Sep 11, 2009
New Server
Site was down for almost a week, due to my provider being DDoSed. Email was broken more so as SMTP was the target, but it was rather odd that the data center decided to block outgoing SMTP connections from a block of IPs, where my VPS is unfortunately a member of.
I've since switched to a new provider. This makes my third OpenVZ VPS, though I was meaning to move on to Xen. At 6 US dollars a month though, it seems quite a bargain, so I'll have to see where this goes.
The move also afforded me to change some stuff under the hood. Apache is gone, replaced by nginx (although this required having blosxom running under a thttpd backend, until I can whip up a FastCGI equivalent.) BIND gave way to maradns, cutting down significant memory usage. And dropbear replaces the OpenSSH server. Exim 4 and dovecot remain though, as they seem to quite big (or small) enough for my purposes.
I'll document more about the changes in later posts. In the meantime, I need to catch up on emails and packaging...
Tags: debian, maradns, nginx, openssh, perl, www. | Posted at: 15:45 | 2 Comments/Trackbacks.
Sep 24, 2008
Broken Comment Posting Fixed; New #olpc-ph Grassroots Group
Thanks to Wolfger for pointing out an HTTP 500 while trying to greet me by comment. :D I totally forgot about upgrading Net::Akismet to the new version that comes with my patch, as described previously. All the while I was thinking Net::Akismet was doing too good of a job keeping out comment spam, when it may as well have kept out all comments :( But its my fault, really.
Among other things, Jerome has finally started a new grassroots group for the OLPC effort here in the Philippines, fresh from the success at the recently-concluded SFD. There's now an IRC channel up too, with logs available locally (text-only, until I can set up a web and fileserver frontend.) I'm personally interested on running a port of Inferno and perhaps help out on the TODOs for it.
Tags: community, inferno, life, olpc, perl, www. | Posted at: 00:31 | 0 Comments/Trackbacks.
Jun 04, 2008
Making Net-Akismet play with TypePad AntiSpam
I've been getting a lot of blog spam lately; it appears that Akismet is slipping. Fortunately, there's a new Akismet-compatible alternative at TypePad AntiSpam which I read about from Justin Mason's post. And it being perl, I decided to try it out here on my blog (never mind it being Blosxom, as long as it uses Frank Hecker's feedback plugin that in turn uses Net::Akismet.
But alas, the current version of Net::Akismet doesn't support user-supplied REST endpoints, so I added it, and promptly filed a report on the CPAN. Hopefully it gets included in the next release very soon.
As for the Blosxom feedback plugin, tweaking it to use the new feature in Net::Akismet was a cinch, so only the real test (of incoming spam filtered by TypePad) remains. Hopefully it does work.
[PS: Looks like the first line in blosxom posts don't like package-like names such as Net::Akismet (during editing my blog title disappeared on the render!) Needs to be looked at later...]
Tags: akismet, blosxom, perl, www. | Posted at: 10:18 | 0 Comments/Trackbacks.
May 11, 2008
Adding Some Blog Bling
I added some more bling to this blog last night, like a spiffy new CSS theme (based on twocolumncss) and a handful of plugins to improve feed generation, readable and extensionless URIs, and support for comments and trackbacks. Blosxom indeed is such a flexible toolkit for making a blog! :D
That said, I did find one or two quirks in the plugins existing in the blosxom and blosxom-plugins CVS repository; I'll post patches to my git mirrors of these repositories. I'll probably add some more features on some of the plugins I used too (that reminds me, I should put up a list somewhere.)
Tags: blosxom, perl, www. | Posted at: 01:46 | 0 Comments/Trackbacks.
May 10, 2008
Subdomains for Blog and Code
I have reorganized the site a bit. This blog is now on its own subdomain (and www currently redirects to it.) My existing and new projects (under their own git trees) are now on the code subdomain, with gitweb as root.
I'll probably put up a wiki as the main www, and maybe even lists (in case some of my projects go gold heh.)