BrianJarrett.com

Believe it or not I’m actually kinda upset that Billy’s gone.  Michael, the pedophile with one good album, not so much.  At least Billy was just trying to make people’s lives better.  :)

I’ve got some Mighty Putty under my sink right now plugging up a leak.  I’m sure I’ll think of Billy every time I see it.

I was just watching a show on National Geographic about the Auschwitz concentration camp.  Mothers and children murdered in gas chambers, fathers separated from their families, people starved, shot in the head, beaten, and more, all while SS guards partied as if none of it mattered.  I imagined myself and my wife and babies in that situation and it almost made me vomit.

I think that the Holocaust alone is enough proof that there is either no God or, if there is, He’s a monster.

For Father’s Day 2009 Traci got me another personalized shirt with “me and the boys” (I love my other one she got me last year).  Orson and Trent both drew me pictures too.  Orson’s is two-sided and Trent’s is only one-sided.  See below.

Orson’s Drawing:

Trent’s Drawing (it’s a little light; I think my scanner is going bust):

Orson drew me a picture of trains. Too cute.

Some time back I wrote an article about how I got Spam Assassin up and running on my mail server.  That worked great for about a year and half.  Eventually the spammers caught up with me and Spam Assassin just wasn’t effective enough to control it.  I put up with it for a while because I didn’t have time to address it but eventually I couldn’t take it any more and decided to take some action.  This post is intended to provide a simple explanation of what I did to virtually eliminate spam on my server.  There’s more than one way to skin a cat but this was my way.

I’m now running an Ubuntu 8.04 server with Postfix and Spam Assassin and using Procmail to filter my mail into folders.  I’m the only user of mail on this server.

Essentially I used three additional approaches to accomplish this.  First I added some simple checks in my Postfix /etc/postfix/main.cf file that reduced the 150 or so spams that were getting through Spam Assassin literally in half.

# Spammer repellent
smtpd_delay_reject = yes
smtpd_helo_required = yes
smtpd_helo_restrictions = permit_mynetworks, check_helo_access hash:/etc/postfix/helo_access, reject_non_fqdn_hostname, reject_invalid_hostname, permit
strict_rfc821_envelopes = yes
disable_vrfy_command = yes

These commands tell Postfix to reject servers that lie or …read more »

After my hard drive crashed last week I began to think more about my backup system. I’ve always been very paranoid of drive failure or any other situation that would cause data loss. Much of my life is contained in digital format, from my finances to my photos, my home movies, my writing, and more. If I were to lose it it would mean years of my life lost for good with much of it impossible to retrieve. Due to laziness on my part I did end up losing about a month’s worth of photos that I hadn’t backed up. Everything was intact, saved via Apple’s Time Machine software.

Typically in the past I’ve saved my data offsite on one or more hard disks. Up until I bought my Mac I had two drives that I kept at work and brought home every other week, alternation the two each time. That meant if one drive failed I had a redundant backup no more than a month out. It wasn’t perfect but it was pretty thorough. After I bought the Mac I ended up re-appropriating these drives to other uses and ended up with a single hard drive backup for my computer and for Traci’s computer. I also had a single hard drive backup for my fileserver and webserver combined. This works, but it creates a single point of failure if any of these drives would go bust.

So after I successfully restored my system from my Time Machine backup I …read more »

I figured I’d add this picture to the site; it cost me $350,000 so I figured, why not?

Now that I’ve moved to Charter high speed broadband the site should be a little faster now.  The biggest jump was in the downspeed but my up speed got a little shot in the arm as well.

I’m really pleased so far with it.  The installer was great and the speeds are so much faster than I had with DSL.  I’m also doing phone with Charter and I used it last night for a couple hours without any issue.  I’m also paying Charter right around what I was already paying for phone and Internet combined but now my down speed is four times faster than it was.

So far I’m really happy with it.  We’ll see how it goes.

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