Rick Wang's Weblog

Today, I sold off my Dell PowerEdge SC440, "freedom" via craigslist for $140. I had paid $460 in 2007 for this machine, and got some use out of it, so a $320 depreciation is not so bad. Plus, I get the reassurance that the computer will get some use instead of meeting a sad fate as e-waste in my closet. The network page has been updated accordingly. I still had all of the original packing materials and enclosed items, and handed them off to the buyer. I think it works out well for both of us since it is still a pretty solid machine.

One of the things I have been struggling to do all week is get my Dell PowerEdge SC440 system upgraded into a better desktop system, but I kept running into all sorts of snags. The main bottleneck was that 512MB of RAM was nowhere near enough for a modern desktop, so I went ahead and ordered 2xCrucial 1GB DDR2 from Amazon.com for $44. I was looking forward to this, but when it arrived, I found out that the SC440 cannot take non-ECC RAM, despite the fact that most boards with ECC capability also allow non-ECC to be set in the BIOS. Well, I had 2 extra sticks of RAM that were useless, and could not be returned to Amazon.com, so I decided to research my options.

On a whim, I spent much of today playing with roses, my old Dell Pentium III. I was particularly amused to see how smooth Firefox 1.0-prerelease ran compared to the bloated 3.x series today. Eventually, I realized that since all of my old files were still on roses, the emails from the time it was used as the email and file server should still be there as well. I confirmed this and set about importing all of the old emails (spam included) from roses to pain. In particular, since roses' email was set up in mbox format (sendmail/procmail/postfix), and pain is setup to maildir format (postfix/dovecot/squirrelmail), I had to use mb2md in order to convert. The maildir format is superior to mbox format because each email gets stored in a separate file instead of being added to an ever-growing file. I had some trouble getting the Date::Parse module required by the mb2md script, so eventually I had to install TimeDate from CPAN. Once all of the email was converted, I quickly found out that squirrelmail or some other mail-related program upstream had problems with massive amounts of email in a folder. Since the combination of maildir + squirrelmail's search feature made my previous folder hierarchy obsolete, I went about the manual task of sorting old non-spam emails by year. All spam email got put in one folder without any regard to the date.

Sorting the email archive by year seemed to work out for squirrelmail, as I was no longer faced with a list of "Unknown Date" emails. However, I did notice something odd: from mid 2005 to mid 2006 I had almost no email whatsoever. Some investigation revealed that this was the time period when I assigned vertigo (my now-defunct mini-ITX) to take over email services, and perhaps even then it had serious problems. Or maybe I forgot to back up those emails. At any rate, I do remember vertigo behaving erratically, but at the time I was investing large amounts of time into the Final Fantasy XI MMORPG, and did not care to investigate the problems vertigo was having. I think it was also at this time that I shifted from the flatline email to the h4ngedm4n email to run away from the large amounts of spam hitting the flatline address regularly. In short, many things happened and I have a hole in my email history. I suppose emails sent to me then probably failed as well. If so, I didn't notice. I was totally hermiting at that point in time, with only the occasional excursion to the gym or a hollywood nightclub. It is amazing to look back and consider the amounts of time sucked away by an online game.

It has been nearly 3 years since I last touched an iptables configuration, and I have totally forgotten it all. This was problematic because my configuration was so locked down for security, it was blocking some ports I wanted open. The first port I want to open was for gkrellm, port 19150. The second port was for Deception OCG, port 44000. For the most part, I followed this set of instructions from the Debian wiki. I suspect this was the exact same page I used the first time. Anyway, as a precautionary measure, iptables configurations are edited in a separate file rather than directly touching the current configuration. This is because a botched iptables configuration causes serious problems. I copied my existing /etc/iptables.up.rules as a starting point, then added the following lines:

-A INPUT -p tcp -m tcp --dport 19150 -j ACCEPT
-A INPUT -p tcp -m tcp --dport 44000 -j ACCEPT

Next, I loaded the test configuration into iptables by using the iptables-restore command. I tested to make sure everything was working the way I wanted, then I saved the configuration by using the following command:

sudo sh -c "iptables-save > /etc/iptables.up.rules"


Estiah is a browser-based multiplayer card game/RPG that I have been playing since last year. I manage four characters now, Starwarskid, Deathbringer, Mudkip, and Technoviking. They are all named after internet memes. One of the things I like about the game is the browser based interface, which makes much of the game's data accessible to the user. I had previously written a Battle Parser to analyze replay data, and now I to improve my Python skills by making a new automatic character banner, for use in forum signatures. The resulting source code and calling script are posted on Lodge It!. In making this script, I got to play around with lxml, Python Imaging Library, and pylint. It was my first time using lxml and pylint, and there was some learning curve. I had played around with PIL a little before, and have some background in image processing, so that was easier to pick up. Eventually, when I felt comfortable with it, I announced it on the game forums. The above banner is a static, saved version, and the below banner is a demonstration of actual use. On forums, the html is replaced by the appropriate bbcode equivalent.


