A colleague of mine is not fond of backup MX hosts. He (correctly) points out that all incoming mail should be transmitted through another mail server anyway, so the backup MX hosts only serves as an attack point for spammers.
For the most part I agree with him, and that’s a good thing. After […]

Categories: System Administration

I recently started messing around with building my own Facebook application. I figured the best way to start learning was to download the demo application and get it working on the Slaptijack web server. I quickly ran into a problem:
PHP Fatal error: Call to undefined function json_encode()
The problem is that PHP 5.2 […]

Categories: System Administration

If you’ve been reading Slaptijack for a while, you might remember that I’ve been doing personal backups with rsync and hard links. The hard links conserve disk space by making sure I don’t have multiple copies of the same file lying around.
I recently added a new drive to my iMac expressly for the purpose […]

Categories: System Administration

Hello from our new Dell Vostro 1500 laptop!
We just got this laptop for my wife to use at home, but I thought I should spend a few minutes getting everything up and working (and blog about it). Generally speaking, I’m a Mac guy, but this laptop is pretty sweet and the price was right. […]

Categories: System Administration

This is just a quick note for you DNS operators out there.
Mark Andrews of ISC has notified the bind-announce mailing list that L.ROOT-SERVERS.NET has changed it’s ip address to 199.7.83.42. Mark’s suggested method for updating your BIND hints file is as follows:
$ dig ns . @a.root-servers.net > newfile
My configuration uses a file […]

Categories: System Administration