splee.blog

After reading Anxious Annie’s post (I know her name isn’t Annie, but, y’know, alliteration…) about dishwashers, it made me pine after my own mechanical servant to wash my crockery.

If someone asked me “what, in all the world, do you hate doing the most?”, my answer would be, without a seconds hesitation “Washing up”. I loathe doing the washing up and, as a result, there’s a stack of washing up by my sink waiting to be done right this second. The washing up only ever gets done for one of the following reasons:

1. I’ve run out of plates/dishes/cups/glasses/etc and I am fed up of take away food
2. I’m expecting company and don’t want to appear a slob
3. My mum comes round to visit and feels duty bound to scrub the kitchen to a rediculous level in case I’m required to perform surgery in a trice

Unfortunately I have neither the room nor the funds to get a dishwasher of my very own. I’m going to have to find myself a woman who prides herself on her ability to clean and enjoys it… by which time I should have moved into a mansion in Kensington, bought a small island in the Carribean and holidayed on Mars.

Today was not a nice day. In between servers throwing wobblers, the internet breaking (I sank teh Intarweb!) and the general hubbub of office life, my mail archiving program decided it was going to creak under pressure and stop our mailserver from coping with a copious mail influx.

I’m actually rather proud of my little archive system. It uses a PHP frontend with AJAX goodness to search any email that has come in or out of the building and then forward said email to whomever we please or download the attachment(s). The search through about 5GB of emails (that doesn’t include the attachments!) takes about 5 seconds at most.

The data is all stored in MySQL and is pumped in using a python extension to our mailserver software, vPop3.

The problem that caused a few emails to get stuck in a big old queue was that the python extension has to connect to the mysql database from scratch every time vpop processes an email. Under heavy load this can take up to 5 seconds per email and when vpop is accepting 4 or 5 emails a second there is soon a huge buildup.

The solution is simple: Make the extension that is run by vpop place the email to be archived in a spool folder of it’s own and let vpop do it’s thing asap. That way I can have a seperate process run once a minute (or run as a service if I decide to get really smart) to parse and archive the spooled mail to the database.

I’m right in the middle of splitting the current incarnation into two components and having one process run all the time. I’m also planning to release it to the community at large. Even though the user base for vpop is relatively small, I still think it will be of help to smaller businesses.

I’ve been using Linux, in various shapes and sizes, for well over 8 years now and I’m still impressed by the sheer flexibility of the OS.

It’s a web server, it’s a router, it’s a firewall, it’s a desktop, it’s a recovery tool, it’s a geeky thing to put on your iPod. In short, it is all things to many people. That’s what I love about using Linux. Just when you think you’ve got it licked, suddenly there’s a new way to use and abuse the power of complete configuration freedom.

Case in point: Some of our users at work were abusing our good natured benevolence in letting them browse what ever websites they pleased. All they had to do was self-police. “Keep the personal stuff to lunch breaks, eh?” was the phrase we muttered. Well, blow me down with a feather if they weren’t disregarding our request.

What we needed was a way to restrict users to certain sites at certain times. Blocking it with our Windows Server 2003 wasn’t an option as to do that it was an all or nothing affair. Unacceptable. Purchasing ISA Server also wasn’t an option as it’s expensive and would take too long to sort out via the official channels. We needed a solution and we needed it now.

Enter an old PC we were about to throw away, 2 NIC’s and Linux. Placing the linux box in between the Windows Server (which acted as the gateway for the rest of the network) and our router as a bridge, plus some jiggery pokery with Squid and Shorewall, I managed to get a transparent proxy with timed ACL’s up and running within 2 hours. It literally slotted in and not a single configuration change was required on the whole network.

I love the smell of hotmail-blocking in the morning!

I’m back. After a long period of inactivity, during which I made this spanking new theme, I’m blogging again.

There are a few little hiccups with the site (most notably with tags) but I hope to have those sorted out asap.

Why I stopped blogging…

I think I just got bored with it. I felt I wasn’t publishing enough to actually warrant the blog but, after a while without it, I realised that infrequent publishing is better than no publishing. It’s useful to have somewhere to dump things, to mentally offload them and file them away rather than have them floating around in the ole grey matter.

I shall publish at my own pace and I shall publish what I want, rather than compare to how quick others publish and what they’re publishing and then worry that I’m not ‘keeping up’.

Oh, and any comments, opinions. or constructive criticism about my new theme would be much appreciated.

[edit] I’ve noticed that there are a few bits and pieces that don’t work properly in IE. I almost feel like saying “tough shit”, but the perfectionist in me just won’t let it lie. I’ll try to get those odds and sods sorted out when I can make time.