Too Far Afield

On the fly GPG de- and encryption, anyone?

Moin,

On 26.11.2007 17:25, Patrick Fey wrote:
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> /jABAAM5Yr3b44ciQwCEkXmbqvRFurarJAf0gbEx88U9+rCFzMO5BFl9gJtj
Du hast die URL vergessen…

> yvSpi3R354YUCWgrn5CCYs8gQX7b6tc9u8E7kn4Bpb8ixDwFBlVKZVP1DgE
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> SqYJHF4GBf4EUcw67uIj8tXDhqMmqc8FSvpFzxokX8QOgMA2dw0zraWZa

Hm. Also ich glaub vom Apachemaessigen her, ist alles eingerichtet.

Ich ueberlege gerad, was passiert, wenn der Apache neugestatret und die DNS Eintraege aktualisiert werden. Vielleicht sollten wir uns einen DNS-Timeout (185630 sekunden=128 Tage) lang Zeit lassen, weil sonst die Clients eine ungueltige IP haben. Also jetzt A-Eintraege fuer die “neuen” Domains hinzufuegen und den Timeout runtersetzen (12h oder so), warten, Apache neustarten, alte A-Eintraege rausnehmen.
Vielleicht auch nicht… Stress und so…

> wzxyKuP+Yvbb/jIiEu1CDxCGJFsxIhoT5nxS4yAfMQBXOIDZgK00B/rl1
> vvwu9EsfLQJ1iPubCyjPv/AbKr+hGQjve9v30L8zumgwrhppjMyoC7hTj
> 8spfwTB2QG5YU31lS1J7yh9g0jDzmLn9j/VYP/1PgDdClGrEtw5S8A27f
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> GBas/iGwxv0hgxTxgIDeXL8Jz7e3EUia2cNr8DKkIgkplL1fFvqzFJrmv
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Ich hab Planet nun auch mit gemacht…

Haben wir schon korrekte RDNS Eintraege fuer die IPs?

> Nh50QGepThcoqsCnpnJOF1AG8gRE3bhUQsIoN4RaRCHjyYNLqHyKHjGDZ8
> duxZdYxptc0WnjAWOKzx8Xm6ZAjfjmEZUfmdAf6fls6FwaPXp/1
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> g9JYkflzJrRslQqJsSlFS55F4dUZss4YqVMFLxumwYklSx6NuzX6zA7Qh
> Zbs2r4SQSFBI97SvhPbm1hAvpW0QLTkCwviCaRUs8sOZk34P+U4AKb2N
> usQnP0wsAJCI/ytQ32R8+XU5zX432RE4OHmojKsMstApjbUB5yqpvoW0
Man kann (beliebig?) viele A Eintraege auf einen Hostnamen machen.

MfG
Muelli

Sometimes you need to troubleshoot some problems or you need to do regular maintenance work at your Exim mailserver. You might want to hold delivery of incoming mail and just keep it on the queue during the maintenance period. There are two ways to do this.

Queue mail for some domains

If you need to troubleshoot a problem with just one domain or a limited number of domains (e.g. all local domains), use hold_domains. We use this, if we test new configurations of mailinglist domains.

In your Exim configuration file set hold_domains to a list of all domains that should be affected by the maintenance and restart Exim. Mails for those domains will be held on the queue until the retry time is expired. If you want to keep mail for a longer time, you need to add a dummy retry rule for this special case.

Queue mail for all domains

If you want to do a larger maintenance that affects all mail handled by your server, you could just use hold_domains = *. A better way to do this is to set queue_only = true and restart Exim without the -q15m (or whatever time you use), so no queue runners are started. It is more efficient, because Exim won’t even start to deliver messages. With hold_domains, Exim starts the delivery, and checks every recipient to see if it is held or not. While you probably won’t be able to tell the difference on most installations, hold_domains might use more resources, if your server handles a lot of mail.

Resuming regular service

To resume regular service remove the configuration options and restart Exim. If you used hold_domains, you need to force delivery with the -M, -qf, -Rf or -Sf options additionally.

Documentation

• Exim documentation on hold_domains
• Exim documentation on queue_only

I just listened to the song Go West by the Pet Shop Boys. I guess the song is not so much about going west, but more about achieving things you dream of. Or maybe pursue your personal goals and dreams.

