Makura no Soshi

I already love the new Apache httpd version 2.2.13 because its mod_ssl finally supports the TLS extension for Server Name Indication. In other words: it allows for every name based VirtualHost to use its own HTTPS certificate.

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… companies boycott YOU!

Some observations after a power failure at my office:

• Because of low occurence probability a UPS configuration update/test can stay an the end of a todo-list for months and years.
• Over time too many devices are attached to one UPS.
• On power failure the battery running time is always shorter than previously measured in self-test.
• Some devices just do not shutdown fast enough.
• Those devices that do shutdown correctly will have errors at startup instead.

Just updated to FreeBSD 7.2 and I already like it. — Finally I can use IPv6 adresses for my jailed websites :-)

This week brought great news for my CRM114 plugin: The upcoming amavisd-new version 2.6.3 will completely support CRM114 (either standalone or as an SA plugin) so no more patches are required to include custom headers.

In addition Mark made several improvements to my plugin itself, so I am happy to release a new plugin version 0.8 (see the project page for the module, its documentation and additional notes).

Update: I just noticed that CRM114’s stable versions (those from 2007) do not support the “--report_only” option. Thus I made a last minute change after uploading and deactivated the option in line 653 (= line 607 in the SA3.3 version).

Today the RFCs for the new Syslog procol and transport were published:

• RFC 5424 on The Syslog Protocol
• RFC 5425 on Transport Layer Security (TLS) Transport Mapping for Syslog
• RFC 5426 on Transmission of Syslog Messages over UDP

~> date -f %s -j 1234567890
Sa 14 Feb 2009 00:31:30 CET
~> date; date +%s
Sa 14 Feb 2009 02:08:28 CET
1234573708

Many systems send status e-mails from their periodic {daily,weekly,monthly} cronjobs. But just as with log messages you probably stop reading them because there are too many mails (one or two mails per day and host) and they are very repetitious (on healthy systems they should not change too much). — This demands automation.

A simple solution is to eliminate variable fields from the periodic output and only send an e-mail if the output is different from the expected or the previous output.

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