From: Daniel Pittman
Date: 09:15 on 18 Sep 2007
Subject: Sagator, the worst anti-spam software in the world...
You have to love standard test messages for spam and virus content.
They are so useful for testing your anti-virus filtering for email
stuff.
Like sagator. Our friend sagator. The best software in the world.
Sagator has a command line scanning tool, which is nice. I can use that
to scan some stuff as it passes through an annoying bit of commercial
software that is rather inflexible.
So, we test it:
[root@server1 tmp]# sgscan --quiet both.test
Total infected/spams files/emails: 0/1 in: 1.00 seconds
Well. That is odd. I know the tests are in there. Shall we see why it
thinks that wasn't infect, eh?
[root@server1 tmp]# sgscan --verbose both.test
both.test: SPAM [SpamAssassinD(),200.08]
Total infected/spams files/emails: 1/1 in: 0.00 seconds
Ah, excellent. Sagator was just doing what I asked. I asked politely
that it was quiet and didn't both me ... so it didn't. It didn't bother
me about anything.
Especially not having detected a virus or a spam. That would be noisy
and annoying, so it politely didn't tell me anything.
Thanks, sagator.
Daniel
From: Daniel Pittman
Date: 15:15 on 21 Apr 2006
Subject: gstreamer
Having recently converted a computer used by a family member from
Windows to Linux[1], things have gone smoothly. More so, in fact, than
I expected.
Except in one painful, hateful, evil way. KUbuntu, the distribution
that I chose, is nice -- but it uses the horrible GNOME gstreamer
multimedia infrastructure by default, because that is what Ubuntu do.
Which would be great, except that none of the gstreamer audio output
options work. At all. Except to abort the running process after they
complain about this.
This is especially annoying when a gstreamer based application registers
itself as the first preference plugin for embedded media *without*
showing up on the list of plugins.
So, after hitting that with a heavy rock ^W^W set of preferences for a
while and getting /that/ issue resolved, I try another bit of software
to get downloaded audio working, now that embedded streaming does.
All the options for playing back content use gstreamer -- of course --
is I have the choice of the movie player (no audio device, abort!) or
the iTunes alike music player. (hey, audio. whadaya know?)
Then, gstreamer gets to show more hate: play the audio to verify that
things work, and be happy -- they do. Exit the application. Listen to
the next thirty seconds of audio as gstreamer, presumably, runs through
the decoded buffer in the background and finally exits with the
"something broke" sound. (No error message, of course.)
Whee, plenty to hate there. Next try: switch between tracks, and hey,
nothing is happening. Hit the button to pause playback and, wow,
playback actually starts for no comprehensible reason.
Worse, I /know/ that all of these applications can run reliably, produce
high quality sound without these stupid problems. I have them running
myself, and working without hate.
I just can't apply the fix here, which is to get rid of hateful
gstreamer and use the xine engine instead, because the machine only has
a dial-up modem attached, and 20MB at 3KB/s is a little more than I can
take the time to get through...
In conclusion, let me just say: gstreamer, I hate you. GNOME, you
wretched pathetic attempt to introduce the complexity and inflexibility
of Windows to Linux, I hate you for causing gstreamer to form from the
=E6ther.=20=20
Gah!
Daniel
Footnotes:=20
[1] ...because the other options were having to clean up another virus
infestation, or having to pass on it and let someone else suffer.
--=20
Digital Infrastructure Solutions -- making IT simple, stable and secure
Phone: 0401 155 707 email: contact@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx.xxx.xx
From: Daniel Pittman
Date: 03:22 on 31 Aug 2005
Subject: Exchange Server
...yes, I know it is a tired little hate, but hey:
1.2 million connections every 24 hours, because you have a record in
some database table claiming you need to deliver an email, but the file
isn't in the queue.
Oh, yes, connect, then issue quit, then try again would be the right
response, for sure.
Stupid broken incapable incoherent useless mail transport agent run by
monkeys filled with crack and broken glass!
Gah!
