Planet GeekDinner has been filling up with lots of non-geek-dinner related cruft. So I’ve taken advantage of Planet Venus’s cool filtering system.

Any feed that doesn’t have a “GeekDinner” category feed, is being filtered, and only posts containing the regex [gG]eek[ -]?[dD]inner are being displayed. I.e. If you mention GeekDinner in your post, it will appear on the planet.

I’m also filtering Rafiq’s geekdinner category, as he seems to post everything under “geekdinner” :-)

Oh, BTW, Nice job with the skin, Joe.

UPDATE: Rafiq is unfiltered again - I didn’t read thoroughly enough to see the geekdinner reference as a footnote in your Dell IdeaStorm Post. You have quite a busy site, I thought I’d reached the end of the article when it said “REad more… | Digg Story”).

BTW, Rafiq, seeing as you will probably see this, can you sort out your avatar on the CLUG Park planet? I had to resize it to be the standard size, and it now looks very pixellated.

OK, so joe got me into sorting out a planet venus for geekdinner. And I’ve also tweaked their mediawiki a little.

Planet Venus is the first time I’ve used bzr, it’s really quite a cool RCS, I think I’ll use it more often… While I’m quite a subversion user, working away from home is a pain. SVK helps but it doesn’t go as far as a real distributed RCS like bzr. Nice job ubunteros :-)

I’ve spent some time beefing up CLUG Park.

All the people who seem clueless about making avatars of the correct dimensions (ahem Rafiq), or cropping all the uncessary transparency around their avatar, I’ve sorted them out.

I’ve also switched us from Planet 2.0, to Planet Venus. This allows us to do funky things like filters (for you geeks with nasty RSS feeds). It also partitions out the theme far better, and above all does multi-threaded RSS harvesting.

Is anyone is keen on a tech-only (or CLUG-only) CLUG park, where we limit the subscriptions down to posts about CLUG or technology (using category RSS feeds), let me know, we can easily do this. While some of us like to read all about what CLUG Park members are up to, others probably only want to read tech-related articles?

I spent a lovely weekend morning setting up monitoring on servers - yes, what fun :-)

I like all my servers to run logcheck, smartmontools, sysstat, and lm-sensors.

logcheck means watching your email every hour, and adding in yet more ignore rules for things your server thinks it’s perfectly OK to spit out.

smartmontools means waiting to see which attributes it’s going to complain about, making sure it’s set up to mail you about bad sectors, and getting this all in inside the 128-character line-length limit.

And lm-sensors, well that takes a lot of tweaking, to get all the alarms to stop ringing, labelling the right temperatures, and ignoring the disconnected pins.

Ugh, it’s painful work, but it helps in the long-run…

I finally found a good blog post on the subject of getting Postfix to do SMTP-AUTH via SASL.

I went one step further, and instead of moving /var/run/saslauthd/ to the Postfix chroot, I did a bind mount:

/etc/fstab:

Postfix was announcing methods like CRAM-MD5 which can’t be supported by the PAM backend, so I restricted them down to PLAIN and LOGIN (over TLS only, obviously):

/etc/postfix/sasl/smtpd.conf:

Now, it’s working nicely, and I can IMAPS and SMTP-AUTH-TLS to my mail server from anywhere.