In a bizarre political move from the guys at CodeWeavers, they are giving away copies of their CrossOver products for today only.  Head to their website for all the details, and to register for your serial number.

I now have a very unique set of requirements for a password wallet.  I realistically need something that is file based (as opposed to database based) and runs on Windows, Windows Mobile, and Mac OS X.

It needs to be file based, so I can use FolderShare to keep it in sync between our fileserver, my work PC, and the Mac.

The platforms are obvious.  I still have a Windows based desktop in my home office, and a Windows based laptop for work.  I won't be switching phone platforms for quite a while.

I've been using Ilium Software's eWallet for ages.  It meets all of my requirements, almost.  I actually have it working on the Mac under Darwine, however there are some issues.  Occasionally, the clipboard between X11 and the Mac has stopped working (i.e. things copied in eWallet can't be pasted into a normal Mac app and vise versa.)  It also has this totally bizarre problem where in the card view, all the text is in some bizarre symbol based font.

I went on a big hunt for a cross platform password wallet.  SplashID looked perfect, until reading the fine print.  The only way to move from a desktop platform to a handheld platform is via it's appropriate sync manager.  I don't actually ActiveSync my phone with anything except the Exchange server.  They do have this awful export/import work around, which would mean clear-text versions of my wallet available every time I needed to update it.  It's also not clear if the Mac and Windows versions are file compatible.

The last one that I checked was the open source project Password Safe.  Their tact for cross platform seems to be to go the Java route.  There's an ancient Pocket Pc version (from 2003) but that seems to be dead.  I guess I could attempt to port it to Windows Mobile and Mac OS X, but given my lame coding skills, and lack of time, this seems like a very poor choice.

I've just now seen KeePass which is another open source option, this time with active Windows, Windows Mobile, and OS X versions.  I think I know what I need to test next.  Migrating my data is going to be a bitch.

[update 03-14-2008]
Marc Tassin from Ilium Software sent me an email pointing to their official blog, and their iPhone announcement.  This quote definitely gives me something to think about:
"4. Will you make a Mac version?
I’m not allowed to give you a definite answer on that one yet, but as some technical types might already know, the iPhone and the Mac run very similar software. I’ll leave it at that for now."

Lifehacker pointed to a Win32 port of Evolution (the Linux Outlook substitute.)  Unfortunately, I can't get it to connect to our Exchange server, which is secured with SSL.  Bummer.  It seems I'm not the only one having problems.

I have Linux box that sits in front of our Exchange server, and does spam and virus scanning on our incoming mail.  Before now, I've just been having it pass all mail through, and then having our Exchange server reject mail for recipients who aren't really in our domain.  This caused our BadMail directory to have tens of thousands of files in there, so I decided to do a little searching to find out if Postfix could check an LDAP directory for its list of valid recipients.  I didn't find that, but I did find an nifty perl script that queries active directory and pulls all the smtp addresses for the domain.   It seems to be working well, so far.  My only issue with the script is that it only works for one OU in Active Directory.  I have two, one for real people, and one for other types of accounts.  I'll have to figure out a good way to modify the script so it pulls from both OUs.

My work machine's Windows install is in that spiral of death all Windows machines seem to get into, so I'm in the early planning stages of a rebuild.  One of the things I intend to do this time around is to completely encrypt my D: (data) drive.  (I had been thinking about it even before the idea that I might actually have to check my laptop, but now it seems even more prudent.)  Unfortunately, I have 16 GB of applications on my D: drive, that I definitely don't intend to run off an encrypted disk (my company has a standard image, and the C: drive is only 12 GB.  Enter Gnome Partition Editor.  I knew that Knoppix had been able to resize NTFS partitions, but you have to do it at the command line, and isn't necessarily for the faint of heart.  gparted is a LiveCD or LiveUSB Linux image who's only purpose in life is to resize partitions.  Because of this goal, its only a 30 MB download, and its a GUI.  I'll definitely be checking this one out.

Yes, I know that our photo gallery has been down for ages.  I actually almost had it up, but SUSE and Gallery just wouldn't get along.  I've just started building a new CentOS based machine that will hopefully behave a bit better.

