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Gettin’ Hitched

Published March 1, 2008

Exhaust Mounting around New Hitch

Earlier this week I received the new hitch for my car. Despite being sick I spent a couple of hours today getting it installed. The directions claimed 30 minutes for an installation, but I imagine that’s for an experienced hitch installer with a lift. I just had a ~45°F garage, a tarp to lay on, and a fluorescent light to set on the ground beneath the car.

It took a bit of effort to get installed, but it was overall simpler than the Honda Music Link. There was some manipulating of the exhaust to be done (namely, lowering it and fitting the hitch over it), and some odd position lifting of an awkward 38 pound steel beam, but I’m happy with it. I’m really glad I was able to talk to about it, who installed a practically identical hitch on his 2007 Civic.

There are a bunch more photos of the installation here (photo gallery retired), or just click the image up top. The rack itself, a Thule 917 (1 1/4″ T2) is scheduled for delivery on Thursday. That should be a lot easier to get together, as it shouldn’t require any laying on the ground / wrenching on the car. Photos of that will be up once it’s here.

Also, I need to clean my camera’s sensor. And take another shower.

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Postgrey

Published February 29, 2008

mailgraph.pl on rowla.nuxx.net after Postgrey
(Click for full report…)

As mentioned yesterday I set up Postgrey on rowla.nuxx.net in order to implement greylisting and hopefully address the spam problem I (and others hosted on my box) have been having.

Well, it’s still less than 24 hours out, but it seems to be having a really big impact on the spam levels, with my personal accounts receiving only seven pieces of spam (all of which were flagged by SpamAssassin hitting my personal inbox. I’ve had no false negatives, and I haven’t yet seen any false positives. (Yes, I’ve been testing this and checking… Everything seems to work as designed.) For reference, I’d normally receive 300-500 automatically flagged pieces of spam per day, with 3-10 false negatives slipping through.

From that graph up there, one can see that Postgrey really seems to be doing the job. What can be seen (in the second graph) is that the rejected messages are way up, flagged spam is way down, meaning that the messages are being rejected and then not retried. The received messages (in the first graph) are way down, which directly correlates with the rejections.

Here is a snapshot from this morning of the daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly graphs. If you’d like to see the mostly-live graphs, here is rowla.nuxx.net’s mailgraph.pl.

Oh, and that dip on Saturday? That was the aforementioned outage caused by Waveform moving my server unexpectedly.

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Greylisting

Published February 28, 2008

My received spam counts have been exploding lately, so I’ve enabled greylisting on nuxx.net via postgrey. It’s too early to tell, but looking at mailgraph shows that delivered message counts are WAY down, spam detections have almost gone away, and rejection counts are way up.

The way this works is by telling mail coming from unknown places to go away and try again later. Most spamming software doesn’t bother trying again later, but proper mail servers do. After the proper mail servers try again the mail is delivered, and that server is noted as being safe. So, because of this, mail coming to those I host from new destinations may be delayed for 5-15 minutes, but it’ll eventually get through.

If I host you and you are suddenly not getting mail which you expect to get, let me know and I’ll sort it out. It should work fine, though, just be patient. I’ll post more in a day or so once I know for sure how much counts are down.

For reference, I personally have been receiving 300-500 pieces of spam (with most of it flagged by SpamAssassin) per day, and it was just getting to be a bit much.

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RP-SMA to Male N

Published February 26, 2008

Maxrad BMM24005ML195NF and RP-SMA to Male N Pigtail
(Click for bigger…)

When checking the mail after (a long and rather satisfying day at) work I found that the RP-SMA to male N pigtail (adapter cable) I had ordered last week had arrived. With this fitted to my Maxrad BMM24005ML195NF antenna and connected to the back of the computer everything in the Trashwall is in place. I may reformat it once in order to test my posted config files (and to restore the CF to a fresh, clean state), but it’s otherwise set.

