May 09, 2006

Be Careful What You Ask For

Our company has just gone through a merger with a US company (we're Canadaian). So far, it's looking like the majority of the combined company's IT work is being done out of my office. The other day, I just received a document from the US office with some notes regarding an upgrade to their website. I'm getting rather used to someone handing me some scribbled notes on a piece of paper and expecting me to interpret those notes and produce a working piece of software. I wasn't quite expecing these notes, however. The gentleman had literally taken the time to take his hand-scribbled note and scan it in, then convert it to a PDF, then email it to me. It's completely unintelligible.


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November 18, 2005

Moving Time at the Office

Our office is doing some major re-arranging, with walls being torn down, and new ones going up. We had a moving company in today to assist us with moving some desks. When I came back from lunch, I found the door conveniently propped open by the movers. Then I took a closer look at what they'd used to prop the door open with...

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July 18, 2004

Astaro and SpamAssassin

We have an Astaro Security Linux firewall (actually two of them, running in High Availability mode) at work. ASL includes SpamAssassin, which is effective in filtering out some spam email from our corporate network. Unfortunately, there doesn;t seem to be a way to 'train' the bayesian filter. Most SpamAssassin implementations that I've seen allow you to set up a spam trap email address where you forward all of your spam messages, and SpamAssassin uses these to train the bayesian filter to recognize spam.


Well, I was playing around at the command prompt, and I found where Astaro keeps the bayes database. It can be found at:


/var/lib/nobody/.spamassassin

I also found that the sa-learn command was installed and working. So, I took a couple of mbox-style files, one with my spam, and one with regular emails, and ran the following commands:


sa-learn --dbpath /var/lib/nobody/.spamassassin/ --spam --inbox --showdots spam
sa-learn --dbpath /var/lib/nobody/.spamassassin/ --ham --inbox --showdots inbox

where 'spam' was my spam file, and 'inbox' was my non-spam file.


The results so far, after training with about 5000 spam messages and 10000 regular messages seems to be working. Looking at the ASL log files, I see more of the spam messages getting a higher bayes score.

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November 05, 2003

Nerf Gun

Today, we rolled out a new insurance sales module for our in-house POS/CRM system. The company decided to hold a little party for the IT department to celebrate the rollout. The coolest part was we got a Nerf gun! Needless to say, productivity in the department plummeted for the remainder of the day.

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September 14, 2003

Linux on the Laptop

I finally did it. I've been threatening to do it for a few years, but I think that Open Source software has matured to a point where I can actually run Linux on my work laptop for most of the time. I'm taking baby steps, though. I took the 20Gb partition and partitioned off 3Gb for Linux. As I slowly get rid of the junk over on the Windows partition, I'll change the sizes of the partitions.

The installation was relatively painless, but it did give me one heart stopper. I used Partition Magic to shrink the existing XP partition and create a Linux partition. During the shrinking, Parition Magic aborted with an error. Upon rebooting, my machine wouldn't boot up, but presented me with a blue-screen error. I had to boot in to recovery mode from the XP CD and run chkdsk /f to bring the machine back to life. After reading some comments on the Internet, I've come to the conclusion that I should run chkdsk /f every time just before running Partition Magic.

I installed Red Hat on the Linux partition. This is the first dual-boot install I've done, and it went very smoothly. It auto detected the XP partition, and configured Grub to dual boot. Again, my readings suggest that once I've done this, it's best not to delete the Linux partition, or I might lose access to XP (the Grub configuration files are actually on the Linux partition, so deleting them makes Grub unable to read it's configuration).

I haven't had any problems with drivers for my Dell Inspiron 4100 laptop. Redhat sees all of my hardware, even my Orinoco wireless card.

The next job is to play around with some wireless sniffing software. There's someone in my neighborhood that my wireless card tries to associate with once in a while. I'll have to see if I can find out more...

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June 13, 2003

Web Site Log Files

I've spent the entire day converting log files. To be more truthful, I spent an hour or so crafting a Perl program to do the actual conversion, but I've spent the rest of the day watching my machine crunch away at the log files.

We had an 'incident' on our Packeteer AppCelera box. We are running beta software (we're in the same building as their Canadian office), and there was an issue with a recent beta that caused the log files to be exported in some wierd internal format instead of W3C format. I had to convert two and a half months of mangled log files. At 4pm on a Friday, it's finally done.

Once we discovered the problem (why did it take me two and a half months to notice the problem?), Packeteer immediately got the programmers involved, found the bug, corrected it, and immediately compiled a new build for us. Now that's service!

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