Spam is a constant problem for me as a sys admin. Even after greylisting and denyhosts and fail2banning I still find myself wanting to deny access to the occasional ip address. The netfilter.org project iptables provides a pretty nice firewall for the Linux kernel. I often forget the syntax an …

Update 2013-02-15 Since this article was written the PPA I list has got frozen at version 18 of chromium. If you want something newer and shinier, you should replace the sources.list line with deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/a-v-shkop/chromium/ubuntu lucid main and replace the apt-key command with sudo …

This is a quick tute for folk who want to send email from the commandline under the various Unices, especially those who also need to include attachments. This has been tested on Debian GNU/Linux with Icedove/Thunderbird. We start by simply sending an email from the commandline. I shall use th …

There is plenty of other documentation of how to set up remote passwordless ssh logins elsewhere on the web. But it often takes some faffing to make it work as you'd like. Now, I often do this, so I thought I’d write up the easiest way that I’ve found to do so. It only has two steps. How …

Its true. By default Icedove (that’s Thunderbird to non-Debianists) puts the newest emails at the bottom of the message list. This is wrong and evil (I may be exaggerating). It took me a while to find the proper solution and then a bit longer to figure out I needed to delete the .msf …

I like to make sure that I always have a listing of all the files I have on my Debian boxen. Fortunately dpkg has a quick way of doing just that. # dpkg --get-selections > /path/to/mybackup.txt I run that once a day or so as a cron job dumping to a file, that file will be in my usual rsync backup. …

Lots of people seem to want to develop applications on the decidedly unfree Adobe Air platform. They provide a .deb for 32 bit systems but not for 64 bit systems. I wanted to check out some software from the dark side, and took a while to suss out what the provided deb needed to make it run …

Note: This post was written in 2008. It might or might not still work. I’ve not had time to test. YMMV!This is a mini-howto which shows one way to get round an annoying bug in mount.cifs that doesn't look like getting fixed any time soon.When using smbmount you can have …