<img src="http://www.disasterzone.net/~h4ngedm4n/cgi-bin/estiahbanner.cgi?userid=23806" />

Recently, I decided to learn lxml for parsing html files. There was one big problem however, lxml on Debian etch was version 1.1.1, which did not have the lxml.html module. At first I tried to use lxml.etree, but this seemed rather unwieldly and I decided to get the newest version 2.2.4. Sadly, there was no backport for 2.2.4. I had to resort to using setuptools, better known by its easy_install command.

First, I had to actually install a recent version of setuptools, which was in backports:
sudo apt-get install -t etch-backports python-setuptools

Next, I had to get a bunch of required packages in order to build lxml:
sudo apt-get install python2.4-dev gcc g++ libz-dev libxml2 libxml2-dev libxslt1.1 libxslt1-dev

Although lxml's site did not seem to require g++, I found that gcc did not have some required headers, such as limits.h or stdint.h. The g++ package seemed to provide these files. With everything in place, first I tested in my local directory, then finally used setuptools as root:
sudo easy_install lxml

Verifying it actually installed:
$ python -c "import lxml; print lxml._file_"
/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/lxml-2.2.4-py2.4-linux-i686.egg/lxml/_init_.pyc

$ python
Python 2.4.4 (#2, Oct 22 2008, 19:52:44)
[GCC 4.1.2 20061115 (prerelease) (Debian 4.1.1-21)] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> from lxml import html
/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/lxml-2.2.4-py2.4-linux-i686.egg/lxml/html/_init_.py:12: UserWarning: This version of libxml2 has a known XPath bug. Use it at your own risk.
from lxml import etree
>>>

Oh well, apparently my version of libxml2 sucks. Hopefully it still works, since I do not see a newer version of libxml2 available for etch. For now, in order to suppress this warning, I invoke Python in the following manner:
python -W ignore::UserWarning

I spent some time today trying to get fetchmail to work, but ran into some snags. I remember fetchmail fondly from my days using Slackware Linux, in order to pull mail from the ISP server and UCSD's mail servers onto my local network. However, when running fetchmail under Debian, I found that postfix was rejecting the mail once fetchmail tried to pass it off. This was because fetchmail tries to deliver to user@localhost rather than user@disasterzone.net as it was configured for. In order to fix this, I had to change this line:

original /etc/postfix/main.cf
mydestination = $myhostname localhost.$mydomain $mydomain

revised /etc/postfix/main.cf
mydestination = $myhostname localhost.$mydomain $mydomain localhost

After restarting the postfix server, it now recognizes user@localhost as a deliverable address, and handles the mail properly. I wondered why localhost was originally omitted? I ran a few open relay tests, but saw no problems. Once this was all working, I went ahead and created my user .fetchmailrc. It is important to chmod this file 600 when putting the password in, to prevent others from viewing the password. Alternatively, one can omit the password and let fetchmail prompt for the password.

.fetchmailrc
set daemon 6000

poll imap.aim.com proto imap
user myusername with password 'mypassword'
ssl

poll pop.gmail.com proto pop3
user myusername with password 'mypassword'
ssl

With everything in place, I pulled all of the old emails from AIM and Gmail onto disasterzone.net's mail server. As far as I can tell, my emails only go back to late 2006. I'm not sure what happened to the other mails. It is probable I forgot to back up the data when decommissioning my old mail server.

So there I was, chatting away on IRC on a rainy day, when I noticed an email from amazon.com had crashed policyd-spf. Alarmed by the loss of potential mail, a quick google search revealed this was a known problem (bug #499504). Reading through the thread, I determined that I had the same problem and proceeded to install an updated version of python-dns from etch-backports:

apt-get install etch-backports python-dns

While looking at backports.org, I was rather disappointed to learn that etch-backports was discontinued as of today. This means at some point, I have to upgrade pain.disasterzone.net to lenny.

Major headache today trying to install latex on disasterzone. Firstly, I found that the tetex package I was used to was no longer supported, so I had to install texlive instead. It has been a while since I last touched a latex document, and it seems tetex had been out of commission since 2006. After attempting to install texlive, I ran into a bigger problem. The default package for etch was not working. After much debugging, I learned that my problem was similar to the fmtutil bug mentioned in this bug report and again in this bug report. Apparently there is a bug where a warning is misinterpreted as a fatal error, stopping apt from installing the package correctly. At the time of this post, the fix for this bug had been accepted but not actually merged into the main repository. As per these instructions, I added the following line to my /etc/apt/sources.list file:

deb http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian oldstable-proposed-updates main contrib non-free

I then installed texlive with the following command via sudo:

apt-get -t oldstable-proposed-updates install texlive texlive-latex-extra

Hopefully the proposed updates get merged into the main repository soon, and other people can avoid dealing this problem.

