Technical

Spamfilters

On August 14, 2009, In Technical, Weblog, by Remko

After being in the field of a systems admin I have met a large group of various spamfilters. Even at home I played with some of them and found that they were quite effective. Though lately a decrease is being seen on my hosts that make me wonder. Spamassassin’s spamd (which I use) does not get any new updates for some time already. That might mean that all spam is the same as it always had been, or something else is fishy.

My spamfilters were quite effective till around two weeks ago. Effectiveness of around 90% suddenly decreased to 66% (as per spamstats.pl which reports the spamd output). I also setup some relays just a few days ago that filter a lot of known blacklists already and prevent them from even entering the system. Some of the domains that I manage had been altered to use them instead (not JR-Hosting domains that is).. I also see a large amount of blocks there (As I expected). But still for every 1000 emails that are being send every day at the moment (ok the volumes aren’t impressive ) 330 (at least) are spam in the last two weeks.

I could retry to train my filters again ofcourse (and train around 200 emails or so instead of too much). If there are suggestions, please let me know!

ZFS paritions recreated

On September 7, 2008, In FreeBSD, Technical, Weblog, by Remko

This weekend I didn’t invest as much time as I wanted for FreeBSD and the like. I was recreating my ZFS partitions. Why? They worked fine right? Yes they did. Though they were controlled by a highpoint controller, offering a pseudo raid setup (software). Ed Schouten recently told me (something I already knew but started me thinking) that ar0 is uncapable of supporting raid-5 in the first place. So my raid configuration might not have been a raid configuration after all.

This made me feel like: do my periodic backup on DVD (backing up this much data is interesting on DVD, I can tell you that ) and I copied over all data to my workstation (which almost has the same storage capabilities, only that’s just two disks, not doing redundancy at all), and burned the beasts on DVD (still am actually).

I destroyed my old ZFS pool (just a disk ‘ar0′) and in the highpoint controller bios I disabled Raid-5 and restarted with just 4 disks. I recreated my ZFS storage with “zfs create raidz data ad14 ad15 ad16 ad17“ which fired up the storage area again. After that I started copying back the data. I copied almost 500GB this weekend already and its still going (and will be for the rest of the night I think). I liked the idea of having my data backupped on my workstation as well, so I’ll probably rsync the storage area every period of time. Probably during the day when I am not home at all, so that the gig’s of data can flow over the wire without doing harm (gbit network). At least its saves a little and I can turn down my machines where needed.

I will also restart my /storage/nfs folders so that I might be able to have my ultrasparc (donated by Robert Blacquiere) do much nicer things again by using networking storage (only fastethernet here (100mbit) but that doesn’t kill the pleasure ).

So yes not much activity for FreeBSD itself; but laying the foundation to be able to do something like that more again (ultrasparc tindy perhaps?)….

New USB Support incoming and ‘feature’ list 8.0

On August 23, 2008, In FreeBSD, Technical, by Remko

A long time discussions and development had been done on USB. Hans Peter Selasky (hps) had rewritten the entire USB stack and it seems to be moving forward enough so that Alfred Perlstein is willing to commit this into the FreeBSD tree.

Ofcourse things do not go without resistance, there are always (and will always be) people that are sceptic, against it, afraid of it etc. Not only developers, but consumers and people using this commercially as well. Nothing new there, nothing wrong there either.

So, with a bit of luck the new code will be in so that it can mature for the 8.0 release of FreeBSD.

Did you all know that there had been a lot of development for 8.0 btw? MPsafeTTY, USB, Dtrace, new ZFS drop, we migrated from CVS to SVN, we are working on LLVM (Contribute people!), even beter ULE support, Superpages got improved by alc@, NFS Locking and GSSAPI crypto, perhaps NFSv4, VImage (Marco Zec’s virtualized networking stack), and many many more new features that are not in the current -RELEASE tree’s, and will probably never be in these tree’s (it will be in future branches ofcourse). Ofcourse the above is no promise it will actually be in there, but as it currently looks like: chances are they will be there

New TTY Layer moves into FreeBSD

On August 20, 2008, In FreeBSD, Technical, by Remko

Today is a big day, for me, for Ed Schouten and for FreeBSD (And it’s consumers ofcourse). Why? Ed Schouten today integrated his MultiProcessorSafe (MPSAFE) implementation of the TTY Layer for FreeBSD. From the beginning that I heared about the project, Ed and I had been in contact, both working at the same company (Snow B.V.), we flew to Canada together (Facilitated and sponsored by Snow B.V.), visited eachother, been in contact for ages (or at least it feels like ages, which is a positive point in this case). Ed also gratuated in the meantime by working on this TTY layer. So a lot of good things had been evolved because of this!

