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‘node-origins’ Feature – Subversion

Subversion Error Message:

svn: The ‘node-origins’ feature requires version 3 of the filesystem schema; filesystem ‘/var/svn/projects/db’ uses only version 2

Fix:
If you see this error message after upgrading Subversion, run

svnadmin upgrade

to upgrade the databases, and then run

svnadmin recover file:///var/svn/projects

Posted in General, Software.

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Apache::Logmonster

An interesting piece of software. Need to look at this when I have some time.

Apache::Logmonster – Apache log file splitter, processor, sorter, etc

http://search.cpan.org/~msimerson/Apache-Logmonster-3.03/lib/Apache/Logmonster.pm

Posted in Software.


Change of hosts

I am moving all the websites under navakrish.com to a ageing laptop in my home. The DNS changes are propogating at the moment. In the mean while, I am taking backups of databases and files from the current hosting provider and importing them to my new system.

If everything works to my satisfaction, I’ll cancel my hosting account and make the changes permanent.

Posted in General.


PixelPost and spam relaying

I’m seeing an interesting new attack on my website where the attacker is hoping to exploit unchecked fields in a “web to email” form. The attack works by assuming a field used in an email header (such as the “From:” address or the “Subject:”) is passed unchecked to the mail subsystem. Appending a newline character and a few more carefully crafted header lines with a BCC list and a spam message body might trick the underlying mail system into relaying spam for the attacker. An initial test sending a BCC copy to killerhamster@punkass.com has been used on most forms on my site to phish for vulnerable scripts. I had an old perl script which didn’t check for new lines in the “email” field which alerted me to the problem and allowed me to quickly fix it. If you run a site, you should check and strip fields for carriage return and newline characters used directly in email headers.

Interesting Crack Attempt to Relay Spam

This morning my hosting provider pulled down my websites all of a sudden. When asked the reason was that some one is using my PixelPost installation at http://www.navakrish.com/photoblog to relay spam messages and that they have received numerous complaints from AOL within the last 24 hours.

Most of these messages were BCCd to ‘battsl1005@aol.com’ . A quick search on Google and I found the reference in this article – “Interesting Crack Attempt to Relay Spam”.

Thought it could help others and so I am sharing this here. I do not have much time to dig further into this problem and so I am temporarily disabling the comment feature in my photoblog.

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Posted in Finesse.


Gmail with Fetchmail

If you have a Gmail account and would like to use it in conjunction with your personal computers, this tutorial will walk you through configuring and installing the latest version of Postfix with SASL authentication and TLS encryption necessary for connecting and relaying mail to smtp.gmail.com and configuring fetchmail with STARTTLS to fetch messages from your Gmail account to your local system.

freshmeat.net: Tutorials – Gmail on Home Linux Boxes using Postfix and Fetchmail

Very useful indeed. Saved me a lot of time to configure my home server to fetch the mails automatically from Gmail.

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Posted in General.


Google Mail in the UK

googlemailGmail gets a new name in the UK. Following a dispute regarding the trademark of the name ‘GMAIL’ google has anounced that new accounts will be under a new domain name ‘googlemail.com’.

What will happen to those from UK who currently uses a gmail.com address. Unfortunately there is no clear message at this point of time.
This is what Google has to say about those accounts.

What if I’m a UK user who already has a Gmail address? Will that address ever change?
Unfortunately, we don’t know. We would love to say that your address will always remain the same. But the trademark issue is still unsettled, and unfortunately, we cannot predict what the other party or the courts might do here. You can always use your same username with an @googlemail.com address to avoid this issue later on. But trust that we will do the best we can to make sure your email address won’t ever have to change.

 
Update:
I tested if googlemail.com address is active for my account by sending a test message from Gmail and Yahoo. The mail from Gmail never reached my inbox. On the other hand the message from YahooMail! took more than ten minutes to reach. So the googlemail.com is working. But now comes the question. Which one should I give to others from now onwards ‘gmail.com’ or ‘googlemail.com’.
Confused 🙂

Posted in General.


Offline Blogging clients – 1

This is the second series of experiments I am conducting with the offline blog clients. The last time when I tested a few clients, I found nothing to my liking.

But this time, things look promosing.. at least at the moment. I am currently evaluating two pieces of software

This is the first test post I am doing with Zoundry.

