schussat

I ran Mandrake for years, but when I put a new hard drive in my laptop, I decided to start over (well, "decided" should really read "was forced by some unknown quirk"). I used Knoppix via live CD to poke around the filesystem and make sure I had everything in the right place, but I decided to go with Ubuntu when I setup the installation to disk. Ubuntu is slick, and is usable much more readily than anything I've used before. Software updates are flawless and fast and everything works great. (Nothing against Knoppix; it has lots of fans, too, and would be a good distro too, I'm sure.)

I've used Shorewall (shorewall.net) for a couple of years and had a pretty good experience. It's another iptables frontend, is really well-documented, and the web site for it provides several sets of pre-build config files for a number of different firewall configurations. It sounds like a middle road between Firestarter and more complicated setups -- so it may be worth a try, too.

Wow -- highly unexpected! Congrats Woody and Bunni. I really enjoyed everybody's entries; lots of fun to see where everybody works and plays.

Nice desk, wampthing. I was struck thinking, "hey, those mountains look familiar," and then I saw that you're in West Jordan. I'll be headed back that way for spring break next weekend.

Okay, and a shot of work, with the requisite graduate student accoutrements: Stats books, bike, photos of places far away.

My understanding is that *data* may be located outside of the public_html tree, but scripts that a user actually wants to execute via http have to be in the public_html tree. Otherwise, the web server can't actually read them -- or am I off base? For example, .htpasswd files and berkeley DB files for MovableType are stored outside of the public_html path, but the actual CGI files (same for PHP, I assume) need to be web-readable and therefore somewhere inside of public_html. So, some of the files that owatagal wants to include should be fine residing just about anywhere, but not the scripts. Right?

All right, here's my home desktop.

If that's the essential task, it sounds like a job for cron. I don't use MailMan, however; could a script take care of that operation?

Since I do most of document-generating in LaTeX, I usually use latexpdf. For non-LaTeX documents I occasionally use OpenOffice, but I've also found that a combination of a postscript printing driver and ps2pdf (part of the ghostscript package) will generate great PDFs. Just use the Adobe-supplied postscript driver to save to a file, and then use ps2pdf to make the pdf. Totally free, and works with just about any application that can print.

Thunderbird doesn't do the notes and calendar that Outlook can do. On the other hand, it does email quite well. I really like it, and use it with IMAP on several PCs. Rob, although it creates a lot of default folders, I think you can delete all the folders that you don't (want to) use. I use it to filter around a bunch of stuff and really like the flexibility to redirect saved mail and sent-mail to anywhere, as well as other filtering.

It doesn't look your script is sending a header. If you add a line to >print "Content-type: text/html"; does it work any better? Also, your code excerpt needs a closing quote and semicolon -- but I'm guessing those just got snipped when you posted it.

I've seen an absolutely enormous amount of referer spam over the past several weeks, coming from a large set of different IP addresses and pointing to an equally large set of sites. There's some good discussion of it in several places: photodude.com/article/2614/verio-and-comment-spam forum.textpattern.com/viewtopic.php?pid=37470#37470 The mass of it functioned as a DDOS against one host: textdrive.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=1851#18328 Reid (the author of the first link above) has tracked a lot of it back to a single source, and is trying to get Verio to act on it -- but not much luck so far.

This happens when Windows mistakes the .com extension in your domain with an actual file type; so, accesslog-**** looks to Windows like an executable file. Open the file up in a text editor and it will work fine. If you want to open it directly from windows explorer, you probably will need to rename it with a .txt extension.

Thanks for clarifying that, Mike. I had the same question. In followup, I'm curious: Does this mean that AOL's spam filters are more aggressive than those in place at TCH, or is it really just a question of volume, meaning that their filters have scanned much more email so they're more likely to identify spam than the filters at the TCH side, especially when it's aggregated from hundreds or thousands of accounts?

Congratulations to Mike and Rob, and congratulations to Bill/TCH overall!

Neat solution, Zathros. Come to think of it, I think I came across a tutorial to do something like this on Webmonkey a while back. I had forgotten all about it. One potential downside that occurs to me is that it won't prevent users from directly linking to non-HTML content like images or PDFs -- but only if they know the filenames, that is, so maybe it's not such a big deal.

Editor: I think that most well-behaved robots do send a referrer string, so this ought to work. Malesims: I dunno; you could try setting up the referrer blocking for the first full URL, and have a separate "allow from all" statement for the second, but I think this task would be easier if you split the "file" and "file?edit" functions into separate scripts in different directories.

Fantastic! I'm glad it worked.

I think you can do this in .htaccess, by allowing access to the file based on referrer: If the referrer doesn't match your linking file, then access is disallowed. Try something like this in an .htaccess file in the directory you want to protect: >SetEnvIfNoCase Referer "domain\.org" local_ref=1 Order Allow,Deny Allow from env=local_ref You may be able to even put the whole filename into the allowed referer. Could do the trick.

Ach, I always forget about php_info. Thanks, Rob.

I came across a thread on another forum (http://forum.textdrive.com/viewtopic.php?pid=12487) that discusses using mod_security to prevent blog comment spam. I have two questions: First, is anybody here familiar with this technique, and second, is mod_security available on TCH servers? Thanks-

If you're open to other options, I'd endorse Txp, too. I started with MT, tinkered with WordPress, and landed on Textpattern. It has a slew of plugins that facilitate archives -- monthly, by topic, etc -- and are easy to use once you get the hang of how Textpattern is put together. My impression from the Textpattern forums is that it has a large user base of designers as well as programmers, and that the significant set of plugins available now makes it even easier to design with it, without being a coder.

I have experienced this from time to time. It sometimes happens when a monitor is running at an odd refresh rate -- though with an intermittent noise, I'm not sure if that would necessarily explain it. I'd recommend adjusting your resolution and/or refresh rate (via, I think, the adapter tab on your display preferences) and see if it makes any difference.

I don't have any experience with the plugin you linked to, but I've always had good luck with Magpie RSS (magpierss.sourceforge.net/). It's easy to set up and use, and can integrate well into weblog software.

Does it help at all to add >use utf8 to the script? I'm not really familiar with the ins and outs of character encodings, so this is just a shot in the dark.