Yep, been some time…

A lot has changed since I last blogged.  I’ve left the financial department and moved to networks and systems.  This, methinks, is the place for me.  Work is a lot of fun these days, it’s very good!  I’m doing some very geeky things, I’ve been doing a lot with virtualization both in VMware and XenServer, I’ve been spending time with enterprise storage and backup solutions and absorbing everything I can from the crew I work with every day.  No day is predictable and I’ve yet to see boredom.  You can’t ask for more in a gig

I’m beginning a project which is both going to benefit me personally (because I like to know things) and professionally, MySQL server administration.  In short, there’s a need for somebody to have advanced skills with MySQL and potentially other SQL servers in the future.  I volunteered to be that guy.  I’m about to dive into beginner MySQL and progress into backups, tuning, database replication and high availability (HA).  I’m pretty psyched!  This is pretty much how I felt when I decided that I wanted to do something other than Windows and I jumped (both feet) into Linux.  I’ve got 5 books on hand, I’m beginning with the MySQL Administrator’s Bible and moving on to others from there.  Since I have no (NONE!) experience with MySQL or any database, I think it’ll be a bit of a slow start and will hopefully speed up in time…

I’ll be banging on this as much as possible over the Christmas break this year and we’ll go from there.  I should have no problem building test servers as needed (XenServer is making deploying a Linux VM trivial) and I’m sure I can grab some large collections of test data from existing MySQL databases on campus.  I should have more than I need for the project

In other news…  The linuxneophyte.com site is still on hiatus and will probably remain that way forever.  Umm, I guess retired is a better description than hiatus.  I’m thinking that if I blog at all, it’ll be here.  One ring to rule them all so to speak.  I’m not focusing on any single OS, Windows, Linux, Mac…  Use the right tool for the job…  If anyone is interested, my primary machine these days is a MacBook.  For day-to-day use, I don’t think there’s a better hardware/OS combo.  It’s simple enough to run Windows in a VM if you need it, you can install a whole collection of command line tools to get real work done and I don’t care who you are, you have to admit, Apple makes pretty hardware.

…and now, bed.

Before I go, here’s something a little cool, it turns out that one of the authors of the administrator’s bible (Sheeri K. Cabral) earned her education @ Brandeis.  Kind of slick that I’ll be taking skills she’s handing me and employing them @ the same Uni.

Sheeri, if you see this in a Google alert, /me says hi!

M

OK, so I had a fun ass day. Yesterday I sent a message to the GNHLUG folks so I could get a recommendation on an IMAP server. I got a few and had to decide between Dovecot and Courier. Both are open source solutions and the winner will be running on my Debian Etch (Linux for those that don’t know) box (which is in a VMware virtual machine).

I decided to implement IMAP so that I could hit my mail from multiple clients instead of just mutt. While I have no problem just using mutt, I can’t ask Natalie to. It’s a console program (no pretty clicky menus) and driven by keyboard shortcuts that have meaning for me and nobody else in the world. I have an email folder that gets all of the notifications of online statements from all of the people we have to give our money to each month. I want her to be able to look at it if she chooses. Yeah, I could forward messages to her mail account or go about this any other number of ways, but setting up a mail server gives me other benee’s and it’s just fun to play with this stuff.

I won’t bore you with the details of configuring the server or making the config changes I needed in my mail clients, but I will tell you that I went with Dovecot and that both mutt and Thunderbird are amazingly flexible and powerful tools. I loved them before, I want to marry them now.

Since I’ve been using mutt for a couple of years now, I’ve grown very accustomed to managing email from 9 accounts (and a lot of it) with folders in one program. I’ve got it set up so that a particular email address and PGP key is selected based on what folder I’m composing/replying to messages in. It’s VERY handy. I never have to worry about which email address is responding to what list or friend. As long as my mail filtering is working properly, my client does the work. That all probably sounds confusing, so as an example, if I’m replying to a message in my Gmail folder, then the program knows that I want to reply with my @gmail.com address and the corresponding PGP key. I wanted the same capability in my GUI client. Enter Thunderbird and the “Enigmail” and “Folder Account” add-ons. It allows me to do just that, I simply need to select which identity to assign to a particular folder and I’m done. It really is that easy. It takes a few minutes to configure your identities and the GPG keys that go with them, a few changes to folder properties and BAM!

Folks, try doing that with Outlook. I’ll wait… Oh you couldn’t? Not surprising, MS doesn’t think you want to use PGP so it’s not an option. Never mind how common and effective it is. You’ll have to go out and buy PGP Desktop. No thanks, I’ll stick with the open source programs that have great devs & users who contribute to the project. The combination just produces far superior tools. That’s *almost* all from the Outlook bashing front for today, but there’ll prolly be more later. I’ve been using it at work for a few weeks now and it SUCKS. The ONLY thing it does right is integrate mail and calendaring if you have a MAPI backend, other than that… meh. There, now that really is the last of the OL smash for today.

So I now have all I wanted from my mail server and I’m super pleased. It took almost no time to set up. It would have gone even faster if I had any sed or shell scripting skills. Ahh well, something to work on.

