Bash

A couple of years ago I've shared my expierience about how to setup virtual mail hosting with Postfix and Dovecot. Some time ago I needed to make that accessible via Web. So, a webmail.

After trying a couple of engines I've decided in favour of SquirrelMail. This worked like a charm with SSL, etc. so the full mailing functionality was available just out of the box. The one thing I was still missing was a possibility to change password. There are already several plugins to achieve the goal, for instance when logging in over LDAP, but nothing could really fit for me. That's because the maildir setup I'm using is non standard. Luckily, the SquirrelMail API is simple and just well documented, so I was able to write a custom change password plugin very fast.

This time I needed some geographical data evaluation for one of my current projects. The data used to be opensource and as possible qualitative and complete. After spending some time in front of the famous search engine window there was a solution:

http://www.geonames.org/

That's the first sentence from the site:

The GeoNames geographical database covers all countries and contains over eight million placenames that are available for download free of charge.

Geonames is used by number of sites. Besides data it has also web services and code libraries in many programming languages to access them.

Referencing my previous article about the mali server configuration, I'm continuing with spam and antivirus scanners setup. On my Debian box i'm installing the following:



With this groups spamd and clamav are automatically created. Before you start, keep in mind - if something goes wrong, allways check the /var/log/mail.* files.

Hi there.

The things I wanna to talk about today are - relational databases building. Particularly I would discuss such the attainments of relational sql as join and subselect. For my experiment I'll take PostgreSQL and Python.

So, lets start:

About a month ago I've written a simple domain checker, which is using whois.net to get the domains availiable. The main goal was to find free 3-symbols domains.



The thing is very simple and the results can be kept on. Additionally it sends mail messages about each found domain. Lets see, what it brought for the .de domains ( about 9000 free domains was found )

Yesterday I was configuring the mail server on my hosting. Because I'm mostly doing programming, not administration, I'm writing this notes which are serving as a simple how to, if I must do it once more in a couple of years.

In spite of the fact I've done all on Debian, all the described things schould work on some other Linux distribution as well. First install Postfix and Dovecot

The configuration will fulfill the following points:

• IMAP over SSL


• SMTP over SSL (Postfix using Dovecot SASL)


• Multiple domains with virtual users


• Mailing possibility for the local users


• Mailboxes in the Maildir format

If you have a hosting, you usually have limited disk capacity on it. Some times there are file managers in the hosting control panel, some times not. Here I will explain how to get disk space used, if your hosting control panel has no file manager. | So, each GNU system always has two built-in commands to determine the disk and file space usage. They are 'du' and 'df'. Because most hostings working with GNU based operating systems like BSD or Linux, we have a right to suppose, that we have ssh login and aforementioned commands available on it. If it's so on your hosting, read further

I'm a midi fan, but since I have a soundcard without the ability to load soundfonts in the memory, I looked constantly for a solution, which will make possible to listen midi. And I found timidity.
| So, the ability to listen midi files means at the same time the ability to edit midi files, and that's exactly what I'm pressing for. I've tried to play midi with timidity, and the result exceeded all my expectations. But the first difficulty for me was - not all sounds was on the right place or was missing at all. So first what I needed was a good midi map and soundfonts. First I've searched SuSE root tree and found some things under /usr/share/sounds/sf2, but their quality was not sufficiently even for purposes of listening and they was incomplete. Than I've found some really good soundfonts there (ftp://ftp.lysator.liu.se/pub/awe32), they have much fewer "gaps" and can be already used, but I don't know if they are completely GPL friendly. Finally, when I found two solutions - the timidity rpm from Arklinux and freepats (SuSE recommended), that containing all complete midi maps and all the soundfonts needed, I've understood how great fits the timidity for midi playing. And now I'll tell you, how to make a software midi synthesizer with timidity.

aMuleis a very comfortable p2p client. For Linux it has even the daemon aMuled and the text style interface aMuleCMD, which means a great solution for the remote control. | First install amule (with yast apt or whatever you use) or download aMule here http://www.amule.org/ and compile it. Don't forget to create or edit /home/username/.aMule/amule.conf.

One day I needed to make a big pdf file from many graphic files. There was no simply solution for this and I wrote this little shell script.

There are several programs, that can convert any file to pdf (for example OpenOffice). But if you have 100 separate files and you want to make a one book from them or print them, it's no so pleasant to do this manually, adding file by file to OpenOffice and then saving as a .pdf or printing. That's why I'm showing you my solution for this.