Anil Gangolli
Collected Bits - Home Page and Personal Weblog
Site now on Fedora Core 3
As we prepare to vacate our house for a remodel, a friend has graciously offered to “colo” my server. If you can see this message, you’re hitting the new www.busybuddha.org. It should look basically the same. The old one will stay online for a day or two to allow DNS caches to flush the old entry.
At this point I’ve switched my MX and www host records to point to the new server and I’m planning for the name service transfer to occur early next week. It all seems to be working, but if you have any trouble reaching my by e-mail, you can try posting a comment on the blog or using Yahoo IM to anilgangolli.
The transition has been a little tough because I set up the new server with Fedora Core 3, whereas my old one had been running Redhat ES 3. Sorry Redhat, I’d been a paying customer since 5.2 or so, but the forced ES upgrade (downgrade) and hiked up annual fee for update service tanned my hide.
Hit some interesting issues setting up Fedora Core 3.
- After getting bad media checks on all four of the Fedora Core 3 CDs, I googled around and found that this was a common problem, and several folks recommended using ide=nodma, turning acpi off, or other options to avoid isolinux bugs. So I tried those. Didn’t work. Tried much fussing with BIOS IDE settings as well. Didn’t work. So finally I decided to try burn a new disk from the first ISO image. Amazingly, it tested perfect without any special BIOS or isolinux options. Same with the others. So it turns out that sometimes when your CDs test bad, they are indeed bad; imagine that! I’m not sure what I’d done to get four coasters; I’d burned the disks several weeks earlier. Same brand of media and same burner.
- I try to revision control most of my important configs (iptables, sendmail, named, sshd), but as usual when moving about, there are a few settings one forgets about. Like, for example, setting up ip forwarding in the kernel (sysctl.conf). It took me a while to remember to go set that, but this time, I still could not get ip forwarding to work. Why? My old config was enabling IP v4 forwarding. Fedora Core 3 uses/prefers the IP v6 stack by default, and you have to separately enable forwarding for that. In the end I decided to disable ipv6 for now.
- I spent a good deal of time looking for the imapd RPM before figuring out that dovecot, which was installed but I had disabled, is the imap/pop3 server in Fedora. That was fine, but it happened to have a dynamic link dependency on the MySQL 3.x client library (even if you don’t happen to use it). So when I set up MySQL 4.x, I had to preserve that library just to allow dovecot (actually dovecot-auth) to start up ok.
- Finally, I couldn’t figure out why SpamAssassin was ignoring my user_prefs. Finally thought of trying spamassassin --lint. Yep; this caught everything. The new version uses slightly different option names for several things.
All in all though, it went pretty smoothly, and I think I’ll be happy with the switch.
Posted at 07:30AM Mar 24, 2005 in System.out | Permalink
Dodging legitimate control by outsourcing
The New York Times reported yesterday on the US policy of covertly transfering terror suspects abroad for “interrogation” and these decisions being left to the discretion of the CIA. The CNN reports today of the administration’s denial that they used this as a means of “outsourcing” torture. (Bob Herbert had written an op-ed piece titled “It's Called Torture” in the Times last Monday).
The Times article cites at least three cases, one of a Syrian born Canadian, another of a Lebanese-born German, and one of an Egyptian-born Australian who were beaten and held from terms of weeks to years before being released without ever being charged. Given that these were citizens of Canada, Germany, and Australia, respectively, it’s hard to legitimize their transfers to Syria, Afghanistan, and Egypt. The CIA then says it doesn’t really control what happens after these transfers.
There’s a broad pattern emerging of the government dodging legitimate checks and balances by outsourcing to parties not directly subject to the same restrictions.
Another case in point is the giant MATRIX database, which because it’s conveniently outsourced to a private corporation (Seisint, Inc. of Florida), is not subject to normal restrictions and controls, not even FOIA.
It appears the ACLU is already studying this trend in other areas as well.
Technorati tags: politics civil rights US government
Posted at 07:58PM Mar 07, 2005 in dogma | Permalink
Smart Tag Creator Behind Google's New Autolink Feature
The similarity with Microsoft’s earlier Smart Tags is not coincidental. -The developer is now at Google, and apparently responsible .-
CORRECTION: NEVER MIND. THE SOURCE OF THIS NOW RETRACTS IT.
Technorati tags: google AutoLink
Posted at 01:56PM Mar 06, 2005 in tech | Permalink
Google and Apple SSDD
The image of Google and Apple as relatively benevolent ethical players in the industry is being tarnished as they exhibit the same hubris and megalomania as everyone else. What is it with these dufuses? They hugely undervalue the grass roots support that sustains their customer base. Huh? Goodwill? Who needs it.
Google’s recent AutoLink play reminds me of the 2003 Verisign SiteFinder scandal (“Oh hey, we own the damned DNS (don't we?). We'll just redirect all of those non-resolving domain names to our site. Yeah, that's the ticket!”)
Technorati tags: google AutoLink
Posted at 01:33PM Mar 06, 2005 in tech | Permalink
Better Bad News on Google Autolinks
Just check it out
Technorati tags: google blogging
Posted at 12:22PM Mar 06, 2005 in tech | Permalink
Is blogging journalism?
Apple is arguing that blogging should not be afforded the California statutory protections provided to the press with respect to identifying sources of leaks and Superior Court Judge James Kleinberg (Santa Clara County) agrees .
Related:
-Discussion on slashdot - UPDATE – On second thought skip that one. Too many nitwits; minimal understanding of the issues.EFF page on the case ; much better.
Posted at 01:29PM Mar 05, 2005 in tech | Permalink