The short version, change the name in:

• /etc/hostname
• /etc/mailname (and restart your mail service)
• /etc/hosts

Then log out and log back in again to make sure your shell gets the new values.

I have some software I'm writing which relies on external software, all of which is currently available as Debian packages. My software is currently built as a Perl package, and I version it using virtual environments. I don't want to install my software as a Debian package since Debian doesn't allow for clean roll-backs: upgrading a package is ( Read more... )

Time to extract my old NSLU2 from mothballs. This is a little device originally designed for sharing USB disk drives over a local network. I'm trying to repurpose it to share my Pixma MP480 over the network so I can print & fax from network computers, and save scanned documents to a network drive to be picked up later ( Read more... )

Here's a great hand-holding tutorial for folks who want to make their systems more secure using sudo to restrict who's allowed to run what as root: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1132821

I got two virtual machines running last night, one providing DHCP and TFTP services to the host-only network, the other booting from a Debian Etch netinstall image. Total time taken was about three hours, most of that looking around for instructions from people who've done it before.

( Here's the list of resources I've used so far )

I recently had a need to have a mail server capture all outgoing email and direct it to a single target account. My motivation for this was that I have a User Acceptance Testing server on which my software is tested before being deployed to production (this is in a Dev -> Test -> Prod controlled environment).

( I use Postfix to set this mail trap as described in Eric London's blog entry )

I have a particular need at present: I'm writing a piece of code which needs to be able to handle a lot of incoming UDP packets. First up I need to learn how to read what's in the packets, then I need to make decisions on where to send the packets, and on top of all this I need to do all this very quickly.

( The rest of this post is about how I used tcpdump, tcprewrite and tcpreplay to sent )

cfengine is a tool for centralised administration of any number of hosts. iptables is the Linux firewall management tool (netfilter is the code inside the Linux kernel, iptables is the command line tool).

( Here are some random articles about handling iptables in a cfengine world )