Comment Re:But can I afford them yet? (Score 1) 228
yeah, and we probably shouldn't call our computers von neumann machines because it's too accurate a description, but sounds so old school.
Submission + - Recovering computers after house fire? (neulinger.org)
Nathan Neulinger writes: "Today, my family and I experienced (after the fact — we were not home) a house fire that completely destroyed our kitchen, and caused significant smoke and heat damage throughout the rest of the house. I believe that the two more important computer systems in the house shut themselves down automatically when the power was cut, but I don't know how much smoke and soot was pulled into them.
I'm not terribly concerned about the machines themselves, but I'd like to pull the data off onto new media. I'm a long time unix admin, so recovery tools themselves are not an issue, but I am concerned about the hardware itself. Are there any things to watch out for in terms of powering the drives back up on another machine, or is this a "don't touch it, leave it to the pros" type of thing? I have not been able to look at the drives up close yet — waiting on insurance adjuster to approve messing with house's contents first."
I'm not terribly concerned about the machines themselves, but I'd like to pull the data off onto new media. I'm a long time unix admin, so recovery tools themselves are not an issue, but I am concerned about the hardware itself. Are there any things to watch out for in terms of powering the drives back up on another machine, or is this a "don't touch it, leave it to the pros" type of thing? I have not been able to look at the drives up close yet — waiting on insurance adjuster to approve messing with house's contents first."
Submission + - Qmail Quickstarter: Review (shantanukulkarni.org)
Shantanu Kulkarni writes: "I am a Unix consultant and a corporate trainer for major corporates in
India, teaching Unix-like operating systems, system administration,
designing mail servers, proxies, DHCP servers, firewalls etc.
I got my copy of "Qmail Quickstarter: Install, Set Up and Run your own
Email Server" by Kyle Wheeler on 25th Jun 07. I knew Kyle due to his helpful tips on
qmail list and so immediately grabbed the copy and started reading it. I
happen to teach qmail to my students and so read it more from a
prespective of a teacher than a critic. Being a fast reader, I finished
the entire book in few hours.
Who is this book for — This is a very good book for newbies to qmail
making them graduate from newbie to intermidiate level. This might not
be informative reading for people already good in qmail but still worth
a read.
Chapter 1 gives a good mention of basic qmail components in a easy
language with a good mention of tcpserver and some mention of
daemontools, packages which are recommended by the author of qmail, Dan
Bernstein, for use with qmail.
Chapter 2 and 3 talks about qmail's queue with some nice discussion
about aliases and dot-qmail files. The best part of these chapters for
me was an small shell script for POP-before-SMTP sessions. I had a lot
of trouble making my students understand the concept after showing them
Bruce Guetner's relay-ctrl package and I was too lazy to churn up my own
in shell or python, so this example is very much appreciated.
But the bad part for these chapters is that Kyle
does not explain the much needed /var/qmail/queue structure in detail.
Chapter 4 is a somewhat theoritical chapter which gives details on
different type of mailbox formats and how they deal with emails, POP3,
IMAP4 servers and webmail. A very nice read especially if you are new to
qmail. The part on webmail though lacks depth and could have been
written to explain common webmail clients like sqebmail, horde,
squirrelmail etc.
Chapter 5 is an excellent HOWTO on qmail virtual domains. It is one of
the best sections in the book.
Chapter 6 talks about filtering but it lacks depth and I was expecting
something real nice from Kyle, especially about recommendations of RBLs,
greet-delay programs, mailfront and some sample QMAILQUEUE wrappers.
Chapter 7 just gives basic intro to maillist managers, encryption which
again could have been expanded a bit more.
Chapter 8 talks nicely about the excellent logging system by Dan and
qmailanalog is explained nicely.
Overall as a trainer I give this book 7.5/10. I wanted Kyle to be
partial to some packages having clean code like mailfront, vmailmgr so
to impress upon newbies the need of clean code. I will certainly recommend
this book for people who are not clear with "Life with qmail" or John
Levine's qmail. Also, Kyle has a way of explaining concepts well.
Shantanu Kulkarni
www.shantanukulkarni.org"
India, teaching Unix-like operating systems, system administration,
designing mail servers, proxies, DHCP servers, firewalls etc.
I got my copy of "Qmail Quickstarter: Install, Set Up and Run your own
Email Server" by Kyle Wheeler on 25th Jun 07. I knew Kyle due to his helpful tips on
qmail list and so immediately grabbed the copy and started reading it. I
happen to teach qmail to my students and so read it more from a
prespective of a teacher than a critic. Being a fast reader, I finished
the entire book in few hours.
Who is this book for — This is a very good book for newbies to qmail
making them graduate from newbie to intermidiate level. This might not
be informative reading for people already good in qmail but still worth
a read.
Chapter 1 gives a good mention of basic qmail components in a easy
language with a good mention of tcpserver and some mention of
daemontools, packages which are recommended by the author of qmail, Dan
Bernstein, for use with qmail.
Chapter 2 and 3 talks about qmail's queue with some nice discussion
about aliases and dot-qmail files. The best part of these chapters for
me was an small shell script for POP-before-SMTP sessions. I had a lot
of trouble making my students understand the concept after showing them
Bruce Guetner's relay-ctrl package and I was too lazy to churn up my own
in shell or python, so this example is very much appreciated.
But the bad part for these chapters is that Kyle
does not explain the much needed
Chapter 4 is a somewhat theoritical chapter which gives details on
different type of mailbox formats and how they deal with emails, POP3,
IMAP4 servers and webmail. A very nice read especially if you are new to
qmail. The part on webmail though lacks depth and could have been
written to explain common webmail clients like sqebmail, horde,
squirrelmail etc.
Chapter 5 is an excellent HOWTO on qmail virtual domains. It is one of
the best sections in the book.
Chapter 6 talks about filtering but it lacks depth and I was expecting
something real nice from Kyle, especially about recommendations of RBLs,
greet-delay programs, mailfront and some sample QMAILQUEUE wrappers.
Chapter 7 just gives basic intro to maillist managers, encryption which
again could have been expanded a bit more.
Chapter 8 talks nicely about the excellent logging system by Dan and
qmailanalog is explained nicely.
Overall as a trainer I give this book 7.5/10. I wanted Kyle to be
partial to some packages having clean code like mailfront, vmailmgr so
to impress upon newbies the need of clean code. I will certainly recommend
this book for people who are not clear with "Life with qmail" or John
Levine's qmail. Also, Kyle has a way of explaining concepts well.
Shantanu Kulkarni
www.shantanukulkarni.org"
Submission + - OpenSuSE to release Linux distro for educators (archive.org)
christian.einfeldt writes: "The next version of openSUSE, due out in the fall, will include an add-on CD optimized for educators. According to the Education section of the openSUSE wiki, the openSUSE community sees the add-on as a way to make it easy for school administrators to create both networked systems and stand-alone desktops for teachers and students. To tailor the add-on CD to the needs of educators, the openSUSE community is asking educators and technologists to submit their software successes, applications used, and "HOW-TOs" for writing applications and using applications. Dubbed the SLEDucator, the package collection is being included as an add-on, as opposed to a new distro or a fork."