Now, time for the next project. I think that’ll be tearing into ‘ stereo to replace the amp ICs and figuring out what is wrong with my dad’s old Kenwood HT. The stereo turns on then right back off again (I think the outputs were shorted at some point) and the HT seems to just go silent for a while even when sitting still on a desk.

Oh, and the trailer hitch should be in on Thursday, so I’ll try and get that installed on Saturday afternoon. For now I’ll just keep enjoying sipping this lovely glass of New Holland’s Espresso Love.

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Whiteboard

Published February 26, 2008

New (to me) Whiteboard
(Click for bigger…)

When moved out of his apartment this weekend he had a whiteboard (and supplies) which he no longer wanted. Now it’s in my basement. What’s really nice is that it’s a good quality whiteboard with a non-damaged surface. I’ve had a couple whiteboards in the past, but at least a small part of each surface had been abraded to the point of being non-erasable.

Hopefully now I can stop scrawling quick notes on Post-It(-ish) notes and sticking them to the back of the workbench.

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Taco Bell & More

Published February 26, 2008

Paperclips at Taco Bell

When at Taco Bell† on Schoenherr and Hall Road / M-59 on Saturday morning before helping move I noticed that a plate on the wall (at just above head height) has fuse-like holders with paperclips crimped around them. I’m not sure if this is for fuses or a temperature sensor, but it sure is slipshod work.

Here’s a few more recently uploaded moblog photos I find interesting:

· The band Margin of Error claims that 21,000 friends and 140,000 plays is on MySpace is a positive attribute.
· Costco’s tasty and reasonably decent food counter.
· A nicely anachronistic cable TV error message.
· A decent falafel plate while waiting for an appointment to start.

† No, I didn’t eat there… We were just grabbing a quick bit of food for because he was really hungry.

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Presenting: Trashwall

Published February 25, 2008

The Trashwall

Presenting: the Trashwall, a repurposed Power Mac G4 AGP. It has been taken from an old, failing machine and turned into a powerful firewall which boots from flash, contains an 8-port managed switch, offers free public wireless via a segmented, built-in access point, and handles NAT, DNS, DHCP, NTP, and whatever else I might want it to do.

It’s also got a shiny serial console for setup / management and Open Firmware. It’s basically a real PowerPC UNIX box now.

The article is complete, I’m just waiting for a small antenna adapter cable to arrive so I can hook up the better 802.11b antenna. After that I’ll post one more photo to the article, but otherwise it’s complete.

So, if you’re wanting to stick together an OpenBSD-based do-everything firewall, you could do far worse than to check out the Trashwall.

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Bike Rack

Published February 24, 2008

So, now that Danielle has a bike, I need a bike rack for carrying them. I can’t really use hang-on-trunk rack, nor do I want a roof rack. After seeing ‘s experiences installing a hitch on his Civic I think a rear hitch mount rack would be best. But, what kind?

There are two kinds of hitch racks; those which the bikes hang from and those which cradle the wheels. With Danielle’s bike not having any horizontal pieces, I can’t really get a hanging type. That leaves me with the wheel nestling type. Unfortunately those all use a bar to hold down the front wheel, which may have issues with the fender on Danielle’s bike.

That all said, I came across these photos of someone using a Thule T2 wheel-nestling-type-rack on a Civic Si. I think this is the bike rack I’m going to end up with, even if I have to sort things out with the fender.

This should be good for taking bikes up north, to local parks, or things like that. It’ll cost a bit more than I wanted to spend (about $450 total), but it should be nicely usable. And, thankfully, the rack can be moved to other vehicles in the future.

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OpenBSD Problem Fixing!

Published February 24, 2008

Back on the 13th I posted about a quirk in OpenBSD/macppc 4.2 which kept the serial console from working after first boot. This was submitted as PR 5732 and I listed a workaround here in the Trashwall article.

Late last night after going to bed I included on a message from Theo de Raadt asking for confirmation from another developer that it is fixed in -current. Poking around cvsweb brought me to this change to /src/distrib/miniroot/install.sub which appears to sort it out.

I’m very happy about this, and I’ll have to be sure to buy the 4.3 CD release when it becomes available.

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