Soooo, you’ve been using IE to visit sordid sites and now your machine is fouled up with all sorts of malware. This mess was avoidable, so clean your machine and put on a browser prophylactic before indulging in your favorite solitary past times again…

What you’ll need:

SeaMonkey
NoScript
MultiZilla/MultiViews [optional]

Overview:

We’re going to be installing the SeaMonkey (SM) browser and it’ll be used to view sites that you don’t trust (you decide what that means in this instance, I’ll define it as anything that would appall your mother). NoScript and Multizilla are add-ons for SM, NoScript will prevent web pages from running scripts (java, etc) and potentially mucking up your machine, Multizilla will give SM some extra clean-up options.

01: Installing SeaMonkey

Download and install SM, I opted to install only the browser, you can perform a complete install if you want to check out all of the open source tools provided in the suite. I also opted not to use Quick Launch.

Following the installation, SM will launch and ask if you want to make it your default browser, answer No.

02: Enhancing/Protecting SeaMonkey

Using SM, open http://noscript.net/getit and click the "Install Noscript latest version*" link. You will be asked if you want to install the software, you do, click the Install button. You will be asked if you want to install NoScript to your profile, click OK. You should see a dialog explaining that NoScript has been successfully installed and will be available to you when you restart the browser. Click OK to dismiss the notification.

Still using SM, open http://multizilla.mozdev.org/installation/installation.html. This page can be a little confusing, don’t install the experimental nightlies, you want to scroll down until you see "Free MultiZilla [Installation] or [Download]", click the Installation button, you will again be asked if you want to continue, click the Install button. The next dialog will tell you to "Select OK, for a single user installation or Cancel, for a multi-user installation", click the OK button. If there are no problems, you’ll be told the install was a success and to restart your browser, click the OK button to dismiss the notification.

03: Configuring SeaMonkey

Close all open SM windows (if you opted to install and use Quick Launch you’ll want to close out of that as well). Now start SM again. It’s going to start with an open sidebar (F9 or View > Show/Hide > Sidebar to kill it) and some extra tool bars which I tend to hide (F12 to hide the MultiZilla bar & F1 to hide the Personal bar).

Now to configure MultiZilla: Choose Edit > Preferences select MultiZilla and click Open Preference Manager. Select the Privacy header and put a check into the boxes next to the options below:

• Clear disk cache on exit
• Clear location bar history on exit
• Clear global history on exit
• Clear all cookies on exit
• Clear download history on exit
• Clear all form data on exit

Now select the Sessions header, on the Save Behavior tab, choose Don’t Save Sessions, on the Restore Behavior tab choose Don’t Restore Sessions.

Note: There are other settings you can tweak to manage cookies and other content both in MuliZilla prefs and SM prefs. It’s up to you how paranoid you want to be.

04: Start Browsing

At this point we’re ready to go. SeaMonkey will clear its cache, history, etc when you exit the program and all scripts are disabled on all pages. You’ll notice that when you go to a page that has a script, a yellow notification bar will open in the bottom of your browser window, in that bar there’s an Options button. Clicking it will allow you to grant that site the ability to run scripts either permanently or temporarily, that way if you really NEED some functionality and NoScript blocks it, you can allow it.

Notes:

From time to time, SeaMonkey, NoScript and MultiZilla will let you know that there’s an update available for them. I would suggest installing the updates as they present themselves. They can add functionality and security fixes.

I’m not promising that this will keep your machine free and clear of malware, but it goes a long way to prevent infection. It’s certainly safer than using IE (switch to Firefox already!). YMMV.

While this was aimed at Windows users, NoScript and MultiZilla work just as well on the Linux release of SeaMonkey, don’t forget to install them if that’s your OS of choice

So, looks like I’ve really been keeping up with this blogging thing. Last time was August 3rd…. Well, to be honest, that was the last time I posted. I see a draft here about a new laptop and Vista that is waiting for completion.. I’m gonna count that as a 75% complete blog session (my blog, my rules).

I just spent all of 10 minutes installing yet another WordPress blog, this time for my dad. I can’t get over just how easy it is to create one. All you need is the ability to create a MySQL user and database (cPanel on any Linux hosting provider gives you that), FTP or (preferably) shell access to the server and the ability to edit a text file.

WordPress has a famous 5 minute install that you can follow to do the job, the extra 5 minutes (in my case) is used up going back into cPanel and then phpMyAdmin to rename the default “admin” account to something else and to tweak the permalinks as I just can’t stand the default. Poof! You got yourself a new blog and you’re ready to share your opinions and inane blabber with the rest of the world!

Check out my Dad’s blog, he’ll be posting topics he covers on his weekly WATD radio show.

I’ve decided that in an effort to do more with things I enjoy that I’ll be picking up blogging here. I’ve pretty much let all of the fun geek stuff I do fall off of a cliff into oblivion. That of course leads to just being bored and uninterested in the “stuff” that I do. Time to change that

I hope to pick up on my Linux blogging over on my other site as well.. For now I just want to get started again. What you’ll find here is stuff that *I* find interesting. Crap about my life, my interests, whatever. That will most likely lead to some geeky things, some fun things, some really horrid gallows humor and other awful things. Just have to see where it leads to.

For now, check out this site: http://icanhascheezburger.com/. I like it because the kitteh comments crack me up. Sure there’s some cute animal stuff, but if you’ve ever spent any time reading IRC chat or watching the cool kids talk in 1337 speak, you’ll enjoy some of these. The wife and I have pretty much sat in the family room reading each and every one of these.