Friday, 08 October 2004

I voted fairly early in the day today, but got stuck in the early morning rush. It's interesting to see the demographic of my suburb. A lot of elderly people, a few young families and a few couples. All the elderly were getting priority in the queue, which meant it took me about half an hour to get to the front of the line.

I couldn't vote for Howard, even though I think his government has done a good job of economic management, I'm just too pissed off about Iraq. Being an environmentalist, I voted Green, which is just an indirect vote for Labor. Damn preferential voting system.

I was just thinking on Friday, how it would be rather interesting to see the impact on the Canberra micro-economy if there was a change of Federal government in this election, followed by a change of ACT government in next weekend's election. Apparently last time there was a change of Federal government, the Canberra property market took a real dive, because there was a lof of upheaval in the public service.

Gave pre-rc2 a spin on my desktop PC today, and it went fine

It's good that one can have the entire system on LVM now, but I kind of miss GRUB. I only switched from LILO to GRUB around the time I started playing with d-i, and realised how much more flexible GRUB is compared to LILO, but GRUB's not so good at dealing with RAID and LVM...

I'll have to try it on my Sony VAIO laptop to see if my WEP issues are indeed resolved now, and I should also do another install on my Ultra 5. I miss the talking alarm clock under the bed.

I had a bit of a foray into greylisting with MIMEDefang today, as it's been something I wanted to implement for a while.

The main example linked from the greylisting website is a monster filter written by Jonas Eckerman. I wanted to stick as closely to the filter that ships with the Debian package (because that's what I'm currently running), so I pulled out all the greylisting code and added it to the standard filter, coming up with this cross-breed.

I've got it running on my backup MX at the moment. I'm not sure if I'm game to put it on my main mailserver yet, just in case I've screwed something up. I can also see a few optimisations that could be made. Rather than opening a text file for each message to examine whitelists, I'd like to just tie to Sendmail's access.db hash, and add whitelist entries to that, if I can. I suspect there might be some file permission issues, as the access file has fairly restrictive read access, and I don't think the filter runs as root.

Now all I need to do is stop point-blank rejecting mail that originates from IPs in various DNSbls (scoring them up in SpamAssassin instead) and I should be in business.