Out of Control®

I needed the pecl package geoip installed on one of my RHEL5 servers running PHP 5. This is an easy task but you might get a slightly confusing error which will stop you.
First off there are two ways to install a PECL package. First is to simply issue a pecl command at the prompt: [...]

As I use this frequently to test remote mail hosts for one of my clients, I figure it deserves a spot here. This will allow you to manually test a remote mail server using telnet and port 25:
First get the mail server address for a website. We will use gmail.com for our example:
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dig gmail.com [...]

Last week I did a short post on testing MailScanner to be sure it was scanning properly. An alert reader pointed out that I missed the easy solution, which was to simply use 'MailScanner --lint' to check if MailScanner was running properly.
Since I wrote that article, I found that my MailScanner was again hogging the [...]

On one of our RHEL5 servers running Ensim, we noticed after the last big update of RHEL using 'yum update', that MailScanner was capped out, using tons of our CPU power. In the past when this happens I usually find it is ClamAV acting up. However, we were using on this server a free version [...]

Canadians find the weather really interesting. Don't we? I mean, after all, it changes every day from a cool -19°C in the morning to a toasty +6°C in the afternoon. Okay, so maybe not every day do we get extremes like that, But Canadians still seem fascinated with the weather.
For me, I am fascinated [...]

With one of my clients I need to monitor email bounces from our mailing lists. Normally this goes relatively smoothly, as either the email goes through, or it bounces back with a 550 Recipient not found message. Sometimes the messages I get back are less familiar to me. Here is the appendix from RFC1893. Hopefully [...]

Today while running a yum update on one RHEL5 server, I got the following error and python traceback:
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yum update

Loading "security" plugin

Loading "rhnplugin" plugin

rhel-i386-server-5        100% |=========================| 1.2 kB    00:00     

primary.xml.gz            100% |=========================| 1.6 MB    00:01     

rhel-i386-: ################################################## 4462/4462

Skipping security plugin, no data

Setting up [...]

This morning I noticed a new feature on Google's Search engine when I am logged into my Google account. I didn't sign up for this feature, and apparently there is no way to turn this feature off. If you don't love it, you will hate Google for adding this feature.
What I am talking about is [...]

Yesterday, someone emailed me saying that their anti-virus software would not let them properly view this website. I keep my site fairly well up-to-date and check it regularly for strange behaviour, so this seemed like a strange complaint. However, I am not one to ignore someone saying they can't see my website. Doing my due [...]

I noticed on one server today a huge CPU load. A quick look at Netstat showed that most of the current traffic was coming from someone in Africa. I crossed referenced the IP address from Netstat with the access log files on the various sites on the server and saw that it had a UserAgent [...]