Someone on IRC pointed me to this wonderful bug in Spamassassin, it’s easy to quickfix, but the fix itself will become a bug in 10 years, in any case, until they push an update that correctly fixes this:

##{ FH_DATE_PAST_20XX
header   FH_DATE_PAST_20XX      Date =~ /20[1-9][0-9]/ [if-unset: 2006]
describe FH_DATE_PAST_20XX      The date is grossly in the future.

( meaning emails sent in 2010  will also trigger the scoring )

should be changed into:

##{ FH_DATE_PAST_20XX
header   FH_DATE_PAST_20XX      Date =~ /20[2-9][0-9]/ [if-unset: 2006]
describe FH_DATE_PAST_20XX      The date is grossly in the future.

Making it not a problem until we reach 2020

On my ubuntu box the rule is found in:

/usr/share/spamassassin/72_active.cf

Special thanks to Habbie for making me aware of the problem on IRC!

oh and by the way:

Happy New Year!

general, work open source, spam

The boss just dumped a whole stack of books on our desks. Oracle 11g for dummies for me, w000t.

Never done Oracle before, though I am no stranger to Databases at all (MySQL, Postgresql, MSSQL, IBM DB2)

general, work life, oracle

Vmware released it’s answer to Microsoft’s Hyper-V product today: a free to download and using 32MB diskspace of footprint Hypervisor.

This can only mean that the virtualisation market is gearing up for one heck of a competition run, maybe even a full-out war. Frankly, Vmware has the lead right now, they are market leader in this segment, and their products are currently second to none. As I mentioned in my earlier blogpost, Microsoft turned out what I consider an ‘unfinished’ product with Hyper-V, but the advantage is that it comes included with windows. On the other hand, Vmware is proven technology, something you want for virtualisation in a business setting, and Microsoft clearly has a couple of miles to go before they get to the level Vmware is at.

So, we have to wait and see how well either product family does. I’m betting on Vmware, quite simply because I’ve been using it for a while now, and it’s a very robust and mature solution. It’s fast, scalable and flexible, but the prices are kind of steep for a beginning business. On the other hand, prices are dropping fast, and each products competitive advantages are becoming more and more clear now.

work virtualisation, Vmware

I like HP servers. True enough, I like Supermicro better, but big companies tend not to like Supermicro due to the fact you have to assemble them yourself, and there’s no real support / SLA agreement possible with them (for now – I hear it’s in the works). Most people in the ISP world know however, that Supermicro is extremely reliable stuff, and priced extremely nicely.

Anyhow, I’m stuck with HP, which is not a bad platform to get stuck with to begin with. FreeBSD runs beautifully on it, but then you have to do without the insight manager agents, the same deal applies when you run Ubuntu. Centos 4 and 5 are a breeze, just edit /etc/redhat-release so it reflects a RedHat version of Enterprise Server, and install the software like you normaly do.

One thing I seriously dislike however, is that when I run Ubuntu or FreeBSD on a HP box, my monitoring capabilities drop to almost zero. With RedHat or Centos I can monitor through the insight manager agents (who hook into SNMP), and use the nagios check_compaq_insight.pl, and as soon as something breaks: I get paged. With FreeBSD (and ubuntu) that seems completely impossible. My last attempt on an Ubuntu box to install those agents resulted in some very serious library problems, because the installer auto-installed some distro-specific rpm’s. That showed me who’s boss. (not!).

Anyhow, during my daily stroll at the Nagios Exchange I noticed a plugin that I hadn’t noticed before: check_ilo2_health. This is a great little plugin written in Perl. Instead of the old: talk to snmpd approach, this little bugger talks directly to the ilo2 interface (ilo/il01 won’t work), and more specifically: it’s XML interface.

wait. did you say XML interface?

Yup, the ILO2 sports a nice new XML interface, with which you can communicate. HP even provides a bunch of examples on how to talk shop with it. Nice hey?

Now I thought, did HP actually put everything you can monitor with the insight agents into the ILO2 and make it accessible with XML?

Unfortunatly: no. (yes, that was quite disappointing).

You can get quite a bit of useful information through the XML interface, including the speed of the fans, temperature readings from all the internal sensors. You can even configure a lot of things, like users and IP settings through it. You can even upgrade the ILO2 firmware through the XML interface. But nothing on RAID status, rebuild status, etc. I tried this against a brand spanking new DL380 G5, so if it doesn’t work there, it won’t work anywhere.

If anyone at HP reads this: please extend the ILO2 so everything is accessible through it’s XML interface. That saves us a lot of trouble of trying to get those agents installed on other operating systems. FreeBSD is too good an OS to ignore, even for an OEM as big as you. (and you don’t, judging from this news-snippet (PDF)). So either open up the XML interface more, or provide us with insight manager agents for FreeBSD. (I would be more then happy to help with testing).

FreeBSD, general, work FreeBSD, open source, OS

They just dragged in no less then 5 Apple HD Cinema 23″ screens here. And HOT DAMN those screens are cool.

Just the thing to hook up to my MacBook Pro, but alas, I will have stick to my Sony 20″ CRT screen here at work for now….

Apple, general, work

I haven’t gotten around to posting here much, due to being very busy at work. We just finished the physical move to a new data centre (we used to house at PSI / Shuberg Philis), now we have a  nice 60m2 cage at easynet.

We had some problems with a power outage at the office, which oddly enough also affected  our network at easynet (spanning-tree … gotta love it *sigh*). And off course, the day to day operations and work kept us very busy.

Also, as some of you may know, my wife is pregnant, and though everything is going just fine with the baby, it’s very very rough on my wife. She’s now under permanent supervision from the Gynaecologist, which normally doesn’t  happen. ( most people here in the Netherlands give birth at home, with a midwife present).

We’re now in the last 4 weeks of the pregnancy, so the next time I post here, I will probably announcing the birth of our baby girl, and we will be the proud holders of those most wonderful of titles: “Mom” and “Dad’.

So, that’s it for now.

work

Today we said goodbye to our old manager, it’s sad to see him go, but his ideas just didn’t match with the direction the company is going. I think he found a spot where he’s going to be much more happy now. Still, we’re going to miss him. He’s got great ideas, and he’s a good manager, not too much meetings, and he pretty much lets us techies decide matters. He listens, and that is not exactly a commodity.

We’ve given him an XBox 360 as a farewell present, he wanted one of those, and now he’s got 3 weeks to play with it

work