If ever you see the following when using SSH and it all seems inexplicable.
Read from remote host www.somehwhere.com: Connection reset by peer
There may be a quick cure (caveat, your mileage may vary). Some routers, i.e. Linksys WRT54G will close a connecting that does not appear busy. So far I have found that if I add
ServerAliveInterval = 300
ServerAliveCountMax = 300
to my /etc/ssh/ssh_config file then everything is fine.
Basically we are send a message to the server every “ServerAliveInterval” seconds and if the client has not had a response after “ServerAliveCountMax” messages then the connection will disconnect. This makes the connection look active to hardware that thinks it’s doing you a favour by disconnecting idle connections.
see “man ssh_config” for more details.
I have also noticed the following method but have not tried it
echo 300 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/tcp_keepalive_time
Packard Bell Store and Save
Their 400Gb 3500 model works a treat under Debian stable. It comes up as a scsi device when switched on. To see the device use dmesg and look for something like the following output.
sdc1
sd 13:0:0:0: Attached scsi disk sdc
sd 13:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg3 type 0
Finding solutions
In teams, to find a solution, create a shared problem.
Pay to display Jobs
I have had a recent spate of people spamming the job site. I knew this would happen eventually. The site has PR6, this means that spammers think if they have a link on the site it will leak enough pagerank to warrant spamming it. This has meant that a lot of spammers have been putting fake job adverts on the site.
I suppose the only way around this is to ask for money since it is really only cost that will stop a spammer, i.e. if it costs more to spam the site than they get back in return then they are not going to do it, I hope 😉
DBD::Pg::dr::imp_data_size
If you are running Apache in a chroot env and you receive something like this.
null: Had to create DBD::Pg::dr::imp_data_size unexpectedly at /usr/local/lib/perl/5.8.4/DBI.pm line 1190
One cure is to make sure you have copied all your PostgreSQL library files into the directory in your chroot environment.
swaks and TLS
A good command for testing if your TLS setup works in exim4 is:
swaks -s insert.host.name.here -tls -q ehlo
It goes something like this.
~$ swaks -s insert.host.name.here -tls -q ehlo
=== Trying insert.host.name.here:25…
=== Connected to insert.host.name.here.
EHLO debian
<- 250-insert.host.name.here Hello somewhere.com [81.107.112.224]
<- 250-SIZE 52428800
<- 250-PIPELINING
<- 250-AUTH PLAIN_TEXT LOGIN
<- 250-STARTTLS
STARTTLS
EHLO debian
<~ 250-insert.host.name.here Hello cpc2-cable.ntl.com [8.0.1.4]
<~ 250-SIZE 52428800
<~ 250-PIPELINING
<~ 250-AUTH PLAIN_TEXT LOGIN
QUIT
<~ 221 insert.host.name.here closing connection
250-XXXXXXXA
If you get the above when inspecting the putput from your SMTP server then you most likely have something inspecting your SMTP or ESMTP traffic. In my case it was a CISC0 851 router. I believe a most CISCO gear especially PIX firewalls are culprits for this. Below is what I was getting:
250-SIZE 52428800
250-PIPELINING
250-AUTH PLAIN_TEXT LOGIN
250-XXXXXXXA
250 XXXB
starttls
500 unrecognized command
If you want to see a genuine output from a server try the following.
debian:~# telnet YOURSERVER.COM 25
Trying 8.8.8.9…
Connected to YOURSERVER.COM.
Escape character is ‘^]’.
220 YOURSERVER.COM ESMTP Exim 4.5 Sun, 21 Jan 2007 19:16:18 +0000
When you see the above, enter:
EHLO [10.10.10.8]
and the following will be the output.
250-YOURSERVER.COM Hello me.org [81.107.112.224]
250-SIZE 52428800
250-PIPELINING
250-AUTH PLAIN_TEXT LOGIN
250-STARTTLS
250 HELP
Then type:
STARTTLS
to see.
220 TLS go ahead
This means your encrypted link to the server is working.
Have fun.
Base64 decoding error exim4
If you get the following error when testing TLS.
TLS error on connection from … (DH params import): Base64 decoding error.
Regenerate your /var/spool/exim4/gnutls-params file. You may have upgraded exim and it can no longer read the file. See:
http://www.mail-archive.com/exim-dev@exim.org/msg01219.html
Some Books I read in 2006
This list is not exhaustive.
The format is as follows:
Book Name: rating (1 – 10): % read where not 100%.
Agile Project Management with Scrum: 6 :
Agile and Iterative Development: A Manager’s Guide: 6 :
Built To Last: 7 :
Code Complete: 7 :
Good To Great: 7 :
Gung Ho: 5 :
Lean Thinking: 7 :
Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture: 6 :
Peopleware: 9 :
Rapid Development: 8 : 50%
The Mythical Man Month: 9 :
Thinking in Java: 7: 75%
Who Moved My Cheese: 5 :
Debian and RRDTool
If you are wondering where your rrdtool library is and are sure it is not here.
/usr/local/rrdtool/lib
try
/usr/lib/