Monthly Archives: December 2009

Create DVDs from any random movie format on Windows

Ewald wanted to be able to create DVDs from the Quicktime movies exported by his digital camera. As a result of being away from my familiar Linux tools, I had to find something that´d work on Windows XP. Read More »
By Rowan Rodrik, 2 years ago, on December 30, 2009, at 14:12 | No comments

UTP wiring

I'm always confused about which wiring scheme to use for UTP cables. After doing some research, it seems T568B is what you need. Wikipedia says that is doesn't really matter, but crosstalk can be a problem for T568A in some esoteric situations: Read More »
By halfgaar, 2 years ago, on December 30, 2009, at 11:12 | No comments

Making Coyote Linux work with KPN ADSL

The Dutch ISP KPN gives you a modem+router to access the internet. The router they give you is a custom version of an Alcatel Speedtouch (model varies) and is extremely limited. I don't use any VOIP services, so I replaced that router with a Speedtouch 546 (which supports DHCP spoofing) so that I can use my own Coyote Linux based router. Read More »
By halfgaar, 2 years ago, on December 29, 2009, at 18:12 | No comments

Creating a DRBD device

When you're clustering machines, a distributed remote block device (DRBD) comes in handy. It's basically RAID1 over a network. I used Ubuntu Server 9.10 to create a test drbd setup. Read More »
By halfgaar, 2 years ago, on December 28, 2009, at 18:12 | No comments

Finding out the UUID of partitions

Often, Linux software configurations define partitions by there UUID as opposed to their /dev device. You can find out what the UUID is with: Read More »
By halfgaar, 2 years ago, on December 28, 2009, at 17:12 | 2 comments

Iptables rule to block access to our IMAP server

When migrating to Zimbra, I don't want people to fiddle with their mail when I'm doing it, so I disable IMAP access from anything but the virtual machine instance in which Zimbra is running. I do that with this: Read More »
By halfgaar, 2 years ago, on December 21, 2009, at 15:12 | No comments

Disabling Zimbra’s spam learning

Zimbra learns ham and spam by sending it to certain mailboxes. For our setup, this doesn't work (easily), because our server is configured to always send mail to another SMTP server and not do any local delivery. I did that, because our zimbra server is not actually on the domain it thinks. Read More »
By halfgaar, 2 years ago, on December 21, 2009, at 15:12 | 1 comment

Quickly removing and adding bootscripts in Debian

Debian still uses the System V init scripts, which are very clumsy to use. Here are two Debian commands you might need often: Read More »
By halfgaar, 2 years ago, on December 21, 2009, at 14:12 | No comments

My time compared to UTC

I always forget what my timedifference is with UTC, so here it is: In winter I'm UTC+1 In summer I'm UTC+2 Read More »
By halfgaar, 2 years ago, on December 16, 2009, at 11:12 | No comments

Using Fetchmail to deliver to another SMTP host and user

If you want to fetch mail from several accounts and relay them to another SMTP host and user, you can use fetchmail. Define a .fetchmailrc like this: Read More »
By halfgaar, 2 years ago, on December 14, 2009, at 16:12 | No comments