Brett Sheffield . com

Google PageRank is a live animal. Google Toolbar PageRank is not. Toolbar rank is updated approximately every three to four months. Today appears to be the day. Yesterday this site had a PageRank of 0/10, today it’s leapt to 3/10. It was about due. The last update was around September 2006. The website of my open source hosted applications business, Gladserv, which was launched a month ago, has jumped from nothing to 3/10 also.

There were other clues. I monitor the PageRank of sites under my control fairly carefully. None had changed at all in months. I was reading an article about PageRank updates yesterday which mentioned the PageRank checker: ezer.com. I’ve tried a few of these kind of sites before, and most of them are rubbish. Yesterday ezer showed mostly 0/10 for this site, with a few 3/10’s. Today it’s showing mostly threes and a couple of zeros. I guess the propagation of this update is almost complete.

My former software and web design business, Gladsoft (Gladsoft is dead! Long live Gladsoft!) has fallen off the PageRank charts completely. About time. For six months last year I had it displaying the apache test page. Late last year, as it still had a PageRank of 4/10, I decided to make it useful. I was still getting a large number of enquiries from people looking for web design services, so I put some Google ads up and a few links to companies I’ve dealt with that might be able to help them. Share the PageRank love, that sort of thing. There are still a good few sites out there linking to it, so I imagine it will resurrect itself Googlewise next time there’s an update.

The versions are coming thick and fast. Seems I’m not the only one who was busily working through the holidays. This time its listed on the the exim site. A few bugfixes from 4.64 & 4.65.

I’m up to my elbows in various projects at the moment, rebuilding my MTAs being one of them. I’m converting my old sendmail/postfix MTAs to exim and separating out the functions onto different Xen virtual machines. Where possible, for maintainability, I like to stick with pre-rolled Debian packages unless I have a reason not to do so. Exim is one case where I like to roll my own.

Much of the exim config is best built into the binary at compile time. One example is logging. Exim needs to know where to write logs before it reads its config (in case it needs to log the fact that it can’t read its config). If you want to log to a non-standard location (or use syslog), then you need to tell exim at compile time. You will also need to compile from source if you want to specify which user exim runs as or if you want to compile out unused transports and lookups for security/performance reasons.

Fortunately, exim is pretty easy to put together, and local makefiles are mostly transferable from one version to the next so its easy to maintain your own package. I run three separate daemons for the external mail exchanger (mx), local delivery (mailstore) and outgoing smtp. Building and maintaining these is straightforward - I’ll be putting a how-to up on this site in the next week or so.