Summersault Weblog

There’s been quite a lof interest in source control management (SCM) software since Linus Torvalds recently announced that he will no longer be using BitKeeper to manage the Linux kernel project. Related to this, kerneltrap.org has a timely survey about favorite SCM software. Sure it’s unscientific, but being skewed towards people who have some interest in large projects like the like the Linux kernel does make it more interesting. These are generally readers of kerneltrap.org, after all.

The two in the lead are no surprises: CVS and Subversion. CVS is the old heavyweight with a large mindshare. Subversion has gained popularity as a “better CVS”. Beyond these, the options get interesting because they get distributed.
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The “Domain Name System” (DNS) is essentially the phone book of the Internet. It’s what translates human readable domain names like “summersault.com” into computer-friendly numeric addresses that identify where a particular website, e-mail account, or other service related to that domain actually lives. Like most of the rest of the Internet’s technologies and supporting systems, the DNS system was not designed for level or type of usage it currently experiences. Over time and through some poor policy decision making, the DNS infrastructure has become, in the context of what constitutes a reasonable quality of operations given modern expectations about network technologies, essentially broken. In recent years, as commercialization of the Internet continues and more and more services become available, DNS has become broken in new and painful ways that have a daily impact on our operations as a hosting company. Even if you’re a casual user, the dysfunction probably affects your own use of the Internet more than you know.
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A Realtime Blackhole List (RBL) is a list of computers on the Internet that made it onto the list because they were caught spamming, sending out viruses, or some other unsavory activity that met the list maintainer’s standard for being listed. Mail service providers all over the Internet then use these lists to decide whether to accept or reject mail from those listed computers (or, in many cases, just “tag” mail from those computers as suspect). As Summersault has continued to rely more heavily on RBLs for keeping out unwanted junkmail and viruses, we’ve also increasingly found the need for being able to maintain exceptions to those lists. This post talks about how to setup your own RBL system for listing those exceptions.
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I love simplicity, and I found it today in shfs, a tool that allows me to
browse any server I can ssh into as a local file system.

Consider this common case: I’m working on some content for my website at home, and I’m ready to upload to my website. I can only access with SSH-based tools, to prevent my password from being sent in the clear, as FTP would do. That means my choices are basically ssh, scp, and sftp.
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Linux as a desktop operating system is finally at place where it can be
comfortable alternative to Windows or Mac OS X for a lot of people.

Linux has outgrown the perception that it’s necessary to use the command line
or have to compile your own software.

Yet, the hacker culture it has evolved from is ripe with opportunities for
additional efficiency and power for those users that do dare to visit the
command line.
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We use the excellent RT request tracker for our support system.

Each request is tracked through a unique ID that gets passed the e-mail subject line. Sometimes I want to update several tickets at once using a collection of unrelated IDs I have in my Inbox. Read the rest of this entry »