Author: matt

Tips for Debian

Here are two things that I think are important, or at least they became important for me, with configuring a debian server.

First off, the debian box I’m configuring is behind a linksys NAT firewall/router.
Secondly, the users of the system are not on the same network (they are one ip address off in the ‘private’ network, separate from the ‘public’ network)

Ok, now for the problems: logging in w/ ssh is SLOW and sending mail out is SLOW.

The solutions:

1) add “UseDNS no” to your /etc/ssh/sshd_config file. Then, restart ssh. This causes sshd to not perform reverse dns lookups on each host that logs in. The “slowness” is that there is no dns entry, and the lookup has to time out before it will let users log in. If the problem is still not fixed, try upgrading to a new version of your software — I’ve heard problems with PAM authentication mucking with things (and this has been fixed).

2) in /etc/exim4/exim4.conf.template, comment out the line that says “host_lookup = *” Then run update-exim4.conf and restart exim. This does the same thing as the sshd trick. You can also try changing “rfc1413_query_timeout” to “0s”

Hope this helps someone!

Google News to RSS Feed Converter

This afternoon, I was really frustrated. I found an article I liked while looking through some financial sites, and I realized, “hey, i want to SUBSCRIBE to this article”

Well, i went to google news, thinking, “of course, they probably already have rss feeds of news searches, just like technorati lets you have of blog space.” Well, I couldn’t find it, so I looked around and found a couple tools, including RSSgenr8 by XMLHub.com. Then, in an hour or so I cooked together a little tool for me to use to track some news stories via my bloglines account.

Anyway, if it’s useful to me, it’s probably useful to someone else. If others find it useful, I may make the code look nice and release it as GPL.

For now, you can try it out: rss-a-tron-o-matic

Edit: Removed Link, google news supports RSS now.

I hate linksys

I hate seeing those little blue boxes everywhere.

They’re friendly, but it’s deceiving. I’ve had SOOO many of them break on me or on family i keep networks for.

Let’s see.

My parents went though three dead HPNA routers, but that’s mostly because of phone lines and lightning (and the devices being sensitive). This weekend, i just upgraded them to 802.11g after their second 802.11b router died a slow bizarre death. Then, I’ve been having problems (suddenly) with my own wrt54g — (not to mention the d-link that it replaced).

I just got through reconfiguring my own wrt54g after doing a factory reset, and hopefully, that will fix things. The bad part of it all was that i had to go to tricia’s laptop and to the tivo to reconfigure their WEP settings.

I mean, it’s nice that the linksys box only costs 60 bucks, but come on, is it too much to ask that the device not just up and die?

All Powerful Playlist Generator of the Future

I don’t know if this exists or not, but I certainly think it would be interesting.

I’d like a music playlist generator that does the following for me:

  1. Is random, but not entirely random. There should be a chance that the next song is similar to the current song.
  2. All probabilities should be adjustable
  3. There should be a probability that the next song is the next song on the album
  4. … that the next song is from the same album
  5. … that the next song is from the same artist.
  6. … that the next song is from the same genre.
  7. … that the next song is from a related genre.

Ideally, the probabilities would get higher as you went along — so that you’d likely stay in the same genre for a while, listening to a couple songs by a given artist before switching to the next artist.

Also, I think that the “smart playlists” in itunes are really just, “not retarded playlists” — I think they need a big upgrade.

I need to be able to groupings of unions and intersections (ands/ors), for one; and “subplaylists” would be good too. — Let me create a couple smaller playlists, and link them together into one larger playlist, possibly by having a, “where playlist = ‘x” option. That alone would let me do some ‘orring of ands’ that i want to do.

If anyone knows of something that does this, please reply to this post!

I wonder if it’s possible to write something like this using the itunes scripting interface?