Matt’s News / Blog

So, it seems like people don’t want me to talk about software development — maybe I talk about it too much already . I guess I won’t dive into designing a loosely coupled system, unit testing, mocking, design patterns, etc… I may every once and awhile write something about software development.

That leaves photography, politics, finances and other along with life events. I think I’ll probably stick to mainly life events with a couple other things sprinkled in along the way. Here are a couple of reasons:

• There are a gazillion other blogs out there that say just about the same thing

I guess that’s just one thing. Oh well.

As part of my blog revival, I’ve updated to the latest WordPress version and installed more anit-spam plug-ins. Hopefully it helps. I’d like to update the template, but that’s currently at the bottom of my project list.

Update: I’ll probably also post on Wedding-Planning-Progress too.

If you haven’t noticed, I haven’t blogged in awhile. I have a couple reasons why:

• My posts bore me
• I lack enthusiasm for my blog
• After sitting at the computer all day, I often don’t feel like messing with the computer in the evenings
• I need more of a focus for my blog
• Unsure of readership

Here is where you come in. What should I blog about?

• Major Life events
• Politices
• Software development
• General Computing
• Photography
• finances
• Other

I’d like to blog more, so I’m looking for some suggestions. What ideas do you have?

This a test posted with Windows Live Writer.

For about the past month and a half my email server hasn’t been working correctly.  Everything seemed ok, I even got most of my email.  But in the past few days it became more apparent that something was up. Yesterday I started looking into it.  I run QMail as my email server so I started looking through the logs and the configuration.  Nothing had changed and everything seemed correct.  I thought maybe it was the DNS.  So I ran my domain through the www.dnsreport.com and discovered that it couldn’t connect to my email server. Strange.  I then tried connecting to it myself through telnet.  It took a long time for it to connect 90+ secs.  After much research I found that my server was using relays.ordb.org to check incoming connections against a known list of spammers.  I found that ordb had closed down in December.

So, because ordb had closed down, all connections to my mail server had to wait for my mail servers connection to ordb to timeout.  The patient mail servers got through and were able to send mail (mainly spam ) and the impatient ones bounced the email (mainly my bank).

To fix this problem, I found another ip address blacklist checking service (http://www.spamhaus.org/zen/ ) to do the checking. DNS Report then could connect to my email server and impatient mail servers now can send their email to me.

So, if you were trying to email me with in impatient email server and it bounced back, sorry… it is fixed now.

Accomplishments for the day:

• Frontpage server extensions are working, so Darrel can work on his site.
• Dovecot IMAP. I have a workaround for the failing to authentic after a period of time problem. That is to set cron to restart the server every hour. It’s not very eloquent, but it works.

Next things:

• Get spam filter working
• Design a new website / blog.

Any design suggestions for my new site? I want it to be somewhat like my old site, but updated.

I flipped ‘the switch’ this morning to have wissman.org point to the new server. So far so good. I still have some issues to work out. Mainly:

• Dovecot stops authenticating after a period of time.
• I’m having trouble installing the front page server extensions for Darrel.

Time to start designing a new website!

The new server is coming along.

Things I’ve finished:

• Qmail up, running and recieving mail.
• I can add email accounts easily though the web interface
• IMAP is up and running*
• I have Apache configuried nicely
• MySQL is up and running and I can administer it through phpMyAdmin
• DNS is running very smoothly

This I have yet to do:

• Setup Front Page server extensions for Darrel.
• Setup web based email. I’m going to use Round Cube.
• Move over and convert my old email / Setup all of my existing accounts on the new server
• Install new version of WordPress. I’m going to use it as mangage my site pages too.
• Transfer my old website
• Design a new website(s)

Unresolved issues:

• Get the email Spam and Virus filter working
• Dovecot IMAP stops authenticating after a period of time
• I can’t connect to my mail server via SMTP to send email.

I don’t think I’ve ever really given anything up for Lent in the past, but this year I decided to try it. I gave up my biggest vice World of Warcraft. It’s going fairly well, so far I’m down to breaking out in a cold sweat once a day. j/k I’ve mainly been spending my extra time working on setting up my new VPS. I’m having quite a time getting everything going.

I decided to ditch the long-time standard UNIX mail server, Sendmail, for the newer hopefully better and easier to configure Qmail. I’m also using vpopmail to manage the domains and email address for Qmail per the how-to that I was following. I did end up deviating from the how-to in the way of the IMAP/POP3 server. The how -to had me use Courier-IMAP. But I couldn’t get it working for the life of me. So I switched to Dovecot. It seems to be working now. I also found out that a dovecot is a building for pigeons. I find this a very clever and witty name for an IMAP/POP3 server.

Problems that I still need to fix:
-Can’t send email to any of my new domains
-Not sure if can check email via IMAP
-Need to convert existing email accounts from mbox to Maildir
-Need to test SMTP.

Once the mail server is up and running, I will move unto Apache, the web server.