aaron

SSHfs on OS X via Samba

Why, you ask? Because sshfs on OSX’s version of sshfs is wonky. My solution is to use an intermediate linux server which does the sshfs mount, then serves that to os x over a samba share. Another benefit to this is that you only need one samba share to mount all your sshfs connections, since the linux server will be taking care of those. Also if you had a windows computer you wanted to use this...

aaron

Redundant web & database servers on a budget using Virtual Private Servers

Background First let me just say that I have been struggling with this problem for quite some time now. The problem is to provide redundancy for a website so that the website continues to run even if there is a problem with one of the servers it’s running on. In a typical simple server setup, there is a single machine running the web and mysql servers. The machine can be either a dedicated server,...

aaron

IMAP Authentication for WordPress

UPDATE 2/13/09: There is a newer version of the IMAP Authentication plugin for WordPress 2.7.1. It seems like IMAP authentication would be a pretty basic plugin to find for WordPress. A google search doesn’t turn up much. I found this one which was apparently written for an older version of WordPress. Never having written a WordPress plugin before, naturally I decided to fix it to work with version...

aaron

iptables not logging to syslog

I was scratching my head on this one for several hours before finally figuring out the solution which turned out to be ridiculously simple. I wanted to log all incoming tcp connections on port 25 and then drop them. I read through several guides on how to set up logging in iptables. (linuxgurus.com, linuxquestions.org) Seemed straightforward enough. Here are the rules I ended up with: (output from...

aaron

Fun with caller ID!

We just got caller ID at my house. One of my roommates doesn’t have a cell phone, so eventually everyone else stopped answering the house phone because it was always for him. But then he would come home and not know who called. Now of course, caller ID solves this problem by logging who called on the phone handset, but being me, that is not enough! My plan is to hook up a computer to the phone...