Too Far Afield

Someone is sending spam about Perfectly crafted Pieces under the identity of one of my many email addresses. Unfortunately, there seem to be a lot of mail servers out there, that do not check SPF records and simply send error messages about unknown mailboxes and the like back to my address. Got at least 40 of those in the last three hours. Many of those even saying that the message was not accepted because it is spam. Doh!

Just found this via Google:

NOTE: duplicity does not allow you to run a backup (full or otherwise) on the same command line as a –remove-older-than. Your –remove directive will need to be run from a separate duplicity command.

Unfortunately, this is not documented on the man page of duplicity. At least I did not find it there. On the other hand, this seems to be the answer to the question, why the hard disks of some of my servers got out of space so often. This is now fixed on all servers (that are already using duplicity for backup; The majority still uses some ugly shell scripts with a lot of gpg and rsync hacks). We actually kept several full and a number of incremental backups from the last 6 months for the duplicity servers. This seems to be a bit overkill, I guess. And more importantly: It does not scale very well. Back to 2 months now… What shall we do with all the free disk space now?

Muelli, you could have saved some time by just installing the Nightly Tester Tools and disabling the Addon compatibility check in the preferences of that extension.

I just read, that Brother printer drivers might be in Ubuntu 8.04. This is great news. I own a Brother Fax-1835C fax. Basically, I bought this fax from Brother and not from another vendor, because Brother made available Debian drivers for their printers on their website. Installation was a bit rough, but the printer worked with these drivers. There was even a possibility to directly send faxes from Linux, but I never tried that. Guess my disillusion, when I found out that those drivers stopped working after upgrading to Edgy. I played around with the drivers a bit, but I was not getting anywhere close to a nice printout. This was due to the switch to CUPS 1.3, I guess. I do not print much, so this was not really an issue, but there one or two times since upgrading to Edgy, where I needed to print out something and I had to find a printer somewhere else. When Gutsy was released and everyone talked about their nice auto-configuration support for printers I had some hope again, but my printer was not even detected. Now all drivers are packaged for Hardy and there are even packages for Gutsy. My printer finally works. Those MOTU guys rock really hard! If you’ve got a Brother printer and use a recent Ubuntu (Gutsy or Hardy), check out the Brother driver packaging wiki page.

I’ve got a 5 EUR voucher for Thalia.de, a German online book store. It’s a leftover from my Christmas shopping. As I do not intend to use it, I’ll give it away for free to the first person who writes in. There are three caveats though:

• You need to buy something for at least 20 EUR.
• You need to have a Thalia.de account.
• The voucher expires on 31st of March 2008.

If you want to use the voucher, drop me an email or post in the comments (with a valid email address, it will not be displayed). First come, first served.

The voucher is sponsored by Die Zeit, a very good German weekly newspaper.