Daemon Dancing

Tuesday, August 19, 2003

Updates - or lack thereof

Sorry about the lack of updates. I've been busy in the real world, and my FreeBSD server has been running all too smoothly, so I haven't really had to pay all that much attention to it:-) I went away for a week and got 5000+ messages from the FreeBSD Questions mailing list, so I did the only prudent thing - I deleted them all!

Live CD site

A simple site that does one thing really well - provide a copy of the "Live" (ie., bootable and runnable FreeBSD) CD:

FreeSBIE - Free System Burned In Economy

Tuesday, July 1, 2003

BSDForums.org

A nice looking *BSD (including FreeBSD) news and community site:

bsdforums.org - FreeBSD OpenBSD NetBSD Darwin Mac OSX Linux Unix forums, message boards, discussions and news.

Tuesday, June 24, 2003

fortune's FreeBSD tips

The program 'fortune', which is often called in the .login file by default, has a nice collection of FreeBSD tips. You can access this a couple of ways:

$ /usr/games/fortune freebsd-tips

will print a single tip to your screen, while

$ /usr/games/fortune -m col freebsd-tips | less

will dump all the tips that contain the sequence 'col' to your screen. This will show you the nice short way using the col command to strip DOS End Of Line characters from your files (those are the ones that look like ^M in many places):

$ col -bx < DOSFIle > BSDFile

although I guess it also replaces tabs with spaces. An easier way is to just use the dos2unix command (and it's opposite, unix2dos).

Testing for mail relay

Site that will check to make sure you don't have an "open relay"; ie., a way for an anonymous user to use your sendmail to send mail from. It used to be pretty common, but then spammers started using everyone else's sendmail to hide their identity, and now it is a Very Bad Thing if you have an open relay.

Mail relay testing