Stan’s Obligatory Blog

Installed Procmail tonight to try and cut down on the spam I’m seeing. Installed it from the ports collection. Below are the .forward and .procmailrc files I started with.

Implemented a home-made CAPTCHA on our web pages to stand guard on the ‘mailto’ links. This will prevent robots from scooping up our addresses to spam. The CAPTCHA itself is written in PHP, and it uses a MySQL database to store the 700-some challenge words and also a list of email addresses or URLs it is guarding. An example of it in action can be seen here: cosmo.pasadena.ca.us/tt.php?id=sms

Upgraded MRTG today in an attempt to get ‘bbmrtg.pl’ to work. The problem turned out to be a typo in bbmrtg.pl. Sent a patch in to the Big Brother mailing list.

Upgraded PHP to 4.3.1 today. Had to add ‘–enable-calendar’ to the main port makefile so that the calendar routines would compile in. This was to enable the ‘easter_date’ function so as to allow for automatic holiday decor on the front page. The upgrade broke the ‘file_get_contents’ function in funcs.php. The new version has this function built-in, so it complained until I commented out the hacked simulation in funcs.php.

Did a build-from-source upgrade to 4.8-stable today. Had some minor problems with sendmail, and had to chmod the binary to 6555, instead of the 2555 it had after the install. Also, had to chmod /var/mail to 01777 so that the Netscape movemail would work.

Looking at the web server statistics, March was the first month where we went over 100,000 hits, over 1.3GB, and averaged about 250 visits per day.

Patched sendmail in response to Security Advisory FreeBSD-SA-03:07.sendmail

Modified the txt2html.dict to have it munge email addresses to deter spam harvesters. Per:

www.cdt.org/speech/spam/030319spamreport.pdf

|[a-zA-Z0-9_+-.]+@([a-zA-Z0-9][w.+-]+.[a-zA-Z]{2,})|
-> mailto:$&

Changed to:

|([a-zA-Z0-9_+-.]+)@([a-zA-Z0-9][w.+-]+.[a-zA-Z]{2,})|
-h-> $1 AT $2

To get ink levels on the Epson photo printer:

escputil -i -r /dev/lpt0

To clean the ink nozzles:

escputil -c -P epson

Nozzle check pattern test:

escputil -n -P epson

I commented out the ‘O DaemonPortOptions=Port=587, Name=MSA, M=E’ line in sendmail.cf to close the open port at 587.