03 Feb 10 Windows 7 and laptop Batteries
since around half october I have been using WIN7 as my main OS on my laptop. At this moment, my laptop battery was working perfectly. Not as good as when it was brand new, but it was working for around 2-2.5 hours (Depending on what I was doing at that moment ofcourse 
).
However, since I installed WIN7 its getting worse and worse. Begin Januari I noticed my battery was empty after around 1 hour. Woah, thats fast. 2 weeks ago, it was 45 minutes. Its getting worse and worse. According to WIN7 this was at this moment time to replace my battery. It was causing issues, and it might cause that your PC shutdown unexpected. WTF? Looking at google, it gave me some info, and WIN7 does give this message at the moment when the battery charges for less then 40%. At that moment it was 37%.
Now, 1 week ago, this was at 19%, and I was only able to use my battery for 30 minutes. Today, I was able to use it 20 minutes. I suppose within to weeks its just dead? 
Now, this is actually going to cost me some money, a new battery isnt cheap. I suppose I also should kick out WIN7, else my brand new battery will be dead within months as well… Time to install ubuntu I suppose.
02 Feb 10 Cacti, Direct Admin and exim
For some nice graph with some data from the hosthuis servers I use cacti to make these. The only requirement I really had that it had to be using SNMP, and it gave the current number of mails coming in and out. I found one made by Ian P. Christian at his personal blog.
Tags: cacti, Debian, exim, greylisting
30 Jan 10 Things can be easy sometimes
remember that I wrote about that KVM wasn’t working a few days ago? Yesterday I finally discovered the problem. I forgot to enable hardware virtualisation in my bios. Sometimes, iam just not so smart
Tags: KVM
26 Jan 10 mod ruid for apache
Another post about the setup of hostshuis.nl’s servers. This time not about the virtualisation iam using at the server, but about something complete else. A (pretty simple) apache module, but a very nice one (at least, thats my opinion 
). (more…)
25 Jan 10 Using KVM, its not always working
Yesterda I wrote about using KVM now on 2 servers. Just after I actually wrote that article I discovered KVM wasnt really working on one of these 2 servers (This server was just moved in, and is already a bit older as the other server. Its the old webserver kinda ).
24 Jan 10 Using KVM for virtualisation, why?
A month ago I wrote already in my previous post that hosthuis.nl is using KVM for there servers. Now that we moved our first server as well to a new datacentre, we are currently installing KVM on that server as well. A lot people think KVM is something complete else as virtualisation, and actually they are both correct as wrong. They are thinking its a KVM Switch, what means you can control serveral server/PC s with 1 keyboard or mouse (Locally, or with a special device via internet). However, this KVM stands for Kernel-based Virtual Machine, something complete else (more…)
23 Jan 10 Greylist stats
Remember that I wrote back in december about greylisting?
Now its nearly a month later, and my main mailserver still uses greylisting. Below here are some stats from this server:
web:~# greylist stats
Statistics since Thu Dec 24 12:59:53 2009 (30 days and 3 hours ago)
——————————————————————-
708 items, matching 12049 requests, are currently whitelisted
0 items, matching 0 requests, are currently blacklisted
332 items, matching 332 requests, are currently greylistedOf 23386 items that were initially greylisted:
- 708 ( 3.0%) became whitelisted
- 22678 ( 97.0%) expired from the greylist
As you can see the stats are since December 24 last year. Since that moment only 708 pairs of mailserver with emailaddress have been whitelisted (And probarly a lot of that is from a phpBB.com related server ). Of these whitelisted addresses the server accepted a bit more as 12000 emails.
Nothing special yet. Looking below, since that starting date around 23000 pairs were greylisted. Of these 23000 only those 708 mentioned earlier are whitelisted. That means 97% probarly is spam of what total is received at that server! Maybe there is some real mail in there, but if there is (What I dont think really), that server is probarly not connected properly. I didnt notice iam missing any mail, so I suppose iam not missing anything.
But these numbers are, what I think, pretty good. It means the spamfiltering done at the server level doesnt need to run on that many mails, what means less CPU usage for that. Iam, at this moment, not sure if the RBL checks are done before or after the greylisting, so maybe these numbers can be even higher when iam not using RBLs at the mailserver. And the same applies for some other checks that are done by exim.
Currently, there is one smaller problem with using this method. As backup MX iam currently using the MX from my host. However, when my mailserver now denies the mail for 10 minutes, it goes to the backup MX (Pretty logical ofcourse), however, the backup MX doesnt run a greylisting, so it just accepts the mail, and directly tries to deliver it. However, the greylisting now denies it again, so it needs to wait again 10 minutes. Due to this, the stats are also probarly a bit off.
A solution for this will be to run the backup MX myself, what hopefully will be happening soon, when I get my second box fully installed
And now some other real stats. Iam currently receiving at max 10 spam emails a day. Thats something I can live with. But still 10 to much. Luckily enough they are directly filtered and moved to the spam map when they arrive.
Tags: email, exim, greylisting, Spam
24 Dec 09 Something about servers, moving sites, and greylisting as anti spam
I never wrote a lot about the few servers I manage already for some time. Since half November there was a brand new server for hosthuis.nl to replace mostly the current server.
The current server is a nearly 3 year old box, that hosts several pretty well known sites, like www.phpbb3styles.net and www.phpbbmodders.net, besides the own sites from hosthuis.nl. (more…)
Tags: Debian, email, greylisting, KVM, Spam
22 Dec 09 New wordpress again
Again, there is a new wordpress: http://wordpress.org/development/2009/12/wordpress-2-9/
So it was time to update this blog again. it now runs WP 2.9 (Or at least, it should run 2.9, you never know )
02 Dec 09 Ajax Shoutbox, no new life.
I know I wrote some time ago a post about that the Ajax Shoutbox gets a new life
This did happen a few days after that post. Badly enough for a lot users there were some users who werent able to follow the instructions I gave to receive support or to report bugs, and even after a few days the topic at phpBB.com was a mess.
Due to this, I decided at that moment that I again stopped the MOD, and that iam not going to publish it anymore in the feature. The MOD will, in the form of how it was, not come back again. It will not be published nor support will be given.
Posting a comment about when support starts again or where you can find the download will not help. I will not provide a download link nor provide support for it. This is caused by the few users who werent able to read what I wrote and just did what they thought was good.
Sorry all.
To give at least a very very very small bit of hope. For a current new site iam currently busy with a complete rewrite of it, and maybe maybe maybe I might publish that brand new version. Hower, iam not going to make anyone more happy as it looks like, so don’t expect that it happens, untill it actually did happen!
Tags: ajax shoutbox, phpBB
