Tales from our World

Well, I have created a new blog…my tech bits.  Which I think is a more accurate to what I post.  Anyway, the content has moved, and this is the last post here.

Well, I got an iPhone, I wasn’t planning on it, as I do think that $500 is a too much for a phone. However, I had a customer with a specific requirement, so I needed to get one. I’m a blackberry user right now, and I have to say, the iPhone has great potential, but right now it seems that Apple doesn’t know if the iPhone is a consumer or a business device.

Here are my thoughts (in no order):

• The screen is amazing
• Battery seems to be really good
• EDGE is a bit slow, I wonder why Apple wanted to go this route, and not a 3G network.
• the mail client is not good (I wanted to says “sucks” but that might be a bit strong)
• AT&T seems to work better at my house than T-mobile
• gApps (email) doesn’t work well with the mail client
• the screen is a smudge magnet

OpenDNS is a great system, and I have found that they have added a great new feature: Adult Filtering. It does a great job, I’m really happy that they have added this feature. It works pretty good, I haven’t found a site that is it lets through…

I used to think that java was the worst programming language out there for web work.  Then I got a ColdFusion project, and I learned that java isn’t half bad (yes, I do know that CF is just a wrapper around java).  I’m a PHP/Perl guy myself, and I asked a friend if he knew anyone…here’s the very breif conversation, that I just burst out laughing…

me: Hey, do you happen to know anyone who know cold fusion?
friend: i laugh at people who do

I am an email user and a email provider, and I hate spam.  No, worse than that, I lothe SPAM…for many reasons.  There are many reasons, most that have been said before, and a lot from an ISP poitn of view (did you know spammers, hijack legit servers to send spam).  One of the “tools” that people have turned to is Challenge/Response system (where you, the sender, get an email that you have to “approve” that you sent it).  I hate these systems, and just for the record, I will NEVER respond to them.  It’s annoying and frustrating to have to send these back, and I have noticed that I have to “re-send” to verify, and sometimes the user doesn’t get them anyway.  *sigh*

Here a script I found that generates various passwords.

I found this command a long time ago, and I forgot where. But, I wanted to share it with everyone. It will tell you what IP addresses are connected to your web server, and how many connections there are.

netstat -ant | grep \:80 | awk '{ print $5 }' | awk -F \: '{ print $1 }' | sort | uniq -c | sort -n


Note: Again, I don’t remember where I found this, and you are the author please let me know and I will link it back to you.

If you are using CentOS 5 and enable FTP and when your users try to FTP in, they get the following error:

500 OOPS: cannot change directory:/home/their_directory

The problem isn’t with FTP (as I first thought), the issue is actually with SELinux.

To fix, edit the file: /etc/selinux/config

Look for the line that says:

SELINUX=enforcing


and change it to:

SELINUX=disabled

There are lots of reports of issues with CentOS 5 and the newest Nvidia chipset. The biggest one that I have found is the network settings are forgotten on each reboot. So, if you set your machine with a static IP only to find when you reboot the machine switches to DHCP mode, then here’s a simple and easy way to fix (note: the proper fix would be to recompile the network card drivers, however this is a bit time consuming).

The simple fix is to turn off Kudzu. From the command line type:

chkconfig --levels 345 kudzu off

Well, I wanted to start writing more specific things, and so I have created a new blog called Deus Ex Code. So, you will find all my writings there from now on, including LOTS of system administration things (which is kinda what I’m trying to focus on).

Update 6/16/2007: I changed my mind, I’m back…long story. I’ll move the little content I has there back over here.