February 19, 2005

Something good from a sick day

While I was home sick today, missing my wife and daughter since they are enjoying a basketball game, I decided to do some catching up and get the last 3 months worth of pictures of of Sarah. You can view them in the gallery.

Posted by doug at 02:31 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

February 09, 2005

Bluetooth problems

I finally bit the bullet and just went out and bought a D-Link DBT-120 bluetooth dongle since I was going to pay the same amount, if not more, trying to win one on e-bay, plus I would have to wait for it, what fun is that.

I had played around for a little with John's DBT-120 to make sure it would work, but apparently I didn't go far enough with it. I was able to link my computer to my phone and ping the phone, but I never tried to pull anything off the phone. Guess I should have.

Here is the issue I'm having. As I said before, I am able to link the two devices up, ping the phone using l2ping, and pull all of the relevant information from the phone using hcitool. The problem comes when I try to use obexftp to pull files off the phone. It won't connect. I get this:


obexftp -b xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx -l
Browsing xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx ...
Channel: 7
No custom transport
Connecting...bt: -94
failed: connect
Still trying to connect
Connecting...bt: -94
failed: connect
Still trying to connect
Connecting...bt: -94
failed: connect
Still trying to connect

I even tried upgrading my kernel from 2.6.7 to 2.6.9 and that did not fix it. I have followed the tutorials that I found here and here, and posted a few inquiries on forums.gentoo.org. If anyone has any ideas, let me know.

I am running bluez-utils 2.12, bluez-lib 2.12, bluez-hcidump 1.16 and obexftp 0.10.7.

Posted by doug at 01:19 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

February 07, 2005

Procmail filtering email to different mailboxes

Once again, thanks to John, I have done some upgrading to my setup as far as mail handling goes. I now have procmail filtering mail based on from address or subject and being deposited into different mailboxes. This works nicely for me, because mutt will cycle through my mailboxes, only showing me ones with new email, and this way I can prioritize them, so I see all of the security related emails first before I look at the junk. I had been using colors in mutt based on the sender, but was quickly running out of colors, even with groupings like friends, work, security, etc.

This change only took the modification of one line in my .muttrc and creating a .procmailrc in my home directory. Samples are pasted below.

.muttrc
mailboxes /var/spool/mail/user /home/user/mail/logcheck /home/user/mail/linux-sec /home/user/mail/gentoo

.procmailrc
MAILDIR=$HOME/mail
LOGFILE=$MAILDIR/log

# If you use EXMH, you might want to uncomment the following line
#MHCONTEXT=.exmhcontext # so EXMH sees the unseen sequence

# # safety net (commented out)
#:0c:
#$HOME/tmp_mail

:0 H
* .*securityfocus.*
$MAILDIR/linux-sec

:0 H
* ^From.*root
$MAILDIR/logcheck

Posted by doug at 03:11 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

February 02, 2005

Linux Bluetooth Dongle Support

John hit the mother load jackpot for me by finding this list of bluetooth dongles and their linux compatibility. I have been bidding on a number of D-Link DBT-120 dongles over the past week not wanting to pay the retail $40.00 for one but kept being outbid. I guess I can now look over the list and try to find a generic one that will work.

Posted by doug at 11:01 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

February 01, 2005

You've got to love this

In reference to my previous posting about Sponge Bob and tollerance, you've got to love it when the United Church of Christ speaks out against the notion that Sponge Bob is too tolerant and is a homosexual. Read about it here.

Posted by doug at 01:48 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

sbl-xbl.spamhaus.org

Last week, I turned on the DNSBL feature of Sendmail and have seen amazing results. I personally have been receiving over 300 spam emails per day, as well as taking in all the spam that each of the other email accounts on my server receives. I had looked at such tools as SpamAssassin and Bogofilter, but these still have the downfall of accepting the email and analizing it. Granted, my pipe to the internet is big enough that accepting the email is not a big deal now, but it very quickly could become an issue. I wanted a product that would allow me to actually reject the emails and not bog down my connection or CPU analizing the message.

In comes the DNSBL feature of Sendmail along with the repository at Spamhaus.org. Since implementing this feature less than a week ago, I have rejected over 3000 emails!

In the future, I may turn either SpamAssassin or Bogofilter on to handle the ones that get through, but I can handle 20-30 spams per day.

Posted by doug at 09:04 AM | Comments (7) | TrackBack