklist however (soon there will be a MT-3.11 plugin package that includes MTB). So far, my experiences with MTB have been pretty okay, though not overwhelmingly good. It deleted about 250 spam comment postings and forced moderation of about 35 comments (which were spam, mostly). The disadvantage of MTB’s approach is that fighting spam still consumes a considerable amount of time as it can’t fully prevent spam from being posted, just from being displayed. So I still had to watch out for new spam commments and manually delete them. I’d probably prefer approaches like those “real human” comment filters such as SCode or HumanVerify. I haven’t tested their effectiveness and efficiency yet however. And as a major drawback, these solutions aren’t very friendly in regard to web accessibility (visually handicapped people). The latter issue could eventually be solved by adding a dynamically generated sound sample of the displayed numbers.
If you often encounter error messages like
“Server your_imap.server.org has disconnected. The server may have gone down or there may be a network problem.”
when trying to access Courier-IMAP from an IMAP client (e.g. Mozilla Thunderbird), there are two approaches to solve the problem:
(I) “The real fix”
By default, Courier-IMAP only allows 4 concurrent connections per IP address for clients accessing it. Usually, this isn’t sufficient for modern IMAP clients which cache several connections and hence try to keep several connections opened in parallel. For example, the popular (and recommendable) Mozilla Thunderbird mail client tries to cache 5 IMAP connections by default, exceeding the number of connections allowed by Courier-IMAP by one. This causes several problems, apart from the one mentioned above, Thunderbird may be slow or have trouble to successfully display new e-mail messages at all (i.e. it only displays a white page instead of the content). Now, fixing this isn’t difficult, as long as you have root access to your IMAP server:
1. Edit the configuration file of Courier-IMAP (in my case that’s /etc/courier-imap/imapd) and increase the value of the MAXPERIP setting. For example, I increased MAXPERIP from 4 to 20 (which works fine for me so far):
##NAME: MAXPERIP:0 # # Maximum number of connections to accept from the same IP address MAXPERIP=20
Note that you do not need to add MAXPERIP to the Courier-IMAP-SSL configuration file (/etc/courier-imap/imapd-ssl on my box) as options in the imapd-ssl configuration file augment the options in the imapd configuration file.
2. Then restart your Courier-IMAP server(s). If you run Gentoo like me, just execute
# /etc/init.d/courier-imapd-ssl restart
(and ‘/etc/init.d/courier-imapd restart’ if you also run a non-encrypted IMAP server)
(II) “The workaround fix”
The above “real fix” (I call it the “real” one as Courier-IMAP’s default setting of MAXPERIP=4 is too restrictive nowadays indeed) is only applicable if you have administrator rights on your IMAP server. If you don’t have, you may either want to contact your server’s administrator or decrease the number of concurrently cached IMAP connection in your IMAP client. E.g. for Mozilla Thunderbird, do the following:
1. Open “Tools -> Account Settings…”
2. Select the “Server Settings” of your IMAP account
3. Open the advanced settings dialog by clicking on the “Advanced…” button
4. Lower the “Maximum number of server connections to cache” from 5 (default) to e.g. 2
(For other IMAP mail clients, change the settings accordingly)
BTW If you use Microsoft Outlook, consider setting your mail options according to the following Outlook quoting recommendations (PDF, 225 KB) or rather switch to a better mail client (e.g. Mozilla Thunderbird, Evolution, KMail, .. almost anything but Outlook will do it ;)
See also the following post by Omar Shahine (Architect of MS Entourage‘s IMAP support) on IMAP, Thunderbird, and mail clients: Entourage earns an A-, Outlook a D+, Outlook Express a C, Windows Eudora a F and Mozilla Thunderbird a B+ :) His executive summary:
“Thunderbird is an almost perfect IMAP client for Windows. If you use IMAP, this is the product for you.”
In any case, have fun! :)
The sound/radio stream links listed at the bottom of this page are now detachable (i.e. can be opened in a separate pop-up window). Just click on
below the title of the section and see what happens ;) Feel free to use it as your switch desk for your daily dose of sweet tunes ;)
Replaced the rather buggy firewall with a better one, updated its firmware and enabled Quality of Service (QoS) control. Web server access should now be faster and finally, remote JBoss and remote SMTP authentication using SASL work :)
In other news, last night was pretty short as I tried to fix my network printer[1] which ceased working (and still doesn’t work). I don’t expect this night to be much longer. Once I read that people who sleep less live longer (contrary to intuition). Good prospects, I suppose ;)
[BTW indicated times on this blog seem to be wrong (it’s 02:13 local time ATM). Need to check it ASAP.]
[1] Update 20040830: It’s alive again :)