A friend of my mother asked her about my plan of life (the German term she actually used was Lebensplanung). My mother didn’t really know the answer. Which is not very surprising as I do have some dreams and goals, but I didn’t plan my whole life, yet. Und das ist auch gut so. ;)

This afternoon I attended a lab section at university. The concept of lab sections is quite boring. Normally, you would receive the corrected homework from your teaching assistant and talk about it for about an hour. The last 30 minutes or so you would talk about the assignments for next week. This time however, our teaching assistant surprised us, when he blatantly told us, that, unfortunately, he had to disregard our homework, because we had submitted it past midnight and had therefore missed the deadline. As we work in groups of three students and I had not submitted the homework this time, I looked at my fellow student, who had submitted the homework, and he also seemed quite irritated. All three of our group were flabbergasted. Again, our teaching assistant said: According to my mail client, you submitted the homework two minutes past midnight. That’s two minutes too late. We are supposed to handle this issue very strictly, so I had to disregard your homework this time. Bam. That was a hard one. We didn’t know what to say. Looking at the other students in the room, you could almost feel in the air what they were thinking: Oh, my god! Luckily we met the deadline this time. Although it were just two minutes, technically he was right. So my fellow student just said: OK. I guess we’ll send it in earlier next time. It was a very strange situation. While I already reasoned, if I should waste time by starting a discussion with our teaching assistant or just escalate the case to the student representatives right away, our teaching assistant told us it was just a joke. Everything went well in the end. All three of us fell for him, though.

Update: The minutes of the hearing are now online.

After the e-voting pen (Wahlstift), that should have been used in the upcoming communal elections in Hamburg in February 2008, was hacked by people from the Chaos Computer Club two weeks ago, the three parties in the Hamburg parliament (Hamburgische Bürgerschaft) agreed to set up a hearing of experts regarding the issue.

The hearing of experts regarding the e-voting pen will take place on Friday, 9th of November 2007 at 5 p.m. in the town hall (room 151). Those hearings are public and you can come without prior registration. Actually, everyone (that includes you) is invited to join the hearing by the head of the constitutional board of the parliament: Der Vorsitzende des Ausschusses, Dr. A.W. Heinrich Langhein (CDU), bittet Sie, an dieser Sitzung teilzunehmen. (from the agenda). At the hearing will be a number of people (also quoted from the agenda):

Eingeladene Auskunftspersonen:
Herr Prof. Dr. Klaus Brunnstein, Universität Hamburg
Herr Matthias Moehl, election.de, Hamburg
Herr Prof. Dr. Joachim Posegga, Universität Hamburg
Herr Prof. Dr. Joachim W. Schmidt, TU Hamburg-Harburg
Herr Dr. Roland Vogt, Deutsches Forschungszentrum für Künstliche
Intelligenz GmbH, Saarbrücken
Chaos Computer Club e.V., Hamburg

Apart from the Chaos Computer Club folks, there will be two professors from our faculty (Mr. Brunnstein and Mr. Posegga). I wonder, what Mr. Brunnstein will tell us about the e-voting pen. I had the chance to be at a number of introductory lectures he gave during our o-weks and it was always very entertaining.

If you can make it on Friday, join the hearing. I think it is always a good idea to demonstrate your interest in important topics and this one is very important. This might also turn out to be quite interesting, not only, if you’re into computer science.

Linux Devices reports, that an Italian company is shipping a Tux-shaped computer. While this is all very nice, the headline of the article is a bit weird: Tux-shaped computer runs Linux. I mean, what do you expect from a TUX-shaped computer? If the operating system of the device had been Windows or even FreeBSD or Solaris, it would have been a nice headline. But it runs Linux. So what? Okay, maybe it’s simply too early and I should just get a coffee and ignore it, but it really made me laugh out loud.

Suppose you want to add a table to a MySQL database that looks exactly like a MySQL table that already exists. Maybe you just need to adjust some fields or add a few columns . Just type in the following MySQL query:

1. SHOW CREATE TABLE registrations

and if a table called registrations exists in the database you previously selected, you might get something like this as the result:

1. CREATE TABLE `registrations` (
2. `user` varchar(10) default NULL,
3. `activationcode` varchar(30) default NULL,
4. `TIMESTAMP` timestamp NOT NULL default CURRENT_TIMESTAMP on update CURRENT_TIMESTAMP,
5. `registered` tinyint(1) default NULL
6. ) ENGINE=MyISAM DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8

This comes in handy, if you need to need to clone an existing PHP application very fast.

Slightly related note: If you don’t want other users on your system to clone your MySQL tables and hijack your MySQL account to use it with their web application, don’t put your MySQL passwords in PHP files that are readable system-wide. Additional bonus points, if you put the files that contain the password in a file beyond the document root of your webserver. Also note: In some cases you just need to give access to everyone due to the setup of your webserver. This is of course save, if you trust every user on your system ;).