Hi All,

Friday evening at 23.57h is our little daughter born! Her name is Jorina

More pictures can be found on her website

Since a long time I was searching for a way to encrypt my data on a USB-stick. But one of the attention points is, it must be used within a Linux and Windows environment.

After reading an article in the Linux Journal I found TrueCrypt. TrueCrypt is an open-source encryption program for using within Linux and the Windows OS

When you are using Windows, you can use the CLI or the GUI


And at home I used it on my Linux laptop... and it worked well!!!

To speed up the backup-scripts I tried two different ways of transfering the data... I tried

  tar -cjvf test-1.tar.bz2 data/*

  scp test-1.tar.bz2 backup@remote:/home/backup/

or

  tar -cjvf - | ssh backup@remote dd of=/home/backup/test-2.tar.bz2

And guess what... it didn't make a difference....

So another speed-up-idea busted

At this moment I running on a daily base a backup of serveral files on my primary server.

Today I discovered that I deleted an e-mail which I still needed...

So I checked the backup files of the /home/*/Maildir and I found the deleted e-mail... after transfering it back to the mainserver and placing it into /home/pieter/Maildir/cur it was back online.

I am also thinking of creating a backup directly to the remote-server instead of creating a tar.bz2 file and after that transfer it to the remote-server... But if I have rewrite the script I will let you know. There is also one other thing... a webinterface for users to restore their files

But about all this... I will let you know the progress!

I want to keep my fingers on the operations on my servers. But I don't have all the time the access to a SSH-client. So I wrote a tiny PHP-script which creates a summary of the server using the next tools:

• smbstatus, for monitoring SMB-connections
  
• w, active logged in users
  
• ps, to fetch active IMAP-connections
  
• df, to monitor the free-space on the harddrive.

This all resultated in the next screen (click for a bigger one):
.

The webpage is only for people with a valid webinterface-account and it uses SSLv3 to keep the information confidential.

As you now, there are a lot of people thinking that my weblog is a free advertising environment... and no I am not!

So what I did... I wrote a small script which

• checks on posted comments (note comments are disabled by default);
  
• get the IP-address out of it and sort them;
  
• drop the address into the blacklist file;
  
• remove the comments;
  
• publish the up-to-date list on the Internet.

The described session will be done automagicly every 15 minutes by mister Cron Tab.

And if your IP-addres is in the list, you wouldn't be able to ever read this blog again

At this moment the counter of blocked ip-address is standing on:

On my website I wanted the uptime of two servers, but I don't want to use complex SSH-stuf-remote-command-PHP-script (because of vulnerabilities).
So I was thinking about a javascript which fetches some data from the other server (again it would be time-consuming... and that was not the goal).

So last but not least... I created on both servers a php-file which generates a JPEG-file and show the uptime:


And you can check the results on this website.

This morning I discovered that the whole world was blocked to send mail to my servers...

So I start digging into the /var/log/maillog stuff and guess what... I used the ORDB.ORG databases and ORDB stopped with their services... and I could have know it, because I had read the article... but didn't realize that I use their services to.

So I reconfigures my e-mailservices and at this moment the blocked e-mails are comming slowly in, at the end of the day I hope everthing is in. Next you find a summary of blocked hosts caused by the described problem:

As I had wrote before I had some trouble with the connection on one of my servers.

I suggested to implement SIP-Spoofing, but I didn't use it.

What I did, was removing the daily tunnel disconnection out of the crontab. When I investigated the log-files it was as if a buffer run out of memory.

With the previous server (other hardware) it was needed to reset the connection every night.

So at this moment the server is up for almost 63 days

It was at least one year ago when I had my last nice technical talk on a 'nice' level.

I was invited to come to the first-thursday-of-the-month-gathering of Snow BV. So I went yesterday to it.

There was a guy from NetApp doing a talk about Virtual Tape Library and it was not a sales-talk, but a technical-talk

From the listeners their were a lot of nice and good questions about the technique. One of the funniest things was that during the whole 'gathering' the word 'Windows' and 'Microsoft' were really dirty words to say!

Some image of a VTL Solution of NetApp:

More information can be found at this page of NetApp.

One of my collegues asked me to download a video from video.google.com. He tried to download a file, but it is not in a AVI-file it is a VideoGoogleFile

I remember me that when you download it using Firefox and Linux it will offer you a AVI-file...
So here comes the trick... change your webbrowser 'User Agent' string into a Linux one, ie:

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.0.7) Gecko/20060909 Firefox/1.5.0.7

The easiest way to do is:

• Install Mozilla FireFox;
• Install the User Agent Switcher
• Add the useragent string:

  Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.0.7) Gecko/20060909 Firefox/1.5.0.7

For more information regarding User Agent strings take a look at Wikipedia.

At this moment I am working on version 0.0.3 of clieop2psv some of the new features will be

• Do the 11-proof on bankaccountnumbers (sending and receiving);
  and the 11-proof succeeded when
  
• A proper english translation of the data-dictionary;
  
• A user-defined fieldseperator;
  
• A XML-output (including batch integrity check).
  
• Turn-off or write to a file the progressinformation to put output to stdout (for scripting purposes)

So I have some nice coding to do the next few weeks.

Their is also a request to create an easy GUI for the script. Imho the script must be seperated from the GUI, the GUI must only act as an interface nothing more and nothing less.

I wish you all a good 2007. 2007 will be a year of changes, first of all we expect our 2nd child within a week or 3. Besides that, their will be some other changes, but I will keep you informed!