I must admit that postfix queue management is definitely not the simplest one. I often get asked how you can remove all the emails that are in the mail queue on a postfix server (probably to delete a spamming abuse or some error, or whatever). This should be something very simple to do right? And actually it is very simple. All you have to do is to run as root: postsuper -d ALL or using sudo: sudo postsuper -d ALL this will delete instantly all the emails in the queue without any warning (be sure you know what you are doing when running this) and will just output the result (xxx messages deleted).

As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, we are giving AdBard another try. We promise we will spend all proceeds generated from the advertising for free beer for the system admins who tirelessly work to maintain the site and blog about their linux system admin experiences.

Here is the first Ad. Click on it. We get more beer if you do. And its for Free Software Foundation.

Here’s a quick how-to for installing ImageMagick and Imagick on Cpanel server. I will cover only the procedure using the Cpanel built-in scripts, although you can also install it the usual way (rpm or source install). ImageMagick is the application for working with images while the Imagick is a PHP extention to modify/create images using the ImageMagick API.

Installation:

ImageMagick

Check first if it’s installed:

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/scripts/checkimagemagick

Proceed with Installation:

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/scripts/installimagemagick

Installation will take a couple minutes as it will install other packages needed by ImageMagick. After the installation, you can check your ImageMagick version:

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/usr/bin/convert --version

It will give you something like:

Version: ImageMagick 6.4.8 2009-05-11 Q16 OpenMP http://www.imagemagick.org Copyright: Copyright (C) 1999-2009 ImageMagick Studio LLC

Imagick

Go to WHM -> Software -> Module Installers -> PHP Pecl (manage). On the box below Install a PHP Pecl enter imagick and click Install Now button - that’s all.

Restart Apache and check your phpinfo page to see the details of Imagick and ImageMagick as well. See linked images for reference: image1, image2.

Uninstall:

If you decide to uninstall it’s as easy as the installation process:

ImageMagick:

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/scripts/cleanimagemagick

Imagick: WHM -> Software -> Module Installers -> PHP Pecl (manage). Click on Uninstall button for Imagick.

When AdBard went off the air earlier this year, I wasn’t so nice to it in my post, so to try to make it up, here is some free publicity for this FLOSS ad network.

Good Luck!

Here is an excerpt from their latest newsletter to previous participants:

The new network has been redesigned under the guidance of the Free Software Foundation, offering an even greater focus on the importance of Free/Libre and Open Source Software. The FSF will continue to take an advisory role in the network. * Based on this guidance from the FSF, to participate in the Ad Bard Network: * Your website must in some way pertain to FLOSS. Our network is dedicated only to websites that are FLOSS-relevant and advertisers that are FLOSS-appropriate. 1. Your website must exclusively display Ad Bard advertisements. We no longer allow other advertisements to be displayed along side Ad Bard advertisements. This is to ensure that there are no FLOSS-inappropriate advertisements displayed on your web pages, and is necessary for some organizations to be able to link to your website. 2. All members will have a chance to vote for or against advertisements for 36 hours after the order is placed. At least 50% of the received votes must be positive for the advertisement to be accepted. Higher traffic websites will have a proportionally greater vote than lower traffic websites. * Only one Ad Bard Network advertisement can be displayed on a page at a time. Ad Bard Network advertisements will be comprised of both 1 image (120 pixels wide by 90 pixels tall) and 80 characters of text. * Instead of trying to sell many inexpensive advertisements, the network will only sell 25 standard advertisements each month. The network will also sell around 5 exclusive daily advertisements each month. Exclusive daily advertisements will be displayed on all pages of all member websites for an entire 24 hour period. Standard monthly advertisements will be displayed in rotation on all websites on all days for which no exclusive daily advertisement has been sold. * Members will earn a % of the profits made from selling advertisements on the network. Actual member earnings will be calculated monthly based on how many advertisements were displayed on your website and how many times the advertisements were clicked on your website. As the network grows, the cost of advertising on the network will also grow, and thus so will potential member earnings. The actual algorithms used will be publicly available for feedback and suggestions, and will evolve as necessary to ensure that payments are fairly distributed.

This is the second time that CSF on our Cpanel server is not detecting POP3 login failures from a dictionary attack. The IP address was added on the ip deny list but still it was able to attempt to login on POP3. We have our LF_POP3D set to 20 and LF_POP3D_PERM to 1 to block the ip permanently after 20 tries. I can’t remember the CSF version when this first happened, but this time we’re running CSF version 4.65 and the latest is 4.67. Of course, the usual way for me to fix the issue is to upgrade to the latest version.

