Sandbox
Gold Bug is real![edit] |
| Posted by Nad on 23 September 2015 at 14:38 |
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This post has the following tags: Our third year on the land
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| When Pete and me were kids we loved the Richard Scarry picture books such as Cars and Trucks and Things That Go. One of the common features was that may pages would have a tiny gold bug character hiding somewhere such as in the first picture on the below. He's still around these days and even stars in his own book!
We always thought that he was just an imaginary character but yesterday I found that he's real! And he followed Beth and I here to Brazil and has been hiding for four years! He would have stayed hidden too, but he must have slipped and fallen because I found him in the bowl of water in the bathroom :-( Fortunately he was ok and I scooped him out and put him on a piece of wood to dry out. Now he's gone into hiding again :-) 
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Server OS upgraded from Debian 7.4 to 8.2[edit] |
| Posted by Nad on 9 September 2015 at 18:02 |
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This post has the following tags: Server
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Debian 8 has been the stable version since April, but I only just got round to upgrading the server today. Even then the main motivation was because of a sudden huge increase in spam which turned out to be due to two things. First we were being blocked from using the domain black-lists, and second because our version of Debian was using version 3.3.2 of [SpamAssassin], but it needs to use at least version 3.4 to make full use of the domain black-lists. Here's an example X-Spam email header showing that we're being blocked:
The first problem was happening because the black-list services run over DNS, but they will block requests from DNS servers that use their free services too much. We were using our server host's DNS servers which were being blocked because they relay requests to the black-lists from thousands of their clients, but they don't pay for the black-list services. This issue is easily fixed though, we simply needed to set up our own caching DNS server so that when SpamAssassin requests information form the black-lists they're going through our own server that makes only a minimal amount of requests. See Configure mail server for more details. The best way to fix the second problem was to upgrade the OS because Debian 8 uses SpamAssassin version 3.4.0 which is modern enough to properly support the black lists. Here's an example of what the X-Spam headers are looking like now :-) Another thing that's much more up to date in the new Debian version is our web-server, Nginx. This was only on version 1.2 before but now has gone all the way up to 1.6! This is good news because versions prior to 1.3 had no support for WebSockets, so now our page comments no longer need to use Ajax-polling which is very unresponsive and wasteful. |
Vege patch starting to look a bit better :-)[edit] |
| Posted by Nad on 4 September 2015 at 19:05 |
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This post has the following tags: Our third year on the land
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Wow it's been a long time with no blogging! We were mainly focussing on our meditation practice, but then did our three monthly trip to Caxias to do our shopping which always takes a lot of both mental and physical energy out of us, and takes a few weeks to recover from and get back into our meditative state again. But nothing much has really happened that's worth post a blog item about, except that the vege patch has recently start looking a lot better, here's some pictures of it as of September 2015 :-)
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