use Perl

Justin has been down with the flu since Sunday. Lori stayed home with him Monday and Tuesday. Today, I stayed home so she could go back to work. Took Justin to the doctor, who said at this point it'd be best just to wait it out.

I got him home around 11:00, and around 11:30 I got a phone call from the school regarding LJ. 102 degree temperature. Lori called the doctor and had him prescribe some stuff for her.

I expect Justin will be back in school tomorrow. And I expect that I'll be at home with LJ.

Hopefully we'll all be back in the saddle on Friday. Just in time for the weekend.

On the upside, I've finally found time to start converting some of my PHP scripts to Perl. HTML::Template is suddenly like an old friend ...

Posted from exitwound.org, comment here.

They are idiots. And everyone knows it. Even they are self-consciously aware of this fact.

They bristle and quickly become angered when fact and circumstances (planned or otherwise) conspire to highlight their inadequacies. And yet they seem so comfortable with their stupidity. They rarely research any problem, and I have never known them to purchase a book at their own expense. Personal and professional growth are concepts too foreign ...

Everyone knows that they are incompetent, incapable, ineffectual, unfit, unskilled and unqualified.

And they know it too.

However, they have insisted that they should be the primary group responsible for managing and administering IIS.

I insisted that we not fight them ... that we simply let them take control. With a few discrete hints and very little wrangling, Management (in its infinite and all-knowing wisdom) decreed that yes, control and administration of the IIS servers should be passed to that group.

And so, today, I hear them talking ... "Security is very important to me, you know. That's why I turned off SSL on my browser."

Oh, dear God ...

Posted from exitwound.org, comment here.

Thanks to boo_radley over at PerlMonks, I spent the day goofing off with Mozilla Firebird.

Following boo's example and looking at the one included for Google, I was able to create searches for my Wiki, my journal and CPAN.

Very cool stuff.

Posted from exitwound.org, comment here.

Andrew (from use.perl.org - you know who you are) pointed me to dnsreport.com, so I checked it out. (Btw, big props to Andrew -- great site!)

Everything looks perfect.

I had actually sunken to the level of hoping that it'd point out something - anything - that I might have overlooked.

But everything looked perfect.

Dammit.

I guess I'll spend tomorrow morning digging through tcpdump and ethereal to figure out what's really going on.

Could my job be any sexier?

Of course, what all of this is really telling me is what I knew all along ... I've done a fantastic job setting up the new mail gateway and configuring DNS. The rest of the world, however, is running about 50/50.

Right ... tell that to the PHB ...

Posted from exitwound.org, comment here.

About two weeks ago, I set up a new box at work to replace our current mail gateway. After I let it run as a failover for a few days, I updated DNS to reflect that this new box was the primary MX and configured the old one as tertiary.

Two+ weeks later, mail is still streaming through the old gateway. Actually, at this point, I'd estimate that the load is about 50/50.

TTL (time-to-live) on the DNS records is 1 hour, and has been as long as I can recall. When I do a dig from outside the office, everything looks fine, so I know my DNS is responding correctly.

Removing the old gateway from DNS didn't help at all. People started moaning about not getting mail ... and tests from Yahoo confirmed that the mail was not being delivered. As soon as I brought the old gateway back online, here comes the mail ...

I thought that once the external MTA saw that the MX was offline, it would at least try to send through the failover ...

What's really weird is places such as Hotmail ... those guys are sending through both the primary and tertiary ...

I did a TCP dump on the DNS box today, and it sure looks correct to me.

How in the hell do I get external MTAs to stop sending to the old gateway ... ?

Posted from exitwound.org, comment here.

My good friend Kim Townsend is in town. She's coming over, along with Luke. It'll be great getting back together and reliving the old days when we all played in the same band.

It'll be a drink-fest, no doubt.

Posted from exitwound.org, comment here.

Late last night, I finally got around to putting the SpamHunter blacklist online. I need to do some work on it, but it's already suitable for usage. Wget, regex, update your client restrictions file, and you're done.

As I was diddling around this morning, I stumbled across Net::DNSBLLookup on CPAN. I whipped up a quick script (rbl-check.pl) and put it in the SpamHunter CVS.

It's pretty neat. It can take an IP from the commandline or read them from a file. Quick and dirty, but I managed to knock out the POD too.

I also wrote a variation on it that checks the SpamHunter spammer database, just in case there's ever a question about any entries.

Posted from exitwound.org, comment here.

For some reason, although the blog sync script reports it as being posted, the following never actually got posted. Repeated for posterity's sake.

Modified spam-stats.pl to maintain and report cummulative numbers.

Added the -r (-rotate) flag to update the historical data. This will require a modified logrotate.conf to run spam-stats.pl -r as a prerotate script.

Added -cummulative to produce a cummulative report in addition to the standard "daily" report.

It may be finished. Need to keep an eye on the reports and see.

I'm slowly starting to get my alcohol-swelled brain wrapped around Movable Type. It's really some very cool stuff. The documentation could be a little more straightforward, but otherwise, it's rocking along nicely.

Note to self: There's a fine line between a good vodka martini and gasoline.

Made the final changes to blogSync.pl and forwarded them to cwest.

If you're reading this from use.perl.org, then it worked.

Posted from exitwound.org, comment here.

I've been playing and tweaking cwest's script to sync Movable Type with use.perl. I haven't modified the functionality at all, because cwest did such a great job. I've only added a few things to make it more immediately user-friendly.

I've still got a few tweaks regarding the tz offset before it's finished.

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