After getting many spam emails with forged sender addresses, purporting to be from my domain, I decided to take action today. I see that there are several ways of addressing forged sender addresses, and I mainly looked at SPF (Sender Policy Framework) and DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail). Both looked promising but SPF looked easier to implement. I read up on the related material at OpenSPF to get a better idea of what was going on. It seems that I had to include a TXT field in my nameserver to specify which IP represents the disasterzone.net domain. Once that was set up, I used the testing tools linked at the OpenSPF site to verify the nameserver modifications were correct.

The second step was to set up my mailserver, in this case Postfix, to make use of the SPF information. This required the package "postfix-policyd-spf-python", which was not available for Debian etch, so I had to learn how to access etch-backports. Thankfully, it was available in backports, and I followed these directions to configure. For some reason, python-yaml was not available, so I could not test whether things were working. Instead, I tailed the mail server logs and kept an eye on it to see if the SPF checking was working. With the large amounts of spam hitting my mailserver, it was only a few minutes before I saw the first successful rejection of a forged sender address.

I added the original Disaster Zone journal entries to the current site incarnation. Unfortunately, the modification dates were off and the filenames did not list the hour and minute. These early entries also contained no titles, so I had to make them up as I read them over. Much of the content no longer applies, and many of the links are broken, but I only made spelling edits. It was quite a trip down memory lane, remembering the dark and isolated upstairs room of Kevin McCoy's Las Palmas townhouse ($500/mo I think?). I wonder how he is doing today?

As much as I support free speech, and consider spam to be free speech, there is simply a point where too much speech starts to have a negative effect. While I have no problems with hearing cross-chatter in public areas, I would take issue with hearing cross-chatter in a private area such as my home. By defining my email box as a private area, it is reasonable to expect that it is also not a free speech zone. In other words, I am justifying the act of blocking spam sent to disasterzone.net.

With so many ways to combat spam, I did some research and decided a big chunk of the spam can be cut out simply by using a dns blacklist. I settled for spamhaus's ZEN DNSBL, which has rejected 86/87 spam mails sent to disasterzone.net within the past 24 hours. All of the legit mails (I have been monitoring which IPs got rejected) came through fine. I'm not too worried about the 1 spam mail that made it through, further tradeoffs in mail filtering are just not of interest to me at this time.

I stumbled across the idea of using a VPS (virtual private server) to host disasterzone while I proceed to move about. It would be too much hassle and downtime to take down freedom and set it up with a new IP each time I moved. First, I tried out VPSLink due to their tempting $8/mo basic plan. I was granted access almost immediately thanks to the excellent web interface they have set up. However, I quickly realized that 64 MB without swap would be insufficient to run Apache/PHP/MySQL. I experimented with the various distributions and the second tier setup, getting Slackware 11 to work reasonably well with the Link-2 package. However, Slackware is very hands on and I did not wish to repeat the process should I make a mistake and need to reinstall. I read much of their excellent documentation in the forums and community wiki and learned much about running Linux in a VPS environment.

Despite the many positive things about VPSLink, I felt their second tier package at $15 was not competitive with many of the other offers found via Google. Upon further research and armed with some rudimentary firsthand experience, I decided to try out RapidVPS. They are not as sleek as VPSLink and have less OS images to choose from, but the package deal was much better at $10/mo. I also like the vibe in the RapidVPS forums, which seems to be relaxed and passionate about their business as opposed to coldly professional. It feels much more welcoming, personal and alive to be in the RapidVPS community. I hope the arrangement works out and I can keep disasterzone there for a long time!

Still using FreeDNS to point to my site until I figure out how to use RapidVPS's DNS servers. While it is ideal to have DNS scattered about, I would really rather consolidate to avoid having too many logins. With that said, FreeDNS works well and is actually free!

After repeated errors with the Windows 2000 install on delusions, I decided to wipe the Windows partition and use all 40 gb for Linux. Originally, I was going to upgrade to Slackware 12, but I did not have a DVD-R handy to burn the installation DVD. I decided to try Ubuntu Desktop Edition 7.04 instead. Although skeptical at first, I must admit I am rather pleased! It was simple to install, and being able to play with the Live CD while the installation happened was a nice bonus! I played some of the solitaire variants while files were being copied over to the root partition. What I like most about Ubuntu is the highly user friendly package manager Synaptic. It seems to include just about every piece of software I want and works flawlessly thus far. It is a really polished Linux distribution and I can understand why Dell is willing to offer it pre-installed on some of their systems.

While much of the content was lost, one of the things I recovered from the wayback machine was the version 2 disasterzone banner. I thought it would be nice to compare the old and new logos to test out the Media library feature of serendipity. It would be nice to get a hold of the original jagged banner but I think that is lost for good.



To do it justice, the v2 banner really should be viewed in the context of the v2 site layout. Here is a screenshot: