Walking in Light With Christ - hip0's personal blog on System Administration, Free Software, Computer Security and Religion

This content editor is really awesome compared to the default editor TinyMCE. If you want to have an options rich content editor for Joomla, then this is the one for you :)
download JCE Content Editor here

After installing the JCE Joomla content editor in order to enable it as a default editor you need to go to the following location:

Site -> Global Configuration -> Default WYSIWYG Editor



There place on Editor TinyMCE and change it with Editor - JCE

Now go to edit some article, and you will see the difference in the editor :)

7. Add gallery Joomla capabilities with sigplus (Image Gallery Plus) and Very Simple Image Gallery

sigplus Image Gallery Plus is a straightforward way to add image or photo galleries to a Joomla article with a simple syntax. It takes a matter of minutes to set up a gallery but those who are looking for a powerful gallery solution will not be disappointed either: sigplus is suitable for both beginner and advanced users.

It's a wise idea that every website has a address location map on it's website, for that reason Google maps is just great.
To install Google maps capability to joomla one can use a plugin called Google Maps .

You can straighly download Joomla's Googlemap plugin from here

Afterwards use Extension Manager to install the plugin e.g. follow:

Extensions -&gr; Install/Uninstall (Choose File)


and click on Upload File & Install button.

To further enable and configure the Joomla Googlemap plugin you will have to go to the location:

Extensions -> Plugin Manager


Therein you will have to find and enable the Google Maps plugin which is to be found in the column named Plugin Manager
On my Joomla installation the plugin was located in the second page with modules, so if you don't find the module on the listing with modules on the first page, make sure you scroll to the bottom of the page and click on Next button.

Therein in the list you will most likely notice Google Maps use the Enable button to enable it.

Next step is to configure the plugin, to do so press on the plugin name Google Maps
All configuration necessery here is to place Googlemaps API Key in the respective field (you will see it among config options).
< br /> Issuing a new Google Maps api key takes just few seconds, if you already have a gmail account just go to http://code.google.com/apis/maps/signup.html and take few seconds to issue the key.

You will get the key right on your gmail account after being issued (to repeat myself issuing takes few seconds so no worrier here).

Once having the key place it in the Googlemaps API Key field and configuring Address (which is one of the list of many options the plugin provides) you will be done with configuration.

To display a google map the location you just configured go to the Article Manager , select the article where you want the google maps location picture of your address to appear and type in the Article something like:

{mosmap|text='Exact street address location'|zoom='15'|zoomType='Large'|zoomNew='0'}


After you saved the article a very nice Google map showing you the location's streets will appear on your web page in the article link where placed.
You can further conifgure a number of things related to the google maps just embedded into joomla, one thing you might want to play with is the zoom level. You see in below's code is equal to 15, e.g. zoom='15'
Set it to another one if you want to regulate your googlemaps zoom level.
For more thoroughful options take a look at the extensive plugin documentation and play with the many settings

One of one of the mail server clients is running into issues with secured SSL IMAP connections ( he has to use a multiple email accounts on the same computer).
I was informed that part of the email addresses are working correctly, however the newly created ones were failing to authenticate even though all the Outlook Express email configuration was correct as well as the username and password typed in were a real existing credentials on the vpopmail server.

Initially I thought, something is wrong with his newly configured emails but it seems all the settings were perfectly correct!

After a lot of wondering what might be wrong I was dumb enough not to check my imap log files.

After checking in my /var/log/mail.log which is the default log file I've configured for vpopmail and some of my qmail server services, I found the following error repeating again and again:

imapd-ssl: Maximum connection limit reached for ::ffff:xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx" imapd-ssl error


where xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx was the email user computer IP address.

This issues was caused by one of my configuration settings in the imapd-ssl and imap config file:

/usr/lib/courier-imap/etc/imapd

In /usr/lib/courier-imap/etc/imapd there is a config segment called
Maximum number of connections to accept from the same IP address

Right below this commented text is the variable:

MAXPERIP=4

As you can see it seems I used some very low value for the maximum number of connections from one and the same IP address.
I suppose my logic to set such a low value was my desire to protect the IMAP server from Denial of Service attacks, however 4 is really too low and causes problem, thus to solve the mail connection issues for the user I raised the MAXPERIP value to 50:

MAXPERIP=4


Now to force the new imapd and imapd-ssl services to reload it's config I did a restart of the courier-imap, like so:

debian:~# /etc/init.d/courier-imap restart


That's all now the error is gone and the client could easily configure up to 50 mailbox accounts on his PC :)

I don't know how many of you have realized but today our societies, especially in the Developed and the second world are suffering from a serious problem that not-many still realize.

I'm talking about the problem of NO IDENTITY !
In this dynamic world, where technological changes happens every second and we are required to change our lifes and behaviour too rapidly suddenly this problem is becoming to become a real society peril.

Let me explain what I mean. Everyday, more and more people are using the Internet and all kind of technological gadgets (IPhones, Ipads, Tablets, Notebooks, desktop computers, E-readers you name it).

While we do constantly and daily are forced to adopt and become part of this virtual realities, be it social networks like Facebook , Xing , micro blogging online services like Twitter or even a simple user blog, most of the times we interact with this puvlic services or technology, we are supposed to come with a new identity.

Each of this services urge us to have a new login account attached to some kind of a new virtual reality one has to build.

Therefore the fake online identities, we constantly build which often are established around our dreams and wanna bees (something we're not in real life) is constantly growing for each of us in every single day.

Most of the middle or hardcore Internet users today has already built an imaginary online image of ourselfs (in this number including myself).

To give an example I'll again take facebook, as it is one of the most heavily used online fake identity generators today.
If one enters facebook and finds, some of his old a real life buddies from the past and matches the online identity the person has built for himself with the person we used to know, very often the difference is quite shocking.

Online almost everybody want to look cool the coolest to attract other people to himself. As people online look and does "judge" on one's self competencies, qualities and goodness simply based on the outlook of how one presents himself.

Suddenly from normal sane persons million of persons are getting into the "self-presenting" competition which is getting, more and more severe with every new person that gets into a certain online community.
Most people online today in building this multiple false images of themselves, try to present only the their good positive sides, while the bad sides are often left behind.

Of course the definition of what is good and what is bad is dictated by the opinion of the masses, as most people prefer to be like the rest in order to escape of the terrible reality of being isolated from the society mass.

With all said if we consider that today's families are highly disfunctional and the people's relations are already quite fake and people are building this multiple-fale faced images even in real life makes things even more tragic.

Now to put everything above in order, let me go back to the NO IDENTITY ISSUE and what I mean by that.
Let me settle it down, during our interatction with technology and the Internet, little by little as a consequence of being exposed to all this identities and to our multiple newly created virtual identities one starts to loose his own self-established identity and starts constantly looking to have newer and newer identities.

The tendency is instead of look in yourself and be what you're, that you follow some fake vague virtual dreams of million of people online who try to share and expose mostly things which are not created just to catch the attention.

The whole things with technology and Internet and the heavy use of it as a logical consequence, learns people to put multiple masks and hide behind the masks their own natural-self.
The story of masks is so bad that nowdays, many people put the masks of themselves created in the virtual reality pleading that this is their new self.

Many people today act without having any core philosophy, rules or a stable reason to step into.
Money, human lust, wordly vanity and popularity are the main drives for the masses.

Our Christian faith who has sustained us through the centuries and helped us grow a sane societies is starting to get into the back-stage, moved by some openly anti-christian hollywood super stars.

I believe the story of NO-IDENTITY corresponds well with buddhistic ideas (highly embraced by modern societies).
This buddhistic ideas preach that one must loose his identity to join the state of Nirvana (yet another anti-chrisitian philisophy).
The story of NO-IDENTITY is a story of constant unceasing change and lookup for something that never can be found. It's like a endless prizeless race.

If many of us take the time and ask themselves the question "Who am I?", I'm quite sure rarely there will be persons able to answer.

Yet there is hope, as I truly hope many people will realize sooner or later that this fakeness and a fake face images that we build daily doesn't lead us anywhere.

After installing a new shiny Joomla 1.5 and trying to make the Joomla work with YouBizz template , an error displayed on the joomla page in my browser:

Deprecated: Function split() is deprecated in /usr/local/www/websitedomain/templates/youbizz/html/modules.php on line 78


In order to fix that, the file which spits the error message, in my case modules.php needs to be modified and the split php function has to be substituted with explode on every occuring place.

I experienced this error on FreeBSD 7_2 with php version 5.3.5 installed from ports.

Obviously it seems new version of php are starting to depreciate some old functions ;)
Happily this simple fix works fine for me.

As an administrator of few company email delivery servers, I always had to debug problems related to emails unable to drop in Yahoo's Mail and Gmail default mail Inbox

In that reason I always need to take a close look on Email headers to try to isolate email issues.
Most often the problems with messages unable to deliver in default in Inbox are with the 3 most popular mail services:

• Gmail
• Hotmail
• Yahoo

Thus I decided to explain shortly here how one can check full email headers in Gmail and Yahoo public mail services in order to be able to later derive conclusions on what is wrong with his mail server outgoing messages.

1. How to view full email headers in Gmail

It's pretty easy, though for some reason Google decided to place the button which shows the complete email message headers in a I would say not too user friendly location.

To view email headers, login to Gmail, click over some random email in Inbox or some of the other mail folders.
Once you can read the email and you see the Reply button located on the right, next to the Reply button there is the down triangle which while pressed will display a menu.

To view the full email headers one has to press over the Show original button presented in the menu. Below you see a sample screenshot on the menu with the Show Original button.


Show complete e-mail message headers and content in Gmail

2. How to view full email headers in Yahoo Mail Classic

I use Yahoo Mail Classic, as I like old stuff, Checking the full email headers there is a bit more intuitive than with Gmail.

To check email headers, just login to Yahoo mail, click over inbox, select an email message you would like to review as text.
Further on after the end of the email, you will see the Delete, Reply, Forward, Spam and Move buttons, right below this field of buttons there is the Full Headers blue text link with very small letters.

Here is a screenshot I've made of a sample opened mail. On the screenshot in right bottom you see the blue Full Headers button.



Yahoo Mail Cassic View Email Full Header

3. How to view full mail headers in Hotmail

In Hotmail checking the email, headers's button position is very similar to Gmail's, the only difference is the exact button which shows the Full Email header is named View Message source

In order to check Email headers in Hotmail, one has to click over a desired message, click once again on the down triangle near the Reply button and press over View Message source

Here is a screenshot showing the View Message source menu

Hotmail View Full email Headers

One small note to make here is that the View source headers buttons is currently not working on Epiphany browser running on Linux.
As always Microsoft are making stuff incompatible, if it's not used with a Microsoft product ..

The aim of this small post is to give just a brief idea of how I fixed my qmail server after breaking it or in case it is broken after mail bomb attacks, etc.

Most common cases when I break my qmail queue myself, are after I'm implementing some new patches and reinstall parts of the qmail server with a patched version of default qmail binaries.
On other occasions, I simply used the qmailctl to start or stop the server as a part of some routine tasks necessery for the administration of the qmail server.

Everybody who has already experience with qmail should have experienced, that qmail is very fragile and could break even with a simple changes, though if it works once it's rock solid piece of mail servant.

Below I explain few ways I used through my days as a qmail sys admin to deal with broken or messed queues.

1. Fixing a broken qmail queue using automatic tools There are few handy tools which in most cases are able to solve issues with the queue, one very popular one is queue-repair - check http://pyropus.ca/software/queue-repair/.
Installation of qmail-repair is dead easy, but it needs to be installed from source as no official debian package is available:

linux:/usr/local/src# wget http://pyropus.ca/software/queue-repair/queue-repair-0.9.0.tar.gz
linux:/usr/local/src# tar -xzvvf queue-repair-0.9.0.tar.gz drwxr-xr-x charlesc/qcc 0 2003-10-22 16:54 queue-repair-0.9.0/
-rw-r--r-- charlesc/qcc 268 2003-10-22 16:54 queue-repair-0.9.0/TODO
-rw-r--r-- charlesc/qcc 1700 2003-10-22 16:54 queue-repair-0.9.0/CHANGELOG
-rw-r--r-- charlesc/qcc 18007 2003-10-22 16:54 queue-repair-0.9.0/COPYING
-rw-r--r-- charlesc/qcc 1098 2003-10-22 16:54 queue-repair-0.9.0/BLURB
-rwxr-xr-x charlesc/qcc 26286 2003-10-22 16:54 queue-repair-0.9.0/queue_repair.py


To check if there are issues fixable within the qmail queue it's as easy as:

linux:/usr/local/src# cd queue-repair-0.9.0
linux:/usr/local/src/queue-repair-0.9.0# ./queue-repair -t
...
checking files...
checking queue/mess files...
checking split locations...


The tool will walk through the mail sub-directories containing mail queued files in /var/qmail/queue and will list any issues found.
It's recommended that the qmail server is stopped before any queue modify operations are issued on the server:

linux:/usr/local/src# qmailctl stop
...

Further on in order to solve any found issues with the queue, there is the "-r"/repair option:

linux:/usr/local/src/queue-repair-0.9.0# ./queue-repair -r
...


Another tool which comes handy whether a repair of a messed qmail queue is needed is qmhandle - http://sourceforge.net/projects/qmhandle/

The use of qmhandle is also pretty easy, all one has to do is to follow the usual classical steps of a download the source & compile:

linux:/usr/local/src# wget http://pc-freak.net/files/qmhandle-1.3.2.tar.gz
linux:/usr/local/src# tar -zxvvf qmhandle-1.3.2
...
linux:/usr/local/src# cd qmhandle-1.3.2


Once again it's necessery that the qmail server is stopped via its init script before qmHandle tool is used, e.g.:

linux:~# qmailctl stop
...


There is a difference between qmail queue repair tool and qmail handle , while qmail queue-repair tool is used to fix improper permissions of queued files with the qmail queue, qmhandle 's application is to completely delete the stored mail contents of a broken queue.

Deleting all the qmail queue content is in some cases the only option to fix the queue.
Often such a drastic measure is required after a heavy mail server overload, let's say a result of spammers or caused by virus infected mail users which send a massive amounts of spam mails.

Thus at many cases when queue-repair was unable to solve a queue mess, I use qmhandble and sacrifice all the queued emails by completely wiping them out like so:

linux:/usr/local/src/qmhandle-1.3.2# ./qmhandle -D
...


Above command would eradicate all queued emails. Hopefully after the qmail server gets launched again with qmailctl start all the mail server operations should be back to normal.

Note that the use of qmhandle's queue delete capabilities is pretty dangerous, if you forgot to stop the qmail server before issuing the above command!

Note that in order to use both qmHandle and queue-repair tools you will need to install python interpreter as both of the tools are written in python.

To check what is currently in the queue in Qmail, there are also native tools available, as you should probably know if you have dealt with qmail, e.g.:

debian:~# qmail-qstat
debian:~# qmail-qstat
messages in queue: 2
messages in queue but not yet preprocessed: 0


Often when there are problems with Qmail and more specificly with qmail server queue the qmail-qstat command does show messages in queue, however when an attempt to check what kind of messages are in the queue with qmail-qread no messages are shown, for instance below you see an example of that, even though qmail-qstat claims 2 messages are in the queue, qmail-qread is unable to list the messages:

debian:~# qmail-qread
debian:~#


If all is fine with qmail queue above's qmail-qread command should have returned something similar to:

debian:~# qmail-qread
26 May 2011 07:46:47 GMT #659982 3517 <hipo@pc-freak.net>
remote somemail@gmail.nl
26 May 2011 07:46:47 GMT #659983 3517 <hipo@pc-freak.net>


2. Fixing qmail queue manually This is very dangerous initiative, so before you try anything, make sure that you know what you're doing, the possibility that you make the situation worst if you attempt to tamper manually the qmail queue is quite high :)

However if you're still convinced to try fixing it manually, take a look at /var/qmail/queue it's very likely that there are permission issues with some of the queued files, in order to fix the situation it's necessery that the following directories:

/var/qmail/queue/mess/
/var/qmail/queue/remote/
/var/qmail/queue/bounce
/var/qmail/queue/info


gets explored with midnight commander / mc or some kind of convenient file explorer.

If there are queued files owned by users different from qmailq and user group qmail , for instance if owned by the root user, a simple chown qmailq:qmail to the wrong permissions file, should be able to resolve the issues.

Apart from all I explain above, there are many other ways suggested online on howto clean a qmail queue, one very popular one is using James's qfixq shell script.

This script as of this very date is not working on Debian based systems, the script is dedicated initially to run on Fedora and Redhat based Linuces

Moreover myy experience with qfixq was never successful.

One very important note which is often a cause of many problems, is always make sure you stop and start the qmail server with an interval of at least of 10 seconds.

I've managed many servers which after an immediate (undelayed) qmailctl stop and qmailctl start was unable to run the whole engine of the qmail server (and either email sending or email receiving was not properly working) afterwards.

In that cases many weird behaviours are common, consider this seriously if you deal with the qmail-queue, it might happen that even if you have fixed your qmail queue, after a restart the qmail might breaks up.
I've experienced this kind of oddities numerous times, thus when I do changes to qmail I always make sure I restart the server a couple of times (at least 5 times ) always with a good delay between the HUPs.

And as always with qmail prayer is always needed, this server is complex, you never know what will happen next :)

Recently the Emails sent by one of the Qmail mail servers running on a Debian host started suddenly delivering in Spam folder in both Gmail.com and yahoo.com public mail services.

This is pretty nasty as many of the websites which used the local qmail server to deliver emails concerning subscriptions and other kind of services provided by the websites started ending in Span and thus many of the users who used their Yahoo Mail account and Google Mail - gmail accounts was unable to read emails mailed by the various websites forms and scripts which were sending emails.
You can imagine the negative effect all this "minor" mail issues had on website visitors count and the overall websites functionality.
To come up with some kind of solution to this mail issues, I did quite a lot of research to understand if Yahoo and Google Mail services has some kind of mail server delist form or some reporting service where one can delist a specific mail server as a spammer one or get some kind of help, but unfortunately it seems neither google nor yahoo has any kind of web based way to remove hosts or ip addresses of legit mail servers who has mistakenly been recognized as spam servers.

During my efforts to find a solution to the situation I red a lot of posts and forums online as well as Google's Bulk Sender Guidelines, none if it was too helpful though.

The QMAIL server had a proper:
1. MX Record
2. TXT SPF records
3. PTR Record
4. There are proper correct mail message headers
5. Proper mails charset and encoding
6. The mail server IP is not listed anywhere in any mail blacklists
(e.g. www.mxtoolbox.com/blacklists.aspx / spamhaus.org)
7. A correct SMTP greeting which matched the mail server domain name


The only thing which was missing on the mail server (checked against Google's Bulk Sender Guidelines) was a properly configured DKIM and Domainkeys.

Thus in order to get around the situation I went the way and configured the qmail server to include and send in the mail header also Domain Keys

In this article I will briefly explain step by step how I configured Domain keys (DKIM) signing of my mails:

There are few ways domain keys signing can be implemented with Qmail.

1. By patching qmail binaries to support domain keys signing

I wanted to omit any interventions concerning the well running qmail install so I decided not to go this way.
Plus there are plenty of add-ons for qmail and as I have no time to test them the idea not to temper the existing qmail installation looked wise to me.
2. Use a wrapprer script around qmail-remote that invokes externally domainkeys binaries


This kind of solution was fitting me better and therefore I took this route to enable my qmail DKIM signing.

There are few approaches one can take described online:

• Use a perl script wrapper which does does the DKIM signing (http://manuel.mausz.at/coding/qmail-dkim/)

I tried using the qmail-dkim-0.2.pl wrapper script following the exact steps described to be fulfilled to enable my outgoing mails dkim signature, however for some reason after substituting the qmail-remote with qmail-dkim.pl and setting the proper permissions, my outgoing mails failed completely and each mail I sent was returned back by the qmail MAILER-DAEMON

• Use a bash shell script wrapper in combination with libdomainkeys's with a Mail-DKIM-0.39 .
  
• I gave a try to this approach and thanksfully it worked after a bit of struggle to tune it up.
  
  Here is what exactly I had to do to in order to have the domain keys signing to work using the above described qmail-remote.sh shell script wrapper
  
  1. Install openssl related required debian packages
  
  debian:~# apt-get install openssl libcrypt-openssl-rsa-perl libcrypt-openssl-bignum-perl \
libmail-dkim-perl
...

  
  2. Create necessery directories and RSA key pairs for DomainKeys
  
  debian:~# mkdir -p /etc/domainkeys/mydomain.com
debian:~# cd /etc/domainkeys/mydomain.com
debian:/etc/domainkeys/mydomain.com# openssl genrsa -out rsa.private_default 768
debian:/etc/domainkeys/mydomain.com# openssl rsa -in rsa.private_default \
-out rsa.public_default -pubout -outform PEM
debian:/etc/domainkeys/mydomain.com# ln -sf /etc/domainkeys/soccerfame.com/rsa.private_default default
debian:/etc/domainkeys/mydomain.com# touch selector
debian:/etc/domainkeys/mydomain.com# echo 'default' >> selector

  
  Where mydomain.com is the mail domain I need the DKIM signatures for.
  
  3. Set proper permissions and owner to /etc/domainkeys directory
  
  debian:~# chmod -R 0600 /etc/domainkeys
debian:~# chown -R qmailr:qmail /etc/domainkeys

  
  4. Generate public domain key for DNS TXT records
  
  debian:/etc/domainkeys/mydomain.com# grep -v ^- rsa.public_default | perl -e 'while(<>){chop;$l.=$_;}print "k=rsa; t=y; p=$l;\n";'

k=rsa; t=y; p=MHwwDQYJKoZIhvcNAQEBBQADawAwaAJhAMlDcYMrpWP9ouQOlFVtCHcFY+gxrSQ6SegYeP4eeG7NECT/3jBqDtxANIVhaS9ASkEO4yNisGu4yX/DRclTmnPWknoDtCDiD7IFEzT37qn1JLzcuknTncmFBFMDRUJq6wIDAQAB;

  
  5. Create the DNS records in Name server
  
  With BIND DNS server you need to place a records like:
  
  _domainkey.example.com. IN TXT "k=rsa; t=y; o=-;"
default._domainkey.example.com. IN TXT k=rsa; t=y; p=MHwwDQYJKoZIhvcNAQEBBQADawAwaAJhAMlDcYMrpWP9ouQOlFVtCHcFY+gxrSQ6SegYeP4eeG7NECT/3jBqDtxANIVhaS9ASkEO4yNisGu4yX/DRclTmnPWknoDtCDiD7IFEzT37qn1JLzcuknTncmFBFMDRUJq6wIDAQAB;

  
  6. Download and compile & install Mail-DKIM-0.39 's perl extension
  
  As of time of writting latest Mail-DKIM is ver. 0.39, however it's a good idea to check and install the latest available version available on http://www.cpan.org
  
  a) Download Mail-DKIM
  
  debian:~# cd /usr/local/src
debian:/usr/local/src# wget http://pc-freak.net/files/Mail-DKIM-0.39.tar.gz
...
2011-05-25 15:09:37 (264 KB/s) - `Mail-DKIM-0.39.tar.gz' saved [87375/87375]
...
b) Compile & Install Mail-DKIM
  
  debian:/usr/local/src# chown -R hipo:hipo Mail-DKIM-0.39
debian:/usr/local/src# cd Mail-DKIM-0.39

debian:/usr/local/src/Mail-DKIM-0.39# su hipo
debian:/usr/local/src/Mail-DKIM-0.39$ perl Makefile.PL
debian:/usr/local/src/Mail-DKIM-0.39$ make
...
debian:/usr/local/src/Mail-DKIM-0.39$ exit
debian:/usr/local/src/Mail-DKIM-0.39# make install
debian:/usr/local/src/Mail-DKIM-0.39# cd script
debian:/usr/local/src/Mail-DKIM-0.39/script# cp -rpf * /usr/local/bin; cd /usr/local/src

  
  In above command lines I use my unprivileged username hipo to compile, here use any non-root user is appropriate.
  For instance it's possible that the cpan user is used as a compile time user, I was lazy to configure CPAN thus I choose to use my normal unprivileged user.
  
  7. Download and install libdomainkeys
  
  a) Download libdomainkeys
  For latest version of libdomainkeys make sure you check on http://domainkeys.sourceforge.net/
  
  debian:/usr/local/src# wget http://pc-freak.net/files/libdomainkeys-0.69.tar.gz
debian:/usr/local/src# tar -zxvvf libdomainkeys-0.69.tar.gz
...
debian:/usr/local/src# chown -R hipo:hipo libdomainkeys-0.69
debian:/usr/local/src# cd libdomainkeys-0.69; su hipo

  
  b) Compile and install libdomainkeys binaries
  
  debian:/usr/local/src/libdomainkeys-0.69$ make clean & & make
debian:/usr/local/src/libdomainkeys-0.69$ exit
debian:/usr/local/src/libdomainkeys-0.69# cp -rpf dktest dknewkey expected makeheader /usr/local/bin/

  
  There is a note to make here, one of the programs part of libdomainkeys called dnstest is not compiled while doing make for unknown reasons?!
  I was not able to compile manually dnstest either using gcc like so:
  
  debian:/usr/local/src/libdomainkeys-0.69$ gcc -o dnstest dnstest.c dnstest.c: In function 'main':
dnstest.c:11: warning: incompatible implicit declaration of built-in function 'strle'
/tmp/ccH78KZ1.o: In function 'main':
dnstest.c:(.text+0x2b): undefined reference to 'dns_text'
collect2: ld returned 1 exit status

  
  I have absolutely no clue why it fails o_O, but it doesn't matter since I figured out that domainkeys header signature is properly set even without dnstest.
  
  8. Install libdkim (source of the libdkimtest binary later used by qmail-remote wrapper script)
  
  debian:/usr/local/src# su hipo
debian:/usr/local/src$ wget http://pc-freak.net/files/qmail/libdkim-1.0.19.zip
debian:/usr/local/src$ wget http://pc-freak.net/files/qmail/libdkim-1.0.19-linux.patch
debian:/usr/local/src$ wget http://pc-freak.net/files/qmail/libdkim-1.0.19-extra-options.patch
debian:/usr/local/src$ unzip libdkim-1.0.19.zip
debian:/usr/local/src$ cd libdkim/src
debian:/usr/local/src/libdkim/src$ patch -p2 < ../../libdkim-1.0.19-linux.patch
debian:/usr/local/src/libdkim/src$ patch -p2 < ../../libdkim-1.0.19-extra-options.patch
debian:/usr/local/src/libdkim/src$ make && exit
debian:/usr/local/src/libdkim/src# make install

  
  The above install will install libdkimtest binary, used by the wrapper script to do the actual DKIM-Signature, the binary gets installed in /usr/local/bin/libdkimtest.
  
  9. Download qmail-remote.sh (qmail-remote wrapper shell script) and set it to wrap qmail-remote
  
  a) Copy original qmail-remote to qmail-remote.orig
  
  debian:~# cd /var/qmail/bin
debian:/var/qmail/bin# cp -rpf qmail-remote qmail-remote.orig

  
  b) Download qmail-remote.wrapper script
  
  Here is the qmail-remote.sh wrapper script that worked for me
  Originally the wrapper script is taken from http://www.memoryhole.net/qmail/, big thanks to Russ Nelson for writting the awesome wrapper script.
  
  debian:~# cd /var/qmail/bin/
debian:/var/qmail/bin# wget http://pc-freak.net/files/qmail-remote.wrapper
Saving to: `qmail-remote.wrapper'

100%[============================>] 1,164 --.-K/s in 0s

2011-05-25 15:46:54 (142 MB/s) - `qmail-remote.wrapper' saved [1164/1164]

  
  c) Set proper permissions to the qmail-remote.wrapper script
  
  The permissions of qmail-remote should look like so:
  
  -rwxr-xr-x 1 root qmail 1164 2011-05-25 11:05 /var/qmail/bin/qmail-remote*
  
  To set this permissions I used:
  
  debian:/var/qqmail/bin# chmod 755 qmail-remote.wrapper

  
  d) Create /var/domainkeys directory (necessery for proper qmail remote wrapper script operations)
  
  debian:~# mkdir /var/domainkeys
debian:~# chown -R qmailr:qmail
debian:~# chmod 700 -R /var/domainkeys

  
  f) Substitute original qmail-remote binary with the wrapper script:
  
  debian:~# qmailctl stop
Stopping qmail...
qmail-send
qmail-smtpd
debian:/var/qmail/bin# cp -rpf qmail-remote.wrapper qmail-remote
debian:/var/qmail/bin# qmailctl start
Starting qmail

  
  10. Send test email to @gmail.com or @yahoo.com to test if DKIM-Signature is included in the mail header
  
  I used my installed webmail interface squirrelmail and send a test email to my home mail server and as well as to yahoo.com
  
  The headers of the email looked fine, here is how my DKIM signed mail headers looked like:
  
  From - Wed May 25 13:13:32 2011
X-Account-Key: account11
X-UIDL: 1306318471.48009.pcfreak,S=1958
X-Mozilla-Status: 0001
X-Mozilla-Status2: 00000000
X-Mozilla-Keys:
Return-Path: <hipo@mydomain.com>
Delivered-To: hipo@pc-freak.net
Received: (qmail 48006 invoked by uid 1048); 25 May 2011 10:14:30 -0000
Received: from mail.mydomain.com (83.170.105.141)
by mail.pc-freak.net with SMTP; 25 May 2011 10:14:30 -0000
DKIM-Signature: a=rsa-sha1; c=relaxed; d=mydomain.com;
s=default; t=1306318395; x=1307182395; h=Received:From; b=k/hvkL
zPXS4xwYaptsg9M8r3esJzQz71q7lK4uYV29VE35qghbmlXD2ShvwwwmElGK2mLR
sFt/0b38dxjNZeu++R0UJ7jK3BJLqhbb/H3BeqdYgjnVloF693fxrwQOFxhSXk06
KTuTrFwF+sVmFvdYIRDDLcsFJo7qBVuN8LPxI=
DKIM-Signature: v=1; a=rsa-sha1; c=relaxed; d=mydomain.com;
s=default; t=1306318395; x=1307182395; h=Received:From; bh=uoq1o
CgLlTqpdDX/iUbLy7J1Wic=; b=VLw/fJAMQzI2Ba9e5EEsGcjmsDxzhmvYWuAGM
SgKmwpdfG1DXknYWs1aX1ia25dHINhPlCixhoGWBiQTHSL7hHXNaOHsFNp5wUifu
0piuBkMvsOWjZt3tf3yhdBxoQEvE2tz2f7MWSkA6QOtGznBiI4A9zjyq8/Q3FcZR
hYKSp0=
DKIM-Signature: v=1; a=rsa-sha256; c=relaxed; d=mydomain.com;
s=default; t=1306318395; x=1307182395; h=Received:From; bh=frcCV
1k9oG9oKj3dpUqdJg1PxRT2RSN/XKdLCPjaYaY=; b=Cozq+28r4hnpZ+9IfM6pt
l7vJSvRE5jsRfwMr/PyE3ubaII+LPDzcvBp4Do8UPvzQln31DM2Hkdu9uvxvh2po
Qgi+eHWN6kW2bcH2HuqnIeFdURdJMVGA946I/eFKH5AB/1bcGXEumeKC0n84H+a7
1596ArTCsGX3jRznvg/t6k=
Received: (qmail 32713 invoked by uid 89); 25 May 2011 10:13:15 -0000
Received: from unknown (HELO webmail.mydomain.com) (127.0.0.1)
by 0 with SMTP; 25 May 2011 10:13:15 -0000
Received: from 83.228.93.76
(SquirrelMail authenticated user hipo@mydomain.com)
by webmail.mydomain.com with HTTP;
Wed, 25 May 2011 11:13:15 +0100 (BST)
Message-ID: <59494.83.228.93.76.1306318395.squirrel@webmail.mydomain.com>
Date: Wed, 25 May 2011 11:13:15 +0100 (BST)
Subject: baklava
From: hipo@mydomain.com
To: hipo@pc-freak.net
User-Agent: SquirrelMail/1.4.9a
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain;charset=UTF-8
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
X-Priority: 3 (Normal)
Importance: Normal

  
  Notice the three DKIM-Signature sections in the header, this obviously means the DKIM-Signature of my outgoing mails is fine.
  What is weird is that the email gets a DKIM-Signature 3 times?
  I'm still investigating why is that asap as I have found why it's like that I'll explain it here.
  
  The idea for writting this small guide on configuring Domainkeys with Qmail and Linux is seriously inspired by Mariuz's Blog post dkim wrapper that works using dk Hope this is helpful to somebody, it took me quite a while until I come up with the exact steps of a workable install of Domain Keys, there are so many tutorials and ways to implement this that at a certain point it's a hell.
  Like always with Qmail, even simple things are so complex, the only good thing about qmail is once you make it work well it works forever, until the next time you will have to spend few days trying to figure it out.
  
  

I have a pirate version of Windows XP Pro 2 installer CD which does automatically turn on Windows Genuine Advantage

This is kind of annoying as the computer gets really slow and the hard disk drive activite gets intensive as well as an annoying popup message that the Windows XP copy is not genuine does appear periodically

In order to get rid of the message I had to do the following steps:

1. Get into Windows Safe Mode without Networking

As most of the people knows this is achieved by pressing F8 keyboard key right before the Windows bootup screen appears.

After in Safe mode it's necessery to,

2. Run Windows Command Line (cmd.exe)

To do so follow, the menus:

Windows (Start Menu) -> Run -> cmd.exe


3. In the command prompt window issue the commands:

C:\Documents and Settings\User> cd \Windows\System32
C:\...\User\Windows\System32> taskkill -IM wgatray.exe
C:\...\Users\Windows\System32> del wgatray.exe
C:\...\Users\Windows\System32> move wgalogon.dll wgalogon.dll.old
C:\...\Users\Windows\System32> del wgalogon.dll.old


A Windows system restart and Hooray the Windows Genuine message is gone :)

Windows XP I'm in a friend and he asked me to take a look at his Win PC.
When the Windows boots up a weird and annoying error message appears that reads:

vBAccelerator SGrid II Control Runtime Error


I figured out the SGrid II Control Runtime Error was a cause of a mis-working old Malware Bytes portable installation.

I've found online the following tool which fixes the stupid VBAccelerator SGrid II error

By simply downloading and starting the mbam-clean.exe binary after a computer restart the error gets fixed.

On 24-th of May as an old tradition we in Bulgaria celebrate the Day of Slavonic/Slavic Writting and Culture.

It's quite of feast, the streets are full of people and everybody wents out to celebrate or have a walk as the whole day atmosphere is extremely cheerful.
Until some years during communism on 24th of may was also a Church feast day of st. Cyril and Methodius, however since some years the Bulgarian Orthodox Church decided to commemorate the two saints on a different date.

However the secular educational tradition of remembering the two saints memory on today's date next to considering the holiday as the official feast of triumph of educational enlightenment and science is still alive in the primary and secondary schools.
24th of May is also considered as the official day of Bulgarian and Slavonic Writting and Culture.
The two saints Saint Cyril and Saint Methodius are considered to be patron saints protector of all Schools, universities and educational institutions in Bulgaria.
On this date it's common that a bit of secular icon images of the two saints to be holded in a public schools manifestation, where specially dressed pupils play music with trombones and drums and all teachers and students does a manifestation lined in a column in the streets (this tradition is a hermitage from communistic times as manifestation on major celebrations were a common thing during the communism years, when Bulgaria was part of the USSR).



24th of May is considered maybe the brightest public feast in Bulgaria, even the secular atheist and unbelievers connect the day of 24th May celebrations with St. St. Cyril and Methodius who historically are the founders/inventors of the Slavonic writting letter and thus highly respected among all Orthodox Christian slavonic nations and as far as I know even are being known and venerated in some countries in the Roman Catholic western world (I'll be glad to hear if some western people who are subscribed to my blog, give some reports if they know the two patron saints of Slavonic Culture.

Many cities in Bulgaria has an official local city feast on 24th of May. Dobrich my home city also marks off it's public holiday on 24th of May.

Many small and middle sized villages also does celebrate heavily on this date, as the so called (people gatherings / (sbor as we call them in Bulgaria)) are occuring on this date.
On this assemblies, where people goes out to buy stuff, we have a lot of gipsies who sell a various hand-made food as well some gipsies home-made children toys :)

It's very pity I have no picture to show you what kind of bulk stuff the gipsies are selling via an improvised made kiosks especially for the fesat.
The gipsies sales all kind of weird food especially for the holiday like, (pink ice-cream, all colors sugar-cotton and pink cream, pink sugar sticks (shiker as we call it) and a tons of other weird foods you cannot see anywhere else)).
I'm quite convinced that every foreigner will truly enjoy this feast of ours and I recommend, if you're about to come to Bulgaria to try to be in our country on this feast, it's truly wild and natural as it is and always was in the bolkans ! :)
It's also traditional on this date of triumph of culture that many cultural events around the country occurs, as well as the traditional folklore performers and dancers perform on the cities centres.


Horo (Bulgarian Traditional Folklore Dance on a city centre)

To generalize 24-th of May is our greatest and brightest holidays here in Bulgaria, there is some kind of established believe that on this date the weather is always nice. This year this national believe come true, as we have a wonderful sunny day here in Bulgaria :).

I have installed TightVNC to a Windows host just a few weeks ago in order to be able to manage remotely a Windows host and forgot to write down the administrator password (stoopid!)

I had to explain to a friend remotely how to change the TightVNC admin password and it was a complete nightmare!

Shortly here is the exact menus one who wants to reset the password of a TigthVNC server after forgotten:

Start -> All Programs -> TightVNC
-> TightVNC Server (Service Mode) ->
TightVNC Service - Offline Configuration.


In the configuration dialog to popup there are the Server and Administration tabs through which a new password can be set.

After the password is change either a restart of the TightVNC server is necessery or a restart of the Windows PC.

One of the Qmail server installations I'm taking care of's clamd antivirus process started loading the system heavily.
After a bit of log reading and investigation I've found the following error in my /var/log/clamd/current

@400000004dda1e1815cf03f4 ERROR: LOCAL: Socket file /tmp/clamd.socket is in use by another process.


I've noticed in my process list that actually I do have two processes clamd :

11608 ? Sl 0:05 /usr/local/sbin/clamd
11632 ? S 0:00 /usr/bin/multilog t /var/log/clamd
16013 ? Sl 0:06 /usr/local/sbin/clamd


It appeared that for some weird reason one of the clamd process was failing to connect constantly to the clam server socket /tmp/clamd.socket and each time it tried to connect and failed to connect to the socket the system gets about 5% of extra load ...

Resolving the issues was a piece of cake, all I had to do is stop the clamd server delete the /tmp/clamd.socket and relaunch the clamd server.

Here is exactly the commands I issued:

debian:~# cd /service/
debian:/service# svc -a clamd
debian:/service# svc -h clamd
debian:/service# svc -d clamd
debian:/service# rm -f /tmp/clamd.socket
debian:/service# svc -u clamd


Afterwards the clamd extra load went out and in /var/log/clamd/current I can see clamd loads fine without errors, e.g.:

Listening daemon: PID: 16013
MaxQueue set to: 150
No stats for Database check - forcing reload
Reading databases from /usr/local/share/clamav
Database correctly reloaded (966822 signatures)
SelfCheck: Database status OK.
...


Below I post the only picture I have of this beloved brother in Christ ipodqkon Georgi You see our brother on the right side of the Metropolitan of Varna and Great Preslav Kiril.
Georgi served as an ipodqkon in the Church Holy Trinity here in Dobrich and was well known and loved by the Church community there.
He also was a really good loving and decent man completely devoted to our Orthodox faith, standing firm in the faith.
He worked for many months in Holy mount Athos as a repair workers cook, where he cooked for about 70 people.

Before he worked in Holy Mount Athos, he used to be a restaurant chef in Sandanski.
Since about 6 or 7 months time he become sick, his assumption for the sickness was that it might be of a bad sploit old food which was consumed by accident by him and the rest of the workers.
He shared with me that all of the workers felt sick after eating it but all of them except him has vomited the food afterwards.

He gets poisoned and urgently transfered back in a hospital in Bulgaria. Consequently he went under a lot of examinations which failed to proof the exact type of sickness he was suffering from.
He was prescribed to eat only fasting food (some bread, apples, oil and a few of other light meals). He was prescribed a lot of medications he tried but none of them really helped him and he on a numerous times has shared with me he is not feeling weel, though I was not really believing his health situation is so severe.

The exact state he was experiencing was infirmity, headaches, skin rushes, he could hardly stay on his foots for more than few hours, as lastly he shared with me.
He also got rashes from most of the food he consumed. His life was a real tragedy as I remember I saw him just 3 weeks ago and he was about to go to Sofia for some examinations.
Even though his hardships in life, he was not loosing faith and believed all that was happening was according to God's will and did accepted his sickness with humility.
During the about 7 months he spend in sickness he was many times being hospitalized in Hospitals in Dobrich, Varna and Sofia.

In each of the hospitals he spend a couple of weeks on injections and live sustaining medical systems.
During this periods, when he was in his home here in Dobrich somewhere in Balik, he often chatted with me over Skype, giving me good spiritual advices.
He also often called my landline phone to consult on various stuff concerning his problems with his notebook. As in the last days he could only lay and use the computer.
The computer he had was one of the few possessions he had, in his last days he did not have money at all as all of his savings were spend for examinations and drugs...

I remember still one time when I walked with him towards the bus-station and I was in a terrible desperation, being faithless.
He instructed me I should pray and told me not to despair and stop smoking as I was nervously smoking...
He lived a life similar in many ways to the life of the saints. He had a strong love for monasticism and had the desire to either become a monk or priest.
He told me many miraculous things he has seen and heard when he was in holy Mount Athos.
Last time I saw my beloved brother Georgi near the Church saint George (sveti Georgi) and for my grief I behaved partly as an asshole, and I repent I was not behaving better.

In this last time I saw him he shared for his great gratitude for God that he was allowed to visit the holy Lands (Jerusalem) The Holy Sepulchure church in Jerusalem.
Even in this last days, obviously living in infirmity he had his strong dedication to the Church and come to the Church services for Resurrection / (Easter) and was mostly being present on holy liturgies in Sundays.

The last time I saw him in the Church he did the Gospel and red some psalms. He was always serious and looked for the spiritual in everything, very rare kind of person to meet today.
Georgi blessed me with a couple of small icons (two copies of icons of Saint Georgi [Fanailska and Araviiska] miraculous icons from mount Athos as well as an icon picture of the Altar of Holy Sepulchure Jerusalem church), and I pray in front of them when I pray to God.

These are two of the icons brother Georgi give me as a gift and blessing from Holy Mount athos:



Saint Georgi Zographus Miracle making icon



My beloved brother in Christ Georgi (God Forgive him / Bog da prosti) has also blessed me with a wonderful digital movie about the Bulgarian monastery in Holy Mount Athos Zographus. The movie about Zographus is explaining thoroughfully the history of the holy cloister and showing the originals of the Holy miraculous icons and monks who spoke about today's spirituality and what is it to be a monk on holy mount athos (one of the most holy places on earth today).

I know also that Georgi was a wonderful a really talanted cook (even a chief) as he was responsible to take an eye for 6 cooks during his work as chief in Sandanski.
In the just recently passed away Resurrection day, he has cooked an Easter cakes and banica as well as some other meals using a holy mount athos recipee.

After the Resurrection early Holy liturgy was over we ate together with the brothers and sisters from Georgi's delicious meals praising God and rejoicing for our Lord has Resurrected from the dead...
I will really miss my namesake (adash) as I used to call him often. I just hope one day I would see him again if by God's grace I'm allowed to enter Heaven.
Just about 1 year ago his mother passed away, then some few years before his father has passed away and now not more than a year after his parents he is gone as well.
When I look over this tragedy it's really hard to understand it but using the Holy Scriptures, one can easily understand why it happened that way as,


His early departure from this life is according to the words in the Holy Bible in Isaiah 57:1:

The righteous perish, and no one ponders it in his heart; devout men are taken away, and no one understands that the righteous are taken away to be spared from evil.


I hope ipodqkon Georgi will find grace in front of God to pray for me the sinner and the rest of us who're still living in ours sins on this sinful earth.
As the memory of the righteous lasts forever he will be forever remembered as I believe he was in the number of the rightous ...

Please Orthodox Brothers and sisters pray for ipodqkon's Georgi's soul that our merciful God forgives him his trespasses and grants him an ever lasting joy with all the saints in the heavenly church, in paradise!

God forgive you our and my beloved brother Georgi! Let your memory last forever. Amen!

Kolya is the first Czech movie, I see. The movie is really good and I would classify it as a really art movie.
It also bears the sad melancholic atmosphere that we hold on the Balkans. The movie might be a hard to grasp one for Western people but would definitely be easily understand by someone who lived in the realms of the USSR.
The movie is also a movie that presents realities of the decaying communism, the times before the year of the fall the Berlin Wall (1989).
What was really worthy and edifying for myself was the sad realities of a falling Union (a false idealistic empire built for more than half a century).

The movie starts with the main actor Louka, a middle-aged Czech man dedicated to music (a cellist funeral crematorium orchestra player and a self-employed cello instructor).
Louka has one major muse which helps him follow his music career, the pursuit of new love and sexual relations with woman.
As the situation with falling-communism is harsh and the economic in the Soviet Union is in downturn this kind of trend is even more seriously felt among people who are in art like Louka.
Most of the movie is happening in Golden Prague (One of the most beautiful cities in the world IMHO).

Louka is working a couple of part time jobs next to his music career in the orchestra in order to be able to pay his daily life and bills, one of his other ways to get extra cash is the gravestone inscriptions.

Even though Louka is trying hard to earn money to pay back his loans and get a normal living, he is unsuccessful in getting enough money to make a decent living.
Suddenly he gets into huge debts which he is not able to pay with his earned money. As Louka is single he is offered by one of his debtors to earn money by a small cheat (a false marriage) with a Russian woman who needs Czech citizenship in order to be able to later travel freely to the western part of Europe.
He is offered 30 000 of Czech crons which for that time is a really solid money, which will allow him to pay back his loans and even get a small car Trabant !

Even though Louka tries his best to resist the temptation to do the criminal marriage at certain point the offered money convince him to accept the offering and he merries the young Russian fictiously.
As marriages of this type are quite common in Czech in this days of communism decay, he lives with the promise by the Russian woman family that they will get divorced after 6 months time.

Louka gets married and gets his money, but just a 2 weeks later the Russian young lady emigrates in Germany to her German lover and leaves her young Russian boy Kolya behind under the care of her old mother.
The old mother being unable to accept the sudden escape of her young Russian daughter, gets insane and enters into a mental hospital.
Since Kolya (who speaks only Russian and has not even basic knowledge of Czech) does not a family to be placed in he is being brought to the apartment of his (father in law) Louka.

Louka enters into an unexpected hardships, where the policy could chase him for the illeagal fictious marriage and even worser with a foreign Russian child.
He has never before had any experience with children, so initially he faces the hell of taking care for a child.
To make things even worser the babushka (mentally unstable grandmother) of Kolya passes away after a heart attack in the Mental hospital.
Now Louka is the only "relative" who according to Czech law has to take care for the 5 year old kid Kolya !
The child suffers from suspected meningitis and has to be placed on a course of carefully monitored antibiotics. Louka is threatened with imprisonment for his suspect marriage ...

The movie is a serious drama but is a really touching one as it presents the power of love and how love can change human lives as Louka's gradual love for Kolya changes him for good.
Kolya is a wonderful piece of art movie and a real achievement for Czech cinema. Since it's the first Czech movie I see I want to see a lot of more.
In the mean time just watch the movie as it's a wonderful piece of all-time movie classic.

After a failed attempt to enable some wrapper scripts to enable domain keys support in a qmail powered mail server my qmail server suddenly stopped being able to normally send mail.

The exact error message which was logged in /var/log/qmail/current was:

@400000004dd66fcc16a088ac delivery 1: deferral: Sorry,_message_has_wrong_owner._(#4.3.5)/


This qmail messed happened after I substituted /var/qmail/bin/qmail-queue and /var/qmail/bin/qmail-remote with two respective wrapper shell scripts which were calling for the original qmail-queue and qmail-remote binaries under the names qmail-queue.orig and qmail-queue.orig

Restoring back qmail-queue.orig to /var/qmail/bin/qmail-queue and qmail-remote.orig to /var/qmain/bin/qmail-remote and restarting the mail server broke my qmail install.

After a bunch of nerves trying to isolate what is causing the error I found out that by mistake I forgot to copy the qmail-queue and qmail-remote permissions and ownership.

Thus I had to check another qmail working installation's permissions for both binaries and fix the permissions to be equivalent to the permissions:

debian:~# ls -al /var/qmail/bin/qmail-remote
-rwx--x--x 1 root qmail 50464 2011-05-20 12:56 /var/qmail/bin/qmail-remote*
debian:~# ls -al /var/qmail/bin/qmail-queue
-rws--x--x 1 qmailq qmail 20392 2011-05-20 12:56 /var/qmail/bin/qmail-queue*


The exact chmod and chmod commands I issued to solve the shitty issues were as follows:

First I fixed the qmail-queue and qmail-remote ownership:

debian:~# chown qmailq:qmail /var/qmail/bin/qmail-queue
debian:~# chown root:qmail /var/qmail/bin/qmail-remote


Second I set the proper file permissions:

# make the qmail-queue binary suid
debian:~# chmod u+s /var/qmail/bin/qmail-queue
debian:~# chmod 611 /var/qmail/bin/qmail-queue
debian:~# chmod 611 /var/qmail/bin/qmail-restart


Third and last I did a restart of the qmail server and tested it sends properly

debian:~# /usr/bin/qmailctl stop
Stopping qmail...
qmail-send
qmail-smtpd
debian:~# /usr/bin/qmailctl start
Starting qmail


Finally to test that the qmail server qmail-queue was queing and sending with qmail-remote I used the system mail command like so:

debian:~# mail -s "test email" testuser@pc-freak.net
asdfafdsdf
.
Cc:


Afterwards the mail was properly received on my mail account testuser@pc-freak.net immediately.

In my /var/log/qmail/current log file all seemed fine:

@400000004dd6702a2eb2b064 starting delivery 1: msg 85281596 to remote testuser@pc-freak.net
@400000004dd6702a2eb2b834 status: local 0/20 remote 1/20
@400000004dd6702b34cc809c delivery 1: success: 83.228.93.76_accepted_message./Remote_host_said:_250_ok_1305899099_qp_65293/
@400000004dd6702b34cc886c status: local 0/20 remote 0/20
@400000004dd6702b34cc8c54 end msg 85281596


The test mail was properly received on my mail account testuser@pc-freak.net immediately.

It took me like half an hour to figure out what exactly is wrong with the permissions in situations like this I really wanted to change all my qmail installs with postfix and forget forever I ever used qmail ...

Yesterday I saw the Live is a Miracle movie and I was so excited that I decided to drop few lines here about it.

The movie is just one nother magneficient masterpiece by Emil Kosturica and contains a multiple hidden meanings as with the rest of the movies of Kosturica, I've watched so far.

The movie is a story about war, love, passion, faith, drama, life expectations and everyday's existence hardships.
The movie reveals a lot of the culture and insanity that is on the balkans these days, it also shows how inventive people on the balkans are, how much grief we the balkan people hold.
It also shows how immoderate we the balkan people are, parallel with you can see how joyful and ridiculous is the existence in Serbia and the near by bordering countries (Bulgaria, Romania) etc.

The movie is a story circulating mainly around a family consisting of a man, a mentally unstable wife and their son who has the childish dream to become a popular soccer player.
The father Luke is an engineer who just moved with his family from Belgrad to Bosnia and is assigned to open an old railway station and design a new train railways to make the railway station functional again.
A war emerges in the meantime and his beloved son Milos is taken into the army to defend Serbia, his crazy wife Jadranka leaves him to escape with her Hungarian Musician loverman.

Luka looses faith in life and decides to commit suicide, like by the providence a young beautiful muslim girl (Sabaha), who is taken as a hostage is being entrusted to Luka as his only hope to exchange her for Luka's son.
Luka and Sabaha fells in love and the rest is a love story drama ;)
The movie is really awesome, watch it and enjoy! :)

One might question why does Orthodox Chrsitian priests wear beards? and why does the long beards of our Orthodox priests makes differences with the Roman Catholics?

Here are the few reasons:

1. Long beards wearing's tradition among Orthodox Christian priests and monks comes after Christ

Christ himself had a beard as it was normal and considered proper for a man to wear long beard.

The fact that our Lord Jesus Christ had a long beard himself can clearly be observed on all our Orthodox Christian icons:


The Lord's Pantecrator Icon (Pantocrator / Pantecrator ) from the 6th century

2. Long beards priest wearing comes as a natural tradition from the Old Testament's times and the tradition of early Church

If one reads thoroughfully the old testament, he will find out that even from Moses and Aaron and onwards the tradition is the same.
All the Godly man and the priests had their long beards unshaved as a mark for their belongship and dedication to God.
To generalize the long beards wearing is according to ancient old testamential ancient tradition.
The long beards tradition as an ancient Jewish religion (Old testamental) tradition can still be clearly observed in Jewish rabbis (nowdays the jewish priests), who still wears their beards long, like for example you can see in the picture below:


A modern day Jewish Rabbi notice the beard

The long beards tradition later was adopted by Muslims when Islam emerged as a religion and more specificly by the muslim priests the Hodjas:



One very interesting historical source of information which proofs that the ancient Church's priests had the tradition not to cut their beards is given by the historian Egezit who writes in his Chronicles that st. Apostle James, the head of the Church in Jerusalem, never cuts his hair.

A source of confirmation that the long hear and beards wearing was an established tradition that dates back to the old testament is found in the old testament in (Ezekiel 8:3)

Here is what exactly we read there:

He stretched out what looked like a hand and took me by the hair of my head.
The Spirit lifted me up between earth and heaven and in visions of God he took me to Jerusalem,
to the entrance to the north gate of the inner court, where the idol that provokes to jealousy stood.


3. Long hair and beards wearing by the Monks

An interesting fact is why does the Monks and novice neophyte lay brothers also stick to the ancient tradition.
It appears long hair and beards wearing traces back to the holy life of the ascetics of the deserts (e.g. the hermits).

The reason why ascetics did not shaved their hairs or bears as a way to avoid vanity and therefore this old hermitage practice has also had a spiritual reason.

4. The Nazarite old testament tradition

In the old testament in Numbers 6:1-21, we read about the term nazarite which means consecrated / separated

Each boy or man who was to become a Nazarine has been devoted to God for a certain period of time or in some cases for his all life, one of the many conditions for one to be a nazarite is not to shave his beard or hair.
One can read about this in the old testament in Leviticus 21:5

Leviticus 21:5
"They shall not make baldness upon their head,
neither shall they shave off the corner of their beard nor make any cuttings in their flesh."


There are some other prohibitions relating to Nazarite's one of the most notable ones is found in Numbers 6:4:

All the days of his Naziriteship shall he eat nothing that is made of the grape-vine,
from the pressed grapes even to the grapestone.


One example for people who gaves vow to become temporary Nazarites is found in 1 Maccabees 3:49 (this book is only available in the Orthodox Holy Bible).
One of the most important figure in Christianity that used to be Nazarite is Samson, his life can be read in the old testament in Judges 13 - 16

As we read in Judges , Samson's great God given power consituted in a prohibition to shave his hair and not to drink wine.

5. Reason why Roman Catholic Priests and monks abandoned the ancient tradition of wearing long hairs and beards

In the early Roman Empire it was a customfor a men to shave. The "enlightened" Romans believed that only the barbarians did not shaved themselves, and as you can imagine Jewish people and early Christians were of course considered to be barbarians, e.g. being unshaved was a sign for a cultural inferiorness in according to Romans comprehension.

The long hairs and beards tradition in the Western Church has started disappearing and consequentially completely lost with the Tyranny of Charlemagne at the end of the eight century.
With his massive 'barbarian' inferiority complex, it was his desire in all things to imitate pagan classical Rome.
It was therefore under him that Western clergy were ordered to shave regularly.
For example at the Council of Aachen (816), it was stipulated that priests and monks were to shave every two weeks.

By the beginning of the 11th century the tradition of wearing long beards was already completely torned apart and almost all the Roman Catholic clergy was regularly shaving.

In the sixteenth century beardlessness for Roman Catholic clergy was enforced by further canons,
which appear to have been dropped since the Second Vatican Council.

6. Why does protestants does not wear beards

As we all know protestant Church denominations has emerged as schismatics from Roman Catholic church and therefore mostly the influence they had was from Roman Catholics which already had the tradition within their clergy to regularly shave, thus pastors shaving was completely out of question and never come to an established reality among the Protestant Church pastors.

7. Is the Orthodox Christian layman obliged to wear beards

Absolutely not! The layman within the Orthodox Church can choose for themselves, if they want to wear their hair and beard and through that possess an image physically similar to Christ.
In my view it's more righteous for us the layman to wear our hairs and beards as I personally believe long hair and beards demonstrates mans dignity and God's dedication, but this is my own private opinion.
At many cases wearing beards or long hairs is an obstacle for a good integration in nowdays society, so if wearing a beard or hair as laymans does become an obstacle for our normal daily lifes then I believe cutting a long beard or hair is perfectly acceptable.
Moreover even the Orthodox Christian priests are not enforced to wear beards and in some cases where the priest's wife is against the beardness the Orthodox priest is allowed to shave himself, though as a matter of fact having a completely shaved priests in our Orthodox Churches is rare and less common today.

In conclusion wearing of beard and long hair by Orthodox Christna clergy, has come from the desire to physically resemble Christ.
This physical resemblance is a symbol of the spiritual resemblance of Christ's humility, which is the ultimate aim of our life.

I'm so depressed these days that I'm trying to write something decent here but everytime I try I do stop and delete all I have written and start from scratch again.
It's terrible, I believe everyone have this days and they're so dark that even the smallest ray of light is gone somewhere...

The causes for depression are multiple, I know we're entering into the season period and that could be a factor, but truly for a long time I haven't felt that bad and I really cannot find the true cause. It's like hunting the unexplained.
Being a citizen of a countries on the balkans brings a lot of questions which cannot get answered. Why we the Balkan and more specificly most of the Orthodox Christian countries are suffering so badly and economically in constant crisis and recession?
From a material perspective Bulgaria is one of the worst countries one can live in, we the people on the balkans are chronically depressed and it really seems like a downward spiral
We've been gone through so far, when I was a child we were teached in the spirit of communism and a believe in a hard material realities.

Communism has taught us we're all fleshly brothers and we should live in groups and stick to the group, now as the democracy come it's on the contraty, we're being constantly re-taught that we should leave behind the group kind of thinking and all built from communism destroy it all and build the new society... We're told by individualist nations like USA and Western europe that the only thing for the good of a person is to (get an absolute individualistic life and only exist for the greater goodness of each ones self as individuals..

As with everything the Balkans are notable for being a very unordered place. Living here is like living in chaos...
The social security policies here are not working, the jurisdiction is working on behalf of the rich, the police force is seriously disfunctional and easily bribable. Put next to all this shit a high levels of unemployment and a lot of unhappy depressed people crawling around the streets and you get the picture ...
As a normal consequence most of the young people have entered a dark ways of alcoholism and hard-core nihillism.
There are high level of people who are oriented into the new dark realities of Metal or underground music.
Each philosophy that is being put in from the west is being adopted here and being multiplied million times and mostly the bad things are being adopted and less rarely the good ones...
It's so mixed up that nobody can explain why it is happening as it is here.
I really am trying hard to convince myself for a years now that it is worthy to live here but the more I live here in Bulgaria the more I see all is getting worser than getting for good.

I wonder for how long it will go this pointless way, we the balkan people are living in ruins literally.

The only light we still have is the Church, but very sadly most people has left behind the faith and prefer to follow the fake American dream than to obey to our old ways and traditions.

Globalisation has entered in the Balkans in a full-force and is destroying our ancient culture and traditions and building the fakeness that most of the people prefer to adore nowdays ...

Bulgaria's population is mostly based of old people and we're a dying nation, if a miracle doesn't happen then we definitely will be gone.

I remember about Johny Cash's Hurt song as the nine inch nails cover was a very favourite one to me for quite a few years, in the meantime I reviewed Johny Cash's musical works and decided to check some biographic info about Johny Cash I was surpirsed to find out Johny Cash used to create a lot of music about the Lord Jesus Christ and shocked by the fact he had a long period in his life in which he was a devoted Christian!

I'm really happy to find out this info as one I'm a christian myself and two he is one of the most influential musicians of the last 150 years, not to say of all times.

His biography is quite a bizarre one full of falling and standings, anyways i would skip the talks now and suggest for my readers to enjoy Johny's Cash few notable songs:


Johny Cash - Hurt Video


Johny Cash - Ring of Fire Video


Johny Cash - Spiritual Video


Johny Cash - Redemption Video


Johny Cash - I walk the Line Video


Johny Cash - God's Gonna Cut you Down
Awesome music ain't it ? :)

Here are the pictures of the holy relics which were temporary sojourned in Pomorie's Monastery for veneration in the the period 04.05.2011 - 14.05.2011.

It's been like a tradition that the monastery is blessed with having a different saints holy relics on the Monastery feast day (St. George's day).

Last year in the monastery were exhibited for veneration the holy relics (the hand remains) of St. Dasius

This year the holy relics the good tradition by God's grace was continued as the holy relics of the saints:

• Saint Great Martyr George
• Saint Venerable Macrina
• Saint Marina
• Saint Cyprian and Saint Justina

were for veneration in the Monastery Church called also Saint Great Martyr George / Sveti Velikomachenik Georgi

Here are the pictures of the holy relics I was able to obtain:

Saint Great Martyr George hand holy relics
Saint Venerable Macrina Holy Relics (hand bone)
Saint Cyprian and Justina Holy relics

There were also few other particles of saints which are permanently in the Pomorie monastery and christian pilgrims can freely go there to venerate them so I would not post pictures of this holy relics here.

What is really striking is that all the Holy relics had a very specific odor (similar to Roses) but as the monk Father Sergii said (an Odor not of this world).
God's grace can be felt with one's heard when he is near the holy relics of this great saints, the monk father Sergii told me that the reason for the odor is that God testifies in that great way that the holy relics belong to his saints.
Each saint holy remains had a different (parfume like) odor, it's really amazing and hard to believe but I have smelled the scent myself!

Here is how Easter is being celebrated in Lebanon Mall.
No Comment ;)

I had been assigned the not easy task to make a Windows XP Pro which is located behind an ADSL modem to be remotely accessible via VNC

The Windows is connected to the Bulgarian Vivacom Intrnet provider through their ADSL service and hence there is an ADSL router modem which is configured to disallow all inbuond connections by default.

The Windows Pro PC where the VNC server was needed to be accessible did not have a real IP address (e.g. was assigned a virtual IP address by the ADSL modem.

The exact ADSL model used to connect the computer via a lan cable to the internet was Huawei SmartAX MT882

As the device is owned by Vivacom (the ex BTK tele communication company) I did not have any admin user and pass credentials for the ADSL modem to configure the ADSL router to do a port NAT forwarding of port 5800 and 5900 used by the VNC software I installed on the PC (TightVNC)

Nevertheless the missing user and password I decided to check in google if I can find some default passwords that Vivacom ADSL modems are configured to work with

After a few minutes spend in Google I already had found few passwords which were said to work fine with the Vivacom ADSL router.
Here are the passwords I found for the Vivacom ADSL Internet modems:

ZTE ZXDSL 832
username: root
password:GSrootaccess

ZTE ZXDSL 831
username:root
password:GSrootaccess

ZTE
username:root
password:831access

Huawei SmartAX MT882
username:root
password:MT882rootaccess

ZTE ZXDSL-531b
username: root
password:warmWLspot


I tied some old school brute force techniques by trying all the passwords via the ADSL web interface located on http://192.168.1.1 (I was not sure which model the Vivacom ADSL modem is as on the router there was nothing written concerning the modem type but only the Vivacom logo was present.

After a bit of time I already knew that the ADSL modem model, user and pass was:

Huawei SmartAX MT882
-------------------------------
user: root
pass: MT882rootaccess


My next step was to configure port forwarding for the SmartAX MT882 ADSL in order to achieve from modem's web administrator I had to follow the menus:

Advanced Setup -> Virtual Servers




Next in the NAT -- Virtual Servers section I pressed the Add button to create new automatic redirection (port forwarding) rule.

Configuring ADSL SmartAX MT882 TightVNC NAT port redirection screen TightVNC requires also NAT port redirection rule for port 5900 in order to be able to connect to the VNC server behind the dsl, so analogically I added a Virtual Server NAT rule for port 5900.

Note that the private IP address of the Windows host was assigned by the ADSL router to the ip 192.168.1.3

Further on I expected the adsl port forwarding created rule would now allow me to connect to the VNC server on the pc located behind the dsl firewall, but I was wrong... even though all seemed to be configured just fine in the ADSL router still the port unmbers 5800 and 5900 were showing up as closed during nmap scan as well as a simple telnet connection to port 5800 and 5900 failed to get established.

My logical assumption was that some configured Firewall on the Windows PC is blocking port connections to 5800 and 5900 thus I decided to check the default Windows Firewall settings as a first possible cause for the vnc ports being blocked.

I did that via the Windows menus:

Start -> Settings -> Control Panel -> Windows Firewall


However weirly enought it seemed the Windows Firewall was disabled e.g. the Off (not recommended) option was set for the firewall.

A bunch of other lookup over all the running system and services on the windows hosts I have found the PC is protected by NOD32 Antivirus - Personal Firewall

The default behaviour of NOD32's Persnal firewall was extremely restrictive and I found it's causing a port filter of the 5800 and 5900 vnc connection ports.

To solve the filtering nod32 did I had to open NOD32 and navigate to the following menus:

Setup -> Personal Firewall -> Configure rules and Zones


In the Zone and rule setup menu config window I had to further press on:
New button to add new personal firewall rule.

In the New rule: menu I filled in the following info:
In the General tab:

Name: vnc
Direction: Both
Action: Allow


In the tab Local

I pressed over the Add Port

Number: 5800


in the Remote tab once again I had to fill in:
Number: 5800


Then to confirm settings just pressed OK

Next on I added in the same manner an allow rule for port 5900.

After this settings I restarted the NOD32 firewall to make sure the new settings takes place by pressing over the Personal firewall button Disable filtering: allow all traffic and right after enabling the firewall once again.

Now remote tightvnc connections to the Windows XP Pro pc works like a charm once again, Thanks God ;)

I needed a handy way to recover some old data of an expired domain containing a website, with some really imprtant texts.
The domains has expired before one year and it was not renewed for the reason that it's holder was not aware his website was gone. In the meantime somebody registered this domain as a way to generate ads profit from it the website was receiving about 500 to 1000 visitors per day.
Now I have the task to recover this website permanently lost from the internet data. I was not able to retrieve anything from the old domain name be contained via google cache, yahoo cache, bing etc.
It appears most of the search engines store a cached version of a crawled website for only 34 months. I've found also a search engine gigablast which was claimed to store crawled website data for 1 year, but unfortunately gigablast contained not any version of the website I was looking for. Luckily (thanks God) after a bit of head-banging there I found a website that helped me retrieve at least some parts from the old lost website.

The website which helped me is called WayBack Machine

The Wayback Machine , guys keeps website info snapshots of most of the domain names on the internet for a couple of years back, here is how is how the website describes its own provided services:

The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine puts the history of the World Wide Web at your fingertips.


Another handy feature wayback machine provides is checking out how certain websites looked like a couple of years before, let's say you want to go back in the past and see how yahoo's website looked like 2 years ago.

Just go to web.archive.org and type in yahoo and select a 2 years old website snapshot and enjoy ;)

It's really funny how ridiculous many websites looked like just few years from now ;)

of the relics of saint great martyr George

Currently I'm once again in Pomorie's monastery for the Saint George's day

It is the second year I take the time to come for a pilgrimage in Pomorie's Monastery st. great Martyr George (Georgi).

I'm named after the great Christian saint and I do want to receive a spiritual blessing here in the monastery.

The believing Orthodox Christians this year could receive a spiritual blessing this year from the Monastery as some of the Holy Relics of a great saints are temporary in the monastery for the Monastery's feast day which is the day we commemorate our great Orthodox Christian martyr saint Georgi.

It's unique that this year by God's grace the monastery has temporary received a small particle of the holy relics of st. George.
The pilgrims could come here and does venerate the great saint martyrs I thank God for being blessed to be here in the monastery.

Herea are few photos of the Holy relics from the monastery, on the pictures you see the holy relics of Saint Cyprian & St. Justina on the right, st. George's holy relics in the center and st. Macrina's holy relics on the left.




On the picture above you see the Abbot of Pomorie monastery Father Ierotei ( who is a truly great father and a wonderful spirited man !) with the holy relics (bones) of saint Macrina on his left.

On this last picture you can see the holy relics of the Pomorie's monastery embedded into icons (the two icons on the right).



I thank God for blessing me with being here in this holy cloister and blessing me with being able to venerate the holy martyrs relics and through this bless me and strengthen me.!

It's important to say that we the orthodox Christians had the tradition to venerate our saint holy remains as a way to venerate God himself in accordance to the holy bible psalm which says Great and Glorious is God in his saints!

I'm sorry to provide my readers with this bad quality pictures, I'll try to put some better quality pictures of the holy remains in very short time.
Being able to show this holy remains to other orthodox christian brother and sisters is also a great grace and blessing which by God's grace was given to us the sinners! Just to close I'll say glory be to our God - The Holy Trinity now and forever and ever amen!

Though I really hate facebook, I was asked today by a friend who is not really into computers to disable, mail notification for him.

The mail notification, annoying feature is one of the stupidest idea someone ever had, as very active facebook users had their inbox totally spammed like with messages from facebook ...

Anyways, here is how I removed the facebook email notification

1. Login to facebook


2. Go to Account Settings and click on notifications and then uncheck the option, e.g.:

Account Settigns -> Profile Settings -> Messages


There are a number of messages that facebook by default sents, so in order to remove the mail notification messages I scrolled down and unchecked all related to facebook email notification.

Every now and then my FreeBSD router dmesg ( /var/log/dmesg.today ) logs, gets filled with error messages like:

pid 86369 (httpd), uid 80, was killed: out of swap space
swap_pager_getswapspace(14): failed
swap_pager_getswapspace(16): failed
swap_pager_getswapspace(11): failed
swap_pager_getswapspace(12): failed
swap_pager_getswapspace(16): failed
swap_pager_getswapspace(16): failed
swap_pager_getswapspace(16): failed
swap_pager_getswapspace(16): failed
swap_pager_getswapspace(14): failed
swap_pager_getswapspace(16): failed
swap_pager_getswapspace(8): failed


Using swapinfo during the swap_pager_getswapspace(16): failed messages were logged in, I figured out that definitely the swap memory over-use is the bottleneck for the troubles, to find this I used the command:

freebsd# swapinfo
Device 1K-blocks Used Avail Capacity Type
/dev/ad0s1b 49712 45920 3792 92% Interleaved


After some investigation, I've figured out that the MySQL server is causing the kernel exceeded swap troubles.

My current MySQL server version is installed from the ports tree, whether I'm using the bsd port /usr/ports/databases/mysql51-server/ and it appears to work just fine.

However I have noticed that the mysql-server is missing a my.cnf file!, which means the mysql server is running under a mode with some kind of default configurations.

Strangely in the system process list it appeared it is using a default my.cnf file located in /var/db/mysql/my.cnf

Below you see the paste from the ps command:

ps axuww freebsd# ps axuww | grep -i my.cnf | grep -v grep
mysql 7557 0.0 0.1 3464 1268 p1 I 12:03PM 0:00.01 /bin/sh /usr/local/bin/mysqld_safe --defaults-extra-file=/var/db/mysql/my.cnf --user=mysql --datadir=/var/db/mysql --pid-file=/var/db/mysql/pcfreak.pid mysql 7589 0.0 5.1 93284 52852 p1 I 12:03PM 0:59.01 /usr/local/libexec/mysqld --defaults-extra-file=/var/db/mysql/my.cnf --basedir=/usr/local --datadir=/var/db/mysql --user=mysql --pid-file=/var/db/mysql/pcfreak.pid --port=3306 --socket=/tmp/mysql.sock

Nevertheless it appeared the sql server is running the file /var/db/mysql/my.cnf conf was not existing! This was really weird for me as I'm used to have the default my.cnf from my previous experience with Linux servers!

Thus the next logical thing I did was to create my.cnf conf file in order to be able to have a proper limiting configuration for the sql server.

The FreeBSD my.cnf skele files are found in /usr/local/share/mysql/, here are the 4 files one can use as a starting basis for further configuration of the mysql-server.

freebsd# ls -al /usr/local/share/mysql/my-*.cnf
-r--r--r-- 1 root wheel 4948 Aug 12 2009 /usr/local/share/mysql/my-huge.cnf
-r--r--r-- 1 root wheel 20949 Aug 12 2009 /usr/local/share/mysql/my-innodb-heavy-4G.cnf
-r--r--r-- 1 root wheel 4924 Aug 12 2009 /usr/local/share/mysql/my-large.cnf
-r--r--r-- 1 root wheel 4931 Aug 12 2009 /usr/local/share/mysql/my-medium.cnf
-r--r--r-- 1 root wheel 2502 Aug 12 2009 /usr/local/share/mysql/my-small.cnf


I have chosen to use the my-medium.cnf as a skele to tune up, as my server is not high iron one e.g. the host I ru the mysql is a (simple dual core 1.2Ghz system).

Further on I copied the /usr/local/share/mysql/my-medium.cnf to /var/db/mysql/my.cnf e.g.:

freebsd# cp -rpf /usr/local/share/mysql/my-medium.cnf /var/db/mysql/my.cnf


As a next step to properly tune up the default values of the newly copied my.cnf to my specific server I used the Tuning-Primer MySQL tuning script

Using tuning-primer.sh is really easy as all I did is download it and launch it and follow the script suggestions to correct some of the values already in my.cnf

I have finally ended up with the following my.cnf after using tuning-primer.sh to optimize mysql server to work with my bsd host

Now I really hope the shitty swap_pager_getswapspace: failed errors would not haunt me once again by crashing my server and causing mem overheads.

Still I wonder why the port developer Alex Dupre - ale@FreeBSD.org choose not to provide the default mysql51-server conf with some kind of my.cnf file? I hope he had a good reason.

I've been struggling with fixing a nasty error with wicd network manager for about 2 hours.
The exact error message I faced was:

Connection Failed: Bad Password



The issue occured after some suggested updates from the Ubuntu graphical update tool.
The wireless network to which it was connected was a WPA-PSK (WPA2) Passphrase authentication.
The network key was properly typed in and was working well on another system so the error Connection Failed: Bad Password made no sense.

There was nothing unusual in /var/log/wicd/wicd.log , that made me even more curious about what might be causing the error. After a lot of try outs and a lot of readings and tests I finally got the cause of the weird Bad Password errors produced by wicd

Weirdly enought, somehow the Ubuntu package update tool has installed the default gnome network-manager package.
The installed network-manager package has mismatched somehow the way wicd connects to wireless networks and as a cause the wpa_supplicant binary was not properly invoked.

As a consequence of the network-manager being present on the system the wpa_supplicant process which made the exact connection to the wireless network was not launching in, the exact wpa_supplicant invocation missing was:

wpa_supplicant -B -i wlan0 -c /var/lib/wicd/configurations/0022b0aa424a -D wext


Luckily the solution to the notebook wireless device unable to connect to the Wireless network was simple.

All I had to do is completely remove all occurance of network-manager packages installed on the Ubuntu system, by issuing the commands:

ubuntu:~# apt-get remove --yes network-manager
ubuntu:~# dpkg --purge network-manager-pptp-gnome network-manager-pptp network-manager


The reason for issuing the a dpkg --purge command was my desire to completely get rid of all kind of network-manager related configurations.

Now after re-connecting with wicd wireless manager, it worked fine ;)

Are you looking for free software version of the old-school absolute Nintendo classic Super Mario Bros. ? :)

If you're an old-school geek gamer like me you definitely do ;)
I was lucky to find Secret Mario Chronicles a Linux version of Super Mario while I was browsing through all the available for installation Linux games in aptitude .

The game is really great and worthy to be played. It's even a better copy of the classical arcade game than SuperTux (another Mario like Linux clone game)



Both Super Mario Chronicles and Super Mario Bros are available for installation as .deb packages in the repositories of Ubuntu and Debian and most likely the other Debian direvative Linux distrubtion.

To install and play the games out of the box, if you're a Debian or Ubuntu user, just issue:

linux:~# apt-get install smc supertux


The other good news are that both of the games's engine, music and graphics are GPLed :)

To Launch the games after installation in GNOME I've used the menus:

Applications -> Games -> Super Mario Chronicles
and Applications -> Games -> Arcade -> SuperTux


The games can also be launched from terminal with commands:

hipo@debian:~$ smc
or hipo@debian:~$ supertux


The only thing I don't like about Super Mario Chronicles is that it doesn't have a good music and only sounds, just to compare SuperTux has an awesome level music.
Along with being an absolute classic I should say that these two games are one of the really good arcade games produced for Linux and if I have to rank them as a gamer among all the other boring arcade games today available for Linux this two ones ranks in the top 10 arcade games prdocuced for Linux

Enjoy and drop me a thanks comment !