Iv'e been having a heck of a time trying to get our webserver back up and running.  Since my new box is an AMD64, I figured it made the most sense to go with a Linux distribution that supported 64-bit, and I chose SUSE 10.  Well, the Apache install that they have is really special.  I figured out most bits, but the tough part is gallery.  It seems that as gallery is running, some of the files end up getting owned by root, instead of by the webserver user.  Needless to say, this is bad.  The only thing I can figure is that the apache process that runs as root must be doing more than spawning new processes.  I posted on Gallery's forums, but haven't gotten a response yet.  Considering I didn't really like the arrangement for Apache anyway, I decided to blow apache away in YAST, and install fresh from source.  Well, that didn't work so well, either.

make throws an error:
"/usr/lib/libexpat.so: could not read symbols: File in wrong format"

A quick Google turns up Alistair's cakeBlog.  Unfortunately, the bug he linked to seems to be here, now.  The recommended solution seems to be "the other workaround is to remove the 32-bit expat-devel package and leave the 64-bit expat-devel installed: that case works fine".  I'll have to do that tonight, because I don't know how to run a cli version of YAST.

One of the functions that I intend to run on a virtual machine is an "email firewall", basically an email gateway that does spam and virus filtering.  On my previous Linux box, I used sendmail, spamassassin, and MailScanner.  I started to build something similar on my new SUSE VM, but soon found out that postfix is different enough from sendmail that I was really lost. I figured that this sounds like the kind of thing that might already be out there, so I headed over to the VMWare Technology Network Community Virtual Appliances page.  Low and behold, the second entry is for Eagle Eye Email Gateway.  s3 smart security solutions created the Eagle Eye VM, but unfortunately they are a German company, and their entire site, and the PDF documentation included with the VM are all in German.  I finally got logged in when I realized that the z character is typed when I hit y on the keyboard.  The reverse is also true.  I'm assuming the keyboard layout is in German.  I haven't yet been able to find the / key, which is making switchign directories a bit tough.  I may just have to scrap this whole idea and build from scratch.  I wonder what distro I can build small but that would support this kind of idea?

The motherboard I put in our new server is an Abit KN8 Ultra.  One of the features that attracted me was the onboard SATA RAID controller.  I got the machine built, and I configured the drives to be a RAID.  This required settings in the BIOS, and then further settings in the RAID controller BIOS.  Interestingly enough, there was only the option of using entire disks to create volumes (i.e. I couldn't see a way to create a 10GB mirrored partition, and then stripe the rest.)  I started the SUSE install last night, and one of the first things it told me is that the RAID is really a software RAID and that Linux won't support it.  I found some forum threads that confirm this.  That's quite a bummer.  I ended up setting up Linux software RAIDs.  We'll see how that performs.  I got Linux completely installed with no issues, but on the first reboot the machine wouldn't boot.  NON SYSTEM DISK OR DISK ERROR.  Crap.  Oh wait, I did see the RAID BIOS flash by that it still had a volume configured.  I went in and unconfigured it, but Linux still wouldn't boot.  I reinstalled.  Still wouldn't boot.  I finally figured out that I had also told the BIOS that I was using RAID.  Once I turned that off everything seems to boot fine.  It found the network.  I set up a normal user.  I check to make sure I could log in as my normal user and root at the console.  I came to work.

I just tried SSH-ing in to the box.  SSH answers, but won't authenticate either of the users.  I guess my boss should be happy, since I won't be spending any time on that machine today.

BTW, my noise problem is the 2U power supply that came with the machine.  It has a 60mm fan in it.  I will probably just leave it, because the availability of quiet 60mm fans is pretty much nil.

RedmondMag.com has a decent article on VMWare player, that is worth checking out.  Among those tips:

• disable realtime virus scanning on .vmdk and .vmem files.  These files are huge and are read from and written to continuously while your VM is running.  Virus scanning them continuously will greatly reduce your overall system performance.
• regularly defrag your host system disks.

Good stuff.

