Misc stuff

Posted on January 10, 2008 by independence

The translation work on the wiki has been going pretty well. The frontpage is now available in English, Swedish, German, French and Serbian. Thanks for helping out everyone! We could ofcourse do with even more translations 😉

Secondly, I bought some new domain names yesterday: blinkenshell.net and blinkenshell.com. There’s nothing there really, just CNAMEs and redirects to blinkenshell.org. If you accidentaly enter something like http://blinkenshell.com/ you should end up on the main webpage.

I’ve also made a small page with information about why the main server/webpage might not be reachable, it’s ofcourse hosted externally (not on the main server) and available at this URL: http://fuji.blinkenshell.org/status.shtml . I’ll try to update this whenever the server is down or unreachable so you can get some confirmation on that and maybe find out when it will be back. I do recommend that you bookmark this page since you won’t be able to surf back in here and look up the URL if the server is down or unreachable 😉

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Webpage/Wiki

Posted on January 4, 2008 by independence

I’ve been working a bit on the website the last couple of days, trying to optimize the response times and changing some out of date information and so on. I do need some help traslating the page into different languages however, since I only know English and Swedish myself. I figure just translating the startpage/frontpage would be enough, atlesat to start with. People does have to read information in English sooner or later, but it’s probably nice to have atleast some basic introduction in your own language. So far, we have the frontpage in English, French (by mika56, possibly out of date) and Swedish (translated by me today). I encourage you to translate the frontpage to any other languages that you may be familiar with, just copy the contents of the frontpage to a new page named Start/<two letter language code> and start traslating!

Also, a couple of weeks ago I built an authenticaton plugin for MoinMoin (the wiki software we use) that can be used with Blinkenshell’s signup system, so it should be possible to log in to the wiki with the username and password of your signup account (if everything still works that is 🙂 )

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CPU fan broke down

Posted on November 26, 2007 by independence

This morning at about 05.00AM the CPU fan in the server broke down, causing the system to shut down. Fortunately, I was visiting my parents this weekend (where the server is at), so I managed to fix it and boot the server up before I left. If my dad hadn’t noticed it was down before we left, we would probably have had to wait a week until I got a chance to look at it. Also, I was very lucky to find another CPU fan that fitted on the MB in another computer! So even though this very critical part in the system broke down in the middle of the night, I managed to get a new one and replace it and have the system up and running in less that two hours! (the box is (normally) a 1.5 hour car ride away from my place.) Impressive, huh? 🙂

Posted in downtime, hardware | Tagged , | 1 Comment

Backups!

Posted on November 5, 2007 by independence

Blinkenshell now makes daily backups of your files that you store on the server, for more information please read: Info/Backup on the wiki.

There are some exceptions of files that won’t get backed up, like temp files (tmp/ in your homedir), backups (bakup/), and logfiles from IRC. It should be pretty obvious why, there’s no reason to make backups of backups for example.

Posted in security | Tagged | Leave a comment

Two new commands

Posted on November 3, 2007 by independence

Today I built a little script to configure some basic settings of the shell that you probably need to change. From now on, all new members will get to run this script the first time they log in, and everyone can run it at any time by executing:

shell-setup

It’s currently quite simple, but I might add more stuff later. What it does is ask about your timezone, locality (like what language and character encoding to use) and if you want to change to another shell (currently bash and zsh is available.) It writes these settings to your .profile which will be loaded every time when you log in.

If you know of any other settings that would be nice to configure with this script, please tell me 🙂

The second new command is a little wrapper for the signup program. It makes it possible to run the signup program from the shell without initializing a new SSH session and logging in with the signup user. It will ask you for your system password (not the signup password) and then let you run the signup program as usual. You can start it with this command:

signup-start

Posted in shell | Tagged | Leave a comment

Weechat

Posted on November 2, 2007 by independence

I’ve installed a new text-based IRC client called weechat (version 0.2.6) on Blinkenshell. It’s a bit similar to irssi from what I’ve heard, but supports a couple of cool new features such as horizontal split of windows (which allows for features like a neat nicklist.)

It seems to support most other features of irssi, even the more advanced stuff. You can also extend it via plugins written in perl, python (yay!), ruby and lua.

Here’s a screenshot of me running weechat-curses (the ncurses ui) at Blinkenshell: http://independence.blinkenshell.org/dump/weechat1.png

More screenshots are available at the website.

You can try it out yourself, just log in to blinkenshell and type:

weechat-curses

Posted in irc, software | 3 Comments

New IRC server

Posted on October 22, 2007 by independence

Blinkenshell now has it’s own IRC server linked to our home IRC network Allshells. This server is on the same network as the shell server, so it’s much closer than to use overload’s server in the US.

If you are using IRC from the shell, you should from now on use this server: mimas.blinkenshell.org port 6667. This should result in less delays/lag, and less bandwidth usage.

If you are using irssi, you can change the address (and network name if you havn’t) in irssi’s config file: ~/.irssi/config and then reconnect (or just /disconnect and then /connect mimas.blinkenshell.org -network Allshells.) The entry in the server section in irssi’s config should look like this:

{ address = "mimas.blinkenshell.org"; chatnet = "Allshells"; port = "6667"; }

I’ve updated the systemwide irssi config in /etc/irssi.conf to use this new server.

Edit: Changed irc.blinkenshell.org to mimas.blinkenshell.org

Posted in irc | Leave a comment

irssi 0.8.12

Posted on October 17, 2007 by independence

irssi is now upgraded from 0.8.12-rc1 to 0.8.12, you can read the full changelog here.

I didn’t notice any real new features in this version, it seems to be most bug fixes.

If you want to upgrade to the new version you can use the /upgrade command in irssi to upgrade the binary without losing your connections (the backlog will however get cleared unless you use the script buf.pl available here.)

Posted in irc, software | Tagged | 1 Comment

Gmail, SPF

Posted on October 16, 2007 by independence

For a long time activation emails sent to Gmails users have been marked as spam. I thought it was because there is a link in it, and before I was using the word “congratulations” which is probably not very popular by spam filtering software. Now I think I’ve finally figured out the real reason, yay!

I’m using SPF on Blinkenshell’s DNS to stop spam with from addresses using @blinkenshell.org, what this does is make sure that only specific hosts can send emails using blinkenshell.org as the domain in the from address. The problem was, in the DNS editing software I had just entered a SPF record like this:

v=spf1 a mx -all

This worked for me last time I used SPF, but this software was different. When I checked the SPF record today I noticed I got a reply looking like this:

"v=spf1" "a" "mx" "-all"

Some SPF checking software doesn’t like this, because they expect it to be in one string, like this:

"v=spf1 a mx -all"

So I enclosed the string in quotes in the DNS software and now it seems to work much better, gmail doesn’t mark the email as spam even though there is a link in it!

Hopefully this will help a lot, cause many of our users seem to use Gmail and often has often got lost in the past. From now on, I hope that these emails will get through properly! Yay 🙂

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