Daniel
From: Daniel Pittman
Date: 04:11 on 19 Aug 2004
Subject: The Cobalt RaQ 550
I *HATE* the Cobalt RaQ 550 OS.
I have a client who hosts users on RaQ 550 based systems.
This is a world of pain. In large part, this is because every time they
screw up again I keep thinking "standard Linux system - months of
uptime".
Really, a hosting platform that cannot consistently manage more than a
few days of uptime before it reboots, usually without any help from
anyone, is an insane proposition.
I also hate the fact that they store all the core information in a
stupid proprietary database.
One that got corrupted on one of the servers.
In fact, one that hosts around 150 sites.
One which is a world of pain to try and migrate things away from
because, you guessed it, the core database is corrupted.
So now I get to try a next to bare metal recovery on a host that has no
sane way to achieve this.
*argh*
None of this even touches on the hate that you get when the thing is
actually working correctly either.
Daniel
From: Daniel Pittman
Date: 02:57 on 06 May 2004
Subject: Address Books...
Having ranted on half of the groupware hate that I feel at the moment,
let me rant on the other half - address books.
I know a bunch of people, some online, some offline, and some both.
I want to store a bunch of information on them, and have relevant
subsets accessible from:
* my mobile phone
* my mail client
* my web based "I can't get at my own PC" mail client
* my PDA, when I get one again
* my partners mail client
* my partners PDA
Now, I would have thought that somewhere along the way *someone* else
might have found this beneficial, but apparently not.
Several days of looking show me that there is *NOTHING* out there that
copes with any sort of shared address book in an even vaguely useful
fashion.
LDAP looks close - at least, in theory it can share the address book
between the machines that are on the local network, and export to other
devices like the phone...
...but no. LDAP is a read-goddamn-only address book system. Nothing,
it seems, actually supports writing back to an LDAP directory, except
for dedicated client software.
Oh, and possibly Outlook, but I can't say for sure because even that
isn't really documented!
The worst part is, of course, that even if I do find the magic to make
Mozilla, Gnus and LDAP all play nice, it still isn't going to do what I
want.
At that point I have an address book system that makes me hate it,
because it is full of insanely stupid data management decisions like
"a home phone number is a property of an individual person"
Bah. No it isn't. I don't want to have to go and update two, three or
even four records because the phone number at a house changed.
I want to see that person X lives at house Y, and I can call house Y on
phone number Z. Then I can update the record for the house, and have it
all work.
I want an address book system that understands the concept of "old"
contact details, so I can keep a historic record of things like, say,
"foobar173256@xxxxxxx.xxx" is actually my friend Joe, but that I can't
reach Joe there today.
I want an address book where I can track the relationship between
people, so that I can jump from someone to their partner, or their
housemate, or both - and know what the link is.
It also bothers me that writing this really makes me think that what I
am after is "Orkut in a can", because that just seems somehow wrong...
Daniel
From: Daniel Pittman
Date: 03:48 on 11 Dec 2003
Subject: OpenSSH and it's built-in denial of service "feature"
...I hate OpenSSH. It's sure nice to have a free SSH server and all,
but it is *so* full of hateful half-complete features.
In this case, we need to use password expiration on our systems, because
company policy demands it. So, we enable this. Life is good.[1]
Then a password expires. Fine, whatever. So, user tries to log in to the
master server where they need to change the password.[2]
OpenSSH knows that the password is expired, so they are not permitted to
log in. That is a fine feature, except...
...OpenSSH does not implement changing passwords.
Oh, yes, it can tell you to sod off if your password is now expired,
because that is so useful, especially when that is the only way to get
in to the machine to change the password.
Advice to programmers: if you want to leave your feature half finished,
do it is a way that isn't going to suddenly impale someone through the
heart and have them bleed to death.
At least the server isn't in the data center in Kansas yet...
Daniel
Footnotes:
[1] Well, the interface is hateful, and distributing passwords across
machines is hateful, but not quite as hateful as OpenSSH.
[2] See point one. All distributed password systems suck.
Generated at 10:27 on 16 Apr 2008 by mariachi