A case study in troubleshooting the email pipeline, chapter 2
It wasn’t Constant Contact. It was never Constant Contact. Constant Contact is fine. Forget I mentioned them.
Category Archives: Computers
A case study in troubleshooting the email pipeline
How I plumbed the depths of my email server and falsely concluded that the problem was Not My Fault.
CrashPlan jumps the shark
I owe a lot of people an apology. For about the last five years, I’ve been a major cheerleader for the “CrashPlan for Home” backup service. Many times, I’ve been asked directly about what computer backup service I recommend or stumbled across a discussion of that question, and many times, I’ve unreservedly recommended CrashPlan. Their… Read More »
Backing up from Unix to Backblaze B2 using Rclone
This blog posting is obsolete. I’ve moved everything over to Github. There are a lot of new goodies there that aren’t here, so mosey on over and check it out. I’ve been using CrashPlan for Home for about five years. Alas, their Home product is being discontinued, and people who want to keep using CrashPlan… Read More »
PenguinDome: new, open-source Linux mobile device management (MDM) solution
Where I work, we have employees who use (in decreasing order of popularity) Mac OS, Windows, and Linux as their desktop computers. We’ve deployed a large, complex remote administration / MDM application for managing the Mac OS and Windows desktops. It’s big and complicated and difficult to maintain. It does much more than we will… Read More »
HOWTO: Converting an unencrypted Ubuntu root disk to encrypted
The best way to configure Ubuntu for an encrypted root filesystem is to tell the installer to do it when you’re installing the operating system. It’s complicated, and smart people have put a lot of effort into making the installer know how to do it properly. Having said that, if you’re an experienced Linux sysadmin… Read More »
Python: How to make Flask work with Logbook
If you’ve arrived at this page, it’s probably because you’re searching the web for an answer why, even though you’ve called logbook.compat.redirect_logging() in your Python Flask app, you’re still not getting any Flask logging in your log files. The problem is that Flask sets the propagate flag on its logger to False by default, so even though Logbook’s… Read More »
Microsoft broke free Office 365 Skype minutes four months ago, still not fixed
If you were using a pre-Microsoft-acquisition Skype account with your free Office 365 Skype minutes, then Microsoft broke your Skype on March 1, 2017, and they still haven’t figured out how to fix it.
How to hose your web server by releasing free software
I run a virtual server on Linode which hosts, among other things, the blog you are currently reading. The server doesn’t get a lot of traffic and is rarely busy or overloaded, so when I get an alert from Linode that its CPU has been pegged for the past two hours, as I did early… Read More »
GameStop data breach: why am I not surprised?
I was victimized by GameStop’s security breach back in October, and again now. I hope it puts them out of business.