I am looking for the following features:

  • The ability to upload pictures through the client
  • Spellchecker
  • Support for Unicode so that I can blog easily in Thamiz
  • Support for categories
  • Pinging other sites from the blog client
  • Ability to edit posts as HTML

Let me see how these two software perform.

Testing Zoundry:

  1. Still working with Zoundry. Everything went fine. But during post it came with a error message. Zoundry still thinks that my post is not published. But I can see that this post is now visible from my Blog.
  2. I still could not find out how I can directly edit the HTML code for this post.
  3. Testing Unicode. தமிழ் (Good. Unicode Works)
  4. Pinging works sometimes and throws up an error other times. I am not sure if this a bug or a problem with the sites I am trying to ping. (Still needs testing)
  5. Slecting the category of the post and posting under multiple categories is working fine.
  6. Spellchecker – Can not find any.
  7. zlogo-beta.png Uploading images works perfectly. However the lack of feature to edit HTML does not allow to position the image as we wish.

Pros:

  • Easy to use.
  • The standard features should suffice the requirements of most bloggers (especially those who are not very comfortable with HTML)
  • The ability to specify the tag words for Technorati and other tagging services can come handy for those who want to increase the traffic to their websites.

Cons:

  • Lack of HTML editing feature is a major problem for advanced users
  • The usability of the software will be a lot better if there were shortcuts to commonly used functions. For example a shortcut for started ‘Lists’ will make things a lot easier.
  • Does not seem to support a lot of basic HTML tags to align your pages. The most needed ones like headers H1, H2.. are missing.
  • Spellcheck will be a very useful addition. But it is still missing.

Update: After writing this post I came across this thread in the Zoundry forums.

The resulting code of the sample page I created with Zoundry looks very close to XHTML. All in all Zoundry is an excellent software for most users. The software is still in its Beta stage. In fact the version I tested is 0.9.133. I hope that by the time they release the first public version, the software will be much more better.

Personally I am going to try this software for some time. But in the mean time I intend to test Post2Blog as well.

On the other hand there are other upcoming software like ‘Flock’ which offers a lot of promise. The future of internet looks promising indeed.

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Posted in General.


Wikipedia’s Amazing Growth

As an occasional contributor to the Wikipedia project, I often visit Wikipedia pages. The amount of growth Wikipedia has gone through in recent days is just brilliant. With the decline of DMOZ, pages like these are helpful a lot.

I was in a mood to try few new ‘News Aggregators’. In olden days I would have gone to DMOZ for information like these to get the list of available products. But today this page in Wikipedia saved me a lot of time.

Another good thing is that I can see a lot of top 10 results from Wikipedia for most keywords in Google. Or is it not that good for other genuine sites?

Posted in General.


Ashes and the Cinderalla Man

England have won the Ashes after 16 years. And I happy for that. But why am I excited for this win? Is it because of the fact that I live there? I think it is because they are the underdogs and that gives me a sense of confidence.

Even with the weather playing spoilsport there was lot of exciting cricket in offer today. From Shane Warne’s bowling to Pieterson’s strokeplay to Ashley Giles chance to show his prowesness with the willow, today would have been a memorable day for those who were in the Oval.

Cinderalla ManAnd after office I went to the UGC to watch ‘Cindrella Man’. This is one of the best holywood movies that I had a chance to watch this year. In fact I would rate this second only to ‘Crash’.

Well done Ron Howard and Russel Crowe. I did watch quite a few boxing movies recently (from Million Dollar Baby to Kumaran S/o Mahalakshmi 🙂 ) and was a bit hesitant today to watch this today when one of friend invited me. But in the end I was happy that I did watch this.

Posted in Movies, Sports.


Ashes – Finale

Final day of the final test of this year’s Ashes series. As Cricinfo’s homepage reads it is “Advantage Australia” at the moment.

Australia with the help of some wonderful bowling through Shane Warne and McGrath is now in a comfortable seat. The pressure is on England. Can they hold themselves together for another two sessions? I am not a great fan nor a follower of the England and Australian cricket teams. But the current series clearly has got me hooked into it.

After a successful day yesterday with the ball, Flintoff failed today with the bat. It is now left to Pieterson, Collingwood and the tail-enders to hold their nerves to ensure a draw. Is it going to be a comfortable draw and a series win for England? Or is it going to be a nail biting finish like the second test?

Posted in Sports.