So the motherboard in Pluto died the other day. Pissed me off. It was troublesome when I put it in (it was used) and it seems to have gone back to the problem it was having before. I tried another motherboard in it, but it was also used and had some problems. I finally broke down and bought a new motherboard and processor (so I could speed the server up a bit).

After I got the thing installed, it didn't want to work very well, at least with the hard drives. I kept getting an Invalid partition message from the FreeBSD boot manager. I'd been having some problems because it was my first install of FreeBSD 5.x anyway, so I thought I'd try and reinstall it. That still didn't work.

I finally broke down and decided that a Linux install would make me a better desktop anyway, so I installed that instead. Two days later, I've got it up and running, almost completely. I've also got KDE using the multimedia keys on the keyboard. I just have a few more pieces of software to install and it'll be finished.

I've been using imap-uw for POP3 and IMAP access for my webserver. I played with Cyrus a little bit, but it caused a few problems of it's own (mostly because I didn't have time to learn to set it up properly, but that's still a possibility for the future). My problem though, is that imap-uw, or at least the version I have installed right now, has some issues with pam. I'm updating my ports tree right now to upgrade it and it's dependencies to make sure I'm using the newest version. Hopefully that'll solve the problem, but I'll have to wait for this update run to finish before I know.

I thought about selling okcbynight.com or just not renewing it, but I think I've found a new use for it. I'm currently setting up horde on it for use as an in-character computer system. I experimented with at least six different portal/webmail systems before deciding that thsi was probably the best option. I played with XOOPS for awhile, but it lacked a lot of features I needed for what I was doing. Someone else recommended e107 as an alternative, but I haven't looked into it yet. And I use postnuke on this site and a couple others, but it's not userfriendly enough in parts and lacks a few features I needed. The others I tried aren't worth mentioning.

Hopefully, horde will do everything I'm needing and I won't have to scrap what I've got so far and start over again. So far so good on that front.

i've decided that I've been suffering from Insomnia for the last couple weeks. I just hadn't noticed before. My doctor had prescribed Flexeril to help with my back problems. It's been helping immensely with the pain. I haven't been taking the average of 1600 mg of Ibuprofen a day that I had been, but it's been affecting my sleep. I've slept like a baby, but I've been oversleeping. The night's I don't take it like I'm supposed to, I barely sleep at all. I think that's why I've been crashing so hard when I take the Flexeril

I just had a idea that might make my life easier in the future, but I'm really not sure how to implement it. I have three computers that I do work on. So I end up with lots of documents between those 3 machines. The documents encompass personal (i.e. non-work related) things, work related (i.e. regular job) and other work related (i.e. on the side). But a good portion of these documents are needed at any of the three computers at any given time. And there's a lot of crossover between the three categories.

Two of the comptuers are on all the time so synchronizing them could be automated. The other computer is a laptop and portable, so it's on sporadicly and not always online, so it could possibly be automated, but more likely it would be manually synchronized.

I know there are a couple different pieces of software out there that could accomplish my task. I'm thinking sothing along the lines of CVS might be the right way to go. That would allow me to track changes in files as well as provide for synchronization.

I recently saw a link to an article on the web on someone's livejournal. The article was titled Bush arrested in Canada for war crimes. I clicked on the link and noticed several things (and looked up a few others) that show this article (and website) are fake.

First, the url starts with www.world-cnn.com. Very few sites would create another domain name like that. At the most, it would've been world.cnn.com. Second, today is December 4, 2004. The newest article on the site is November 30, 2004. Not very good up to date information now, is it? Third, after performing a whois on world-cnn.com, it shows the domain name was first registered November 30, 2004. Weird, huh?

Those were the obvious signs. The fact that cnn.com didn't mention anything about this (or any other major news source for that matter) is a big indication it's a hoax. If people would pay more attention, and double check their sources (especially before forwarding hoaxes to my inbox), I'd have a lot less crap like this to read.

The most likely explanation for the site is that it was set up by some anti-Bush person in Canada. (For the record, copying over a site's content, changing bits of it and posting it to a different site really isn't that complicated.)

I've been playing around with the idea for awhile and I finally did it. Here's the redesign:

I learned an important lesson today. Sendmail includes and access configuration file. In order for it to accept mail for a domain so that it can forward it on (which is necessary for us at my work to pass things to the Exchange server), it has to have the domain name in the access file. However, if you just put the domain name in the file, people can use your server and send spoofed mail as if it's from one of the users of that domain name. You have to include a To:domainname RELAY on the line instead of just domainname RELAY. I tightened down the security on my servers a little bit this way today. It should help with some of the spam problem.

I've been playing with my Gentoo installation on my laptop today. I finally finished getting power management support setup so that it will detect if it's on battery power and adjust things accordingly. I'm fairly happy with the results for that. Also, I updated to a newer revision of the kernel and got the nvidia module for it and the driver for X running. It's amazing how much of a difference it makes in the performance of X.