For FreeBSD this means that finally the TTY layer is GIANT-less. One more big obstacle removed to entirely getting rid of the GIANT lock , as Poul-Henning Kamp mentioned at some point: This is one of the latest chapters that needed rewriting (since a long time as far as I know).

So I am really happy about this. Good Work Ed!!!

George Neville-Neil leaves FreeBSD Security Team

On August 18, 2008, In FreeBSD, Technical, by Remko

Today we learned that George Neville-Neil leaves the FreeBSD Security team due to lack of time. It’s sad that George leaves the team, but he leaves a lot of good work behind and he was a great asset to our Security Team. Therefor “Thank you for working with us George!”

FAQ translation progressing well

On August 6, 2008, In FreeBSD, FreeBSD Doc, Technical, by Remko

Recently I had started the translation of the FAQ, which is currently progressing well. Initially I will do a rough translation and finalize the bits later on. I already got some positive feedback from Ed Schouten (A friend and fellow FreeBSD Developer) which I incorporated. The FAQ had become worthwhile to translate thanks to the efforts of Gabor Pali, thanks for that mate!.

For more information regarding the faq, see the FreeBSD DOC NL page listed on the top, or have a look at http://www.freebsd-nl.org/faq. More updates to follow!

My employer Snow

On July 31, 2008, In Technical, by Remko

Recently my employer switched offices, from the “smaller” office in Waardenburg, we transfered to a bigger office in Geldermalsen. This office is very surely large enough to accompany the growth that Snow is currently facing. As a member of the team (for almost 2 years now) I am happy that we can grow this well in these times and that we have this very nice new building! If you are ever in doubt over your employer and are experienced with Unix systems, consider contacting them

Apart from that: I also feel very thankful to the snow team. Now that I am looking for a home to live in with Denise and Luca, they are helping me the best I can, almost if it were a family. The Snow team very actively helps were possible and I like that a lot, I have never ever seen that with other companies. It makes me that I still wear my Snow clothing with pride!

Thanks Snow for all the things that we have been through together so far! Did I already mention that if you need an employer you should checkout Snow?

Weekend

On July 27, 2008, In FreeBSD, Technical, Weblog, by Remko

So, I had been very productive this weekend, not as productive as I hoped to be for FreeBSD (merging some changes that I had made recently for example) but productive nevertheless. We went to Plaswijckpark on friday with Luca, who had a very nice day there (and so did we). It was good to see him again and Denise as well ofcourse .

On saturday I started translating the Jail chapter and the FAQ (in parallel), which I inserted into the perforce repository, so have a look if you are interested, note that it’s very much work in progress!

Later that day I went to the cinema with Denise, The Strangers is a very nice horror movie!, I enjoyed being with Denise again and spending time together , oh and we are ofcourse still looking for our perfect house to start living together

After doing that I noticed an update from Rene Ladan who finalized the Virtualization chapter! Brilliant work! I checked it, and imported it into the FreeBSD Repository as well as updated the local perforce branches with it.

On sunday I watched Saw 4 with my dad, and bicycled towards the office I am currently working at to see how far that would be. It’s bit too far to bicycle every day, or actually it costs too much time to get there , but it was an impressive thing to do as a non-biker for soo long. I got around 24km/hr according to Robert.

After that I vacuum cleaned the car and continued working on some projects, now it’s getting dark while I am writing this blog entry..

I enjoyed this weekend, thanks to technology and ofcourse (the most important) Luca and Denise!

Multiple languages / Meerdere talen

On July 26, 2008, In Technical, by Remko

Tom Scholten informed me about how he did his multiple languages within Wordpress. He told me how he did it, but at first I messed up because of the broken lang_rewrite option. I had set this option to false after Tom advised me to do so, and now it works like a charm. I have multiple language support now!

FAQ Translation started

On July 26, 2008, In FreeBSD, Technical, by Remko

So, I picked up a lot of changes through Gabor Pali (pgj@) for the FAQ, and decided that I could easily start the initial translation. Most of the content so far is very readable and translatable (which isn’t always the case for the regular handbook, see for example the MAC chapter and the Audit ones, which I am trying to finish for the Dutch Project as well), and probably I’ll have a look at the jails chapter soon as well. Beyond that Rene is helping a lot with translations, which gives me a good feeling about being able to finalize the entire handbook at some point.

Back to the FAQ, I started the translation, and I progress not that fast, but fast enough to find it nice to do. I am now sitting in the sun translating the stuff, which is awesome if one can do this .

More updates will ofcourse follow..

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