debian

Because of some modifications at my Real Life Orkplace, I decided to reduce other duties to get a better chance to deal with my new duties. So i requested help for my four packages in the Distribution. RFH: jove My first package. A small, but powerful Emacs-relative, with all those uneeded things stripped which makes emacs fat. Maybe these days especially useful for small memory devices, as it gives you emacs-likeness for the price of nvi or ae. I have no idea how well it works in a real utf-8-environment. RFH: milter-greylist A greylist-milter which makes running a mailserver somehow possible for me. it keeps away about 2/3 of spam, which leaves me with only 400spams/day. I already have two contacts who want to help with that. RFH: nn No news is good news, but nn is better. This is a USENET reader, for those people who grow up with Webforums and Blogs: This could be still the most effective way to celebrate flamefests, gather information or communicate with people sharing same interests. And nn has in my opinion the best UI for it, and makes it easy and fast to find interesting articles and skip others. Well, Upstream Development has ceased to exist around 1994. I think if no one takes over, this package will become finally useless when IPv6 gets widely used (right after the release of ‘Duke Nukem Forever’) and it also doesn’t deal well with non iso-8859-1-charsets. So best for this package would be to rewrite it from scratch (my dream: message/mime-handling/threading from mutt, scoring from slrn, and UI from nn) because the User Interface is much better than those of all still alive Newsreaders i tried. RFA: synergy This is my most popular package, which makes it possible to share one mouse and keyboard over many computers and displays. (It is available for UNIX/Linux, Windows and MacOS) This is a very very useful software, and i use it permanently. Sadly the Upstream Development mostly ceased to exist, and so i put this to RFA (instead of RFH) because many Debian-Users use it according to popcon. This software should be taken over by someone who is able to help Upstream. There is a RC-Bug, which caused the package be pulled from testing. Interesting is that while filing those RFH/RFA all the same day, i only got responses for the packages which scores lowest in popcon, (24 for milter-greylist, 1196 for synergy).

… because they are bouncing. In my ongoing attempt to investigate and fix problems of our mailinglist-server, i found that we only had a working bounce-detection for lists starting debian-* minus debian-private and the three digest-lists. So i rewrote some parts of the bounce detection: We now have four categories of lists: high (30 or more mails a day) medium (20 or more mails a week) low (10 or more mails a month) very-low (the rest) for these four categories we calculate a spam-rate depending on the number of distributed messages and the number of bounces in the timerange of 24 hours for ‘high’ lists, 7 days for ‘medium’ lists, 30 days for ’low’ lists and 90 days for ‘very-low’ lists. ...

While analysing the pole setters in our internal bouncers-Hitlist i found that some of them run a mail2news-Gateway. The problem is: our Mailinglists leave Mail-Headers mostly untouched, and so headers like X-Trace or X-Complaints-To are passed through without modifications. If a mail containing those headers is handed over to inews (as in INN) it rejects it, and the bounce comes back to us: <> XXXXX@XXX.com> >: Command died with status 1: “/usr/bin/maildrop”. Command output: inews: cannot send article to server: 441 Can’t set system “X-Complaints-To” header inews: article not posted ...

Just a quick note: while wading through the list-archives, drop-boxes and list-configuration to find false positives and possiblities to optimise our mailinglists spam level i accidently removed the inclusion of our spamfilters from most lists. I appologise for this. Luckily zobel discovered my error and fixed it at 14:30 CET.

I’m just wadeing through Debian-Mailinglists on the search for enhancements and false-positives. and i just came over debian-security-announce, a lists that sends a helpful message back to submitters that aren’t allowed to send out advisories. That message didn’t contain a Precedence-Header so i added one, and wondered which value would be appropriate… I remember to have seen three values: ‘junk’, ‘bulk’ and ’list’ (the latter should be set for all our Mailinglists). ...

it sometimes funny, i’m working with mutt since about 10 years, (the 5 years before i was using elm) and just found out how i can view pure text/html-Mails without fiddeling with piping and things. set implicit_autoview in .muttrc does the trick. but now mutt also prefers the text/html-part of multipart/alternative-mails, this is going to far for me. i want the text/plain-part if available. mutt has also a solution here: ...

From time to time we have the problem that a mail posted to a list triggers an autoresponse (vacation, bounce, tdma) from an unexpected source. Sometimes it isn’t possible to identify the subscriber who is causing this. One example for this was “petsupermarket”. So i wrote a small tool, which takes Mailadresses as input and resolves the domains until it reaches IP-level, so it is possible to identify “related” addresses to such an incident. ...

Every two weeks i get this: $ xterm & Xlib: connection to ":0.0" refused by server Xlib: Maximum number of clients reached xterm Xt error: Can't open display: :0.0 and it looks that something eats up the possible number of Clients: $ xlsclients |wc -l 56 when i restart X i can open about 100 xterms until i reach the error message. ideas?

We found out that Simple PHP Blog, the software that is used for this Blog, can’t be packaged for Debian at the moment, because the License looks like this: The Simple PHP Blog is released under the GNU Public License. You are free to use and modify the Simple PHP Blog. All changes must be uploaded to SourceForge.net under Simple PHP Blog. Credit must be give to the original author and the Simple PHP Blog logo graphic must appear on the site and link to the project on SourceForge.net ...

Do you know this? you write a brilliant entry for a blog, a blog-comment or something in a textarea-field in your browser. after finished, you press the Send-Button, and … the browser crashes, or nothing happens because Javacript or Cookies were disabled in your browser. the result is, the brilliant text you just wrote by investing time has gone to bit-heaven. Has anyone a solution for this, beside writing in a text-editor, pasting it over to the textarea, fighting against linebreaks and things? ...