This is so cool.  Just like their free player, VMWare now has a free Server virtualization platform.  I'm definitely considering using this in our home network.  Now all I have to decide is what host OS to run it under, Linux or Windows?

In a pretty short, not terribly scientific, survey I was told I should run Debian. I took it again and tried to answer the questions as I expected your average computer user would, and got recommended Mandriva (Mandrake's new name.) Its an interesting quiz, but I'd rather see the matrix of the features that the quiz is driving at and be able to compare the distros easily.

Looks like my logic was flawed. rysnc doesn't support syncronization, but only mirroring. It can really only copy one way. That's not any better than the batch files I have now. Bummer.

In my quest to find a good file syncronization utility, I've just finished installing sshd and rsyncd on my work laptop.  We'll see how this one works.

First go to cygwin.com, and download setup.exe.  Run through the install, making sure to install cygrunsrv, rsync, and openssh.  Once that process finishes, setting up rsyncd and sshd are trivial.  I installed cygwin in d:\cygwin, so note that in the examples below.

First we're going to create a configuration file for rsync.

rlobrecht@rlobrecht2-gqh ~
$ cd /etc

rlobrecht@rlobrecht2-gqh /etc
$ vi rsyncd.conf

The contents should be something similar to:
use chroot = false
strict modes = false

[modulename]
        path = /cygdrive/d/documents
        comment = Documents
        read only = false

Now we need to install the service.  To do this, we will use the cygrunsrv utility that we installed above.

rlobrecht@rlobrecht2-gqh /etc
$ cygrunsrv.exe -I "Rsync" -p /cygdrive/d/cygwin/bin/rsync.exe -a "--config=/cy
gdrive/d/cygwin/etc/rsyncd.conf --daemon --no-detach" -f "Rsync daemon service"

Now we are going to start rsync.  You can also use Services in Administrative Tools to start the service.

rlobrecht@rlobrecht2-gqh /etc
$ net start rsync
The Rsync service is starting.
The Rsync service was started successfully.

Next we're going to install sshd.

rlobrecht@rlobrecht2-gqh /etc
$ ssh-host-config
Generating /etc/ssh_host_key
Generating /etc/ssh_host_rsa_key
Generating /etc/ssh_host_dsa_key
Generating /etc/ssh_config file
Privilege separation is set to yes by default since OpenSSH 3.3.
However, this requires a non-privileged account called 'sshd'.
For more info on privilege separation read /usr/share/doc/openssh/README.privse
.

Should privilege separation be used? (yes/no) yes
Warning: The following function requires administrator privileges!
Should this script create a local user 'sshd' on this machine? (yes/no) yes
Generating /etc/sshd_config file
Added ssh to C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc\services


Warning: The following functions require administrator privileges!

Do you want to install sshd as service?
(Say "no" if it's already installed as service) (yes/no) yes

Which value should the environment variable CYGWIN have when
sshd starts? It's recommended to set at least "ntsec" to be
able to change user context without password.
Default is "ntsec".  CYGWIN=ntsec tty

The service has been installed under LocalSystem account.
$

Host configuration finished. Have fun!

rlobrecht@rlobrecht2-gqh /etc
$ net start sshd
The CYGWIN sshd service is starting.
The CYGWIN sshd service was started successfully.

More when I actually get files syncronizing.

I started installing XP with the player



But its not going so well.

When you install VMWare Workstation, the VMWare tools are .iso files in the directory you installed in (C:\Program Files\VMWare\VMWare Workstation for me.)  The files are freebsd.iso, linux.iso, netware.iso, and windows.iso.

You can mount an .iso in your VM by editing your vmx file, and inserting something like the following:

ide1:0.fileName="c:\Program Files\VMWare\VMWare Workstation\windows.iso"
ide1:0.deviceType = "cdrom-image"

This is a really cool thing.  VMWare has released a free player app.  Basically you take a virutal machine that was built with a full version of VMWare, and can completely use it wth this player app.  I think I will be able to find lots of uses for this.

