Archive for March, 2008
Earth Hour Shutdown
Mar 29th
This blog will not be available for 1 hour between 8PM and 9PM this evening. All other websites that are hosted by my server, including virtlinux.com, and others will also not be available. Waterfuelconverters.com will remain available because it is hosted by a third party company.
Success For Your Resume
Mar 25th
If you are an entrepreneur you have to remove anything, and everything from your resume that hints that you have big ideas. For instance, if you host your own email server, do not place that email on your resume. Make a quick Gmail email and use that instead. Also, I have had bad experiences telling interviewers about my websites, and servers. Do not put them on your resume. Although you can most definitely mention that you have server experience, but say that you did it for some company, or for a friend or relative. The whole point is to avoid talking about your entrepreneurial tendencies completely! Companies want employees to stay around for decades. Their whole philosophy must be “why train an employee if they are just going to leave in a couple of years?”. The second a potential employer knows that you are an entrepreneur they know the second that you save up a couple of hundred thousand dollars you will leave to start your own business. YOUR POTENTIAL EMPLOYER DOES NOT NEED TO KNOW THIS. Be strategic. Do not let them know anything other than the false impression that you want to be employed by them forever. You need to make them believe that you have no other employment opportunities, and you want to work for them for many decades. Talk about their pension opportunities. Mention your desire for an IRA, or 401K. Talk about the long term benifits of the company, and possibly mention how you need insurance. Although do not give the impression that your main purpose for employment is just the health benifits. Overall make the potential employer feel that you need them. They want you to need them. I’m sorry entrepreneurs, we live in a world where companies want sheep that are completely dependent on the employer!
DOS and Brute Force Prevention Using Fail2ban
Mar 16th
Dealing with dos and brute force attacks can be a daunting challenge. You can manually adjust your firewall to block particular ip addresses, but why not automate the process? What if a program can monitor your authentication, and other log files for suspicious activity? In these log files is a tremendous amount of info about failed login attempts, and how many times an ip address connects to your web server. Using this information a program can automatically adjust your firewall to block the offending ip addresses. Fail2ban does just this. The program automatically monitors the log files of many programs. Most important is apache, and ssh. http://www.fail2ban.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page
SPAM is Relentless and Practically Impossible to Get Rid of
Mar 14th
I though by implementing some blackhole lists that spam would significantly reduce. Technically it has from several hundred to several dozen, but wow, spam is relentless. Spam still finds it way to my inbox, no matter how well trained Thunderbird is. I currently have no 100% solution, and its driving me crazy. I usually figure things out, but to eliminate 100% of spam is proving to be an unsurmountable task. I mark new spam messages every day, but they still find there way in. Simply wow.
Sendmail More Domain Blacklisting to Prevent Spam
Mar 14th
Combing through many free domain blackhole lists the following are relatively extensive, and are readily maintained. combined.njabl.org list.dsbl.org dnsbl.sorbs.net spam.dnsbl.sorbs.net Using these blacklists in your sendmail configuration can reduce the spam received from the most common and prevailing sources. Combining these active spam prevention measures, with passive techniques spam can be greatly reduced. Passive spam prevention includes blackhole lists that are not controlled by you. You can also implement graphical active spam filtering using Mozilla Thunderbird via filters.
Sendmail Blackhole List – Eliminate Most Spam
Mar 13th
To configure sendmail to automatically bounce most spam use one of the countless blackhole lists that are readily available, and consistently maintained: http://www.declude.com/Articles.asp?ID=97 An excellent blackhole list is maintained by njabl.org. Use is relatively straight forward. Add the following line to the end of your sendmail.mc file, then recompile the sendmail configuration file.
FEATURE(dnsbl,`combined.njabl.org',`Message from $&{client_addr} rejected - see http://njabl.org/lookup?$&{client_addr}')
For more detailed information on how to use this blackhole list you can visit their website directly: http://njabl.org/use.html I used to get well over 150 spam messages per day. Now I maybe get 5 total 