mehblog

I’m currently playing with fedora core 4 on my desktop in the office. One of my initial niggles is the way that the file browser app (nautilus) always opens new windows, i.e. when you click on a folder and then click on a sub folder, one ends up with two seperate windows. Very annoying.

Anyway, there is a way to stop this by telling nautilus to work in ‘browser’ mode which is much more like the windows explorer style.

Instructions on how to change this setting are here. Note, one gets to ‘gconf’ by typing gconf-editor from a console window, or by navigating to Applications | System Tools | Configuration Editor (at least on my default gnome setup).

Recent reports on slashdot et al seemed to suggest that Microsoft’s Sender ID initiative was dead in the water as it had been rejected by MARID. It seems however that this was perhaps not so accurate.

I have only recently found out about SPF (Sender Policy Framework) and it sounds great. I run a number of servers for clients and I know how much spam is flying around out there and how hard it can be to filter it out. If SPF can limit the amount of spam that is coming from spoofed addresses I think this will be an enormous breakthrough. On the surface at least, it should force spammers to use their own machines to send out their noxious effluent. That should make it easier to block them.

In theory anyway.

In the next few weeks I’m planning on getting SPF and postfix working together and relaying some domains through it to see how it works. Fingers crossed.

I recently switched to debian for my linux box at home. I have previously been using redhat (various versions and variants). Most of the boxes I work on and manage are redhat based in some way so I had become familiar with the way it is laid out. So, I recently installed ddclient to update my dynamic dns records at dyndns as I am on DSL at home with a dynamic IP. In the installation instructions one is told to use chkconfig to ‘turn on’ ddclient as a service. The problem is that (as far as I am aware) chkconfig does not exist on debian. Hmm. So a bit of searching led me to the debian policy documtent, which explains the debian equivalent of chkconfig, i.e. update-rc.d . That doesn’t roll off the tongue as easily as chkconfig but it does the job. Specifically check out this page<-nextpage-> for info on how to use it.

In my case I just ran update-rc.d ddclient defaults (after copying the file ddclient from my distribution folder to /etc/init.d ) and it created symlinks from /etc/init.d/ddclient to the various init folders. I suppose I should really have choosen just the runlevels I needed but it was early and I hadn’t quite woken up …

hth.