Interestingly enough, they left the ability to boot the player from a CD, which means you can take an existing VM, or a blank VM and install your own OS on them.  Here's a guide to creating a blank VM.  The only thing you are missing that way is VMTools.  I decided to install the evaluation of VMWare workstation, so I could make a few images that include VMTools.

Well, it looks like VMWare anticipated this.

Novell has an interesting looking FolderShare like project, built on Mono, called iFolder. There's a Linux based server that is either an open-source simple version, or a commercial complete solution. Clients are available for Windows, Linux, and Mac OSX. On the road map is a server-less version, which is currently working between two Linux clients.

This will be an interesting one to keep an eye on, but I don't think its quite ready to use yet (at least not for me.)

I did a quick and dirty search to see what I was talking about for a new machine.

Item	Price
3U server case	$145.00
Power supply	$60.00
processor	$89.00
motherboard	$75.00
1 GB memory	$89.00
hard drive	$75.00
	$533.00

With shipping, tax, etc. probably around $650 - $700. That also doesn't include any time to build it, or time to maintain it. Plus electricity, heat and noise in my office, etc.

Our Linux box is dying. You may have noticed this if you visit on a regular basis. I thought that the OS was just getting corrupt (thus the rebuild a couple of months ago) but that doesn't seem to have solved the problem. I believe it is either the memory or motherboard. I know that one of the IDE channels no longer works on the motherboard, and the one that is working, doesn't always find the boot disk on a cold start. Carl has offered me his spare Epia 800 machine (which I greatly appreciate) until I can replace it.

This has got me to thinking. Should I even continue to host this stuff myself? What would it cost for me to move our website to a hosted provider? I need some serious space (about 3.7 GB right now and growing.) My Linux box also does spam and virus filtering, but ASSP will run on Windows, so I could always run that directly on the Exchange machine.

Maybe I need to spec a machine, and compare prices on hosting service. Maybe I don't need a new machine at all?

I use MailScanner on our Linux box to scan for spam and viruses before our mail comes to us. Since the machine rebuild, my wife hasn't been receiving her Soap Opera updates from ABC. These messages come from newsletter@abc.go.com. I fired up my trusty ssh client, and dove down to /var/spool/MailScanner/quarantine. My first try was to do

# grep abc.go.com */spam/*

which gave me the error: -bash: /bin/grep: Argument list too long

I had to come up with a better solution. I figured the best thing would be a foreach type loop. I did a little googling, and came up with this following:

# for dir in *; do grep abc.go.com "$dir"/spam/*; done

This actually worked pretty well, unfortunately I can't find her lost emails. They don't seem to have been captured in the quatantine directory.

The Linux box locked up today, and when we hard reset it, it didn't find the new hard disk we put in it.  Ctrl Alt Del and it rebooted successfully, but man is that a pain.  Now I have to figure out why it doesn't find the drive from a cold boot, and why it locked up.  Maybe I should just my my gallery to Windows, and ditch Linux completely.

I think I finally have sendmail configured, and I have to admit that it took a fair amount of googling.  Here are some notes, mostly to myself.

Most sendmail configuration is done in /etc/mail/sendmail.mc.  This is used to generate /etc/mail/sendmail/cf using the following command:
# m4 /etc/mail/sendmail.mc > /etc/mail/sendmail.cf

Restarting sendmail (on a Red Hat derived machine)
# service sendmail restart
or
# service MailScanner restart

Problem #1: I can connect locally, but it blocks all attempts from outside.  I chased this one as far as completely shutting down the firewall (note to self - reenable snoopy's firewall.)  It turned out to be a configuration issue.  By default, sendmail is set to only allow local connections.  Basically it is assuming your linux box is a workstation.  To allow connections from outside comment out the following line in sendmail.mc
DAEMON_OPTIONS('Port=smtp,Addr=127.0.0.1, Name=MTA')dnl
You can comment it out by sticking dnl # at the beginning of the line.

Problem #2:  When you finally get connected, it says that the machine is localhost.localdomain.  To fix this, you need to enter the following line in your sendmail.mc
Cwfullservername.subdomain.domain.com

Don't forget after each of these changes to remake sendmail.cf, and restart the daemon.