In the day and age of high definition many are upgrading their video recording gear to the latest harddrive or flash based hi def video cameras. Unlike auto dealerships consumer electronics retailers don’t offer trade in options for your old stuff.  In the green / renewable mindset we can put these no longer used video cameras to good use as video surveillance devices perfect for keeping an eye on your own or others property.

On the hardware side you need a DV camera with firewire port (IEEE 1394), firewire port equipped Pentium 4 or equivalent pc or laptop with loaded with Fedora 9 or 10 and a  firewire cable to connect camera to the computer. For software we will only need dvgrab and VLC

Install dvgrab from Fedora update repo:

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yum install dvgrab

Install vlc from rpmfusion repo:

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2

sudo rpm -ivh http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-stable.noarch.rpm
sudo yum install vlc

Set DV camera audio to 16bit (default is 12 bit) to avoid garbled audio.

Turn on and connect video camera to computer and you should see something like this in /var/log/dmesg:

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firewire_core: created device fw1: GUID 0800460102721e20, S100

To test that we are able to grab video/audio from camera and display in VLC player pipe output of dvgrab into vlc.

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sudo dvgrab - -noavc -nostop | vlc - --no-sub-autodetect-file :demux=rawdv

After issuing this command you should see a 720x480 video feed with 16bit 48000Hz audio stream in vlc on your desktop

Now we setup vlc as a streaming server so that we can view the video/audio when away. Streaming a 720x480 video stream is a bit overkill as the video quality on the DV camera is pretty good when vlc streams video at lower resolutions like 320x240, I also reduce the audio quality to save on bandwidth. Here I used “cvlc” or command vlc to avoid opening a vlc window and “&” to put process into background.

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sudo dvgrab - -noavc -nostop | cvlc - --no-sub-autodetect-file :demux=rawdv --sout '#transcode{vcodec=mp4v,vb=600,acodec=mp3,ab=56,scale=1,width=320,height=240,channels=2}:duplicate{dst=std{access=http,mux=ts,dst=192.168.1.102:3323}}' & 

To view the feed locally via vlc open a http network location on ip and port you specified in the dst= section of the command above.

To view your feed from the Internet you will need to either configure vlc to stream on an outside interface or configure port forwarding.

If you want to check to see if you may have already contracted the virus and want to know what to do in case you have, go here:

http://doihaveswineflu.org/

MySQL conference notes on cloud computing shoot out text summary atranscript

Lew Tucker, Cloud CTO, sun Monty Taylor, MySQL Drissel Geek, Sun Jeremy Zawodny, MySQL hacker, craigslist Chander Kant, CEO, Zmanda Thorsten von Ficon, CTO, Rightscale Prashant Malik, Cassandra Dude, Facebook Mike Culver, Evangerlist, Amazon Web Services

Some interesting subjects touched upon were:

elasticity - allowing even a small company to shoot for the moon without shooting itself in the foot like utilities, much like electricity - you dont think about the electricyt company running out of electricity new way of packaging the technology with a pay as you go model, way to provision your application

• Different Types of Clouds
• Layers of Clouds
• Amazon like
• Google

• SaaS

• Who is the cloud for?

• even ERP in the cloud?

How would an existing application benefit from the cloud? * scaling an application * leverage the collective scalability of the cloud * forklifting an application out of datacenter or in house colo * scalability testing?

Cloud adoption barriers * privacy * performance * network latency * trust and privacy * mindset on owning your own datacenter * competition (lack of)

What applications fit best into the cloud * own

Business Opportunities? * dev pay - the customer signs up for SaaS or Software as an annuity * learn how to do performance tuning and optimization and do that for cloud infrastructures (41:50)

Adobe is starting to look more and more like Microsft these days. Both companies offer popular products used at home and in the enterprise, both offer multi-platform versions. Adobe does show much more love for Linux then Microsoft will likely ever will. While this isnt the first time PDF based exploits have been discovered, the new exploit first reported by Security Focus is a biggie mainly because it affects all platforms of Adobe Reader 8.1.4/9.1 This exploit is considered highly critical by Secunia, a security firm.

If there is one posivite to come from this is that updating your anti-virus definitons isnt required. Simply disable Acrobat Javascript by following these simple directions.

1. Launch Acrobat or Adobe Reader.
2. Select Edit>Preferences
3. Select the JavaScript Category
4. Uncheck the ‘Enable Acrobat JavaScript’ option
5. Click OK

In an accouncement made yesterday LSI Corporation stated that it had entered into a definitive agreement with Applied Micro Circuits Corporation (AMCC) to acquire the assets and associated intellectual property of the 3ware® RAID adapter business. It has been about 5 years since AMCC aquired 3Ware Inc for roughly 150 millions dollars in cash and yesterday they sold 3Ware for about 20 million cash.