Brett Sheffield . com

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.

Philip Hazel announced a new release of Exim a week ago:

The Exim website still says 4.63 is the current version, but the mirrors seem to have 4.64 in stock.

I’ll get busy building a deb package for Xen/Debian Etch.

I notice Google has picked up this blog recently so I guess I’d better start writing in it. Drafts of various articles have been underway for a while, but I’ve had little time to finish them. I expect I’ll be writing more over the Christmas break. Last year I spent considerable time testing and reviewing Open Source LAMP apps between eating various roasted animals and consuming vast quantities of alcohol. Bliss.

Gladserv.com is a step or two closer to being launched as a business hosted services provider. The domains are registered, the website is coming together, the second dedicated server has been ordered from Bytemark. An earlier order from UK2 was aborted when I discovered just how difficult they were to contact. Take a look at “Why Not To Use UK2” if you’re seriously considering them - cheap has more than one meaning. This server will be split into several virtual machines (VMs) using Xen with unused VMs sold off - there are already three other businesses on board.

I went to see the bank yesterday and my bank manager actually told me he thought my revenue estimates for the first year were very conservative. I tend to estimate on the side of caution these days, after previous bitter experience. This project is definitely gathering momentum.

I’m starting to promote the site. At the speed Google moves, I think it best to link first and write afterwards. I’ve put the shell of the site together using Website Baker, which is probably the easiest Content Management System (CMS) to set up and use I’ve come across. Graphics and pretty stuff will follow when someone with more visual talent than I provides them.

For the moment I have no need for the kind of fancy frippery that something like Joomla has built in. I usually spend the first hour on a new Joomla site turning everything off. For a simple business site, Website Baker has everything needed to get off the ground without additional distractions. There are some addons available to perform most commonly required functions, but nothing like the bewildering range of Joomla toys. Maybe later.

Yesterday I bought an incoming phone number from Gradwell and pointed it at an old Asterisk installation on my backup server. I’ve never used Gradwell for VOIP services before, but they came highly recommended to me so I thought I’d try them out. I’ve had less success with some other providers in the past. No problems at all so far. Online signup was straightforward. At one point I needed to phone for an authorisation code. At 1730 they answered the phone within a few rings and dealt with it on the spot. Provisioning of the line was immediate.

Asterisk setup is a topic for another day, but to add a new number into an existing setup is trivial. Add a few lines like this to iax.conf:

[08708618861]
type=user
username=myusername
secret=mypassword
context=iax-in
host=dynamic

and a line in extension.conf to tell asterisk where to direct incoming calls:

[iax-in]
exten => 08708618861,1,Goto(gladserv,s,1)

Easy. No need to get a man in at all.

For a long time I’ve been reaping the benefits of free software - this is one of several projects I’m launching to give something back to the libre software/open source community.

I haven’t had a personal website since the company that hosted it fired me back in about 1996 - over ten years. I remember a few people getting excited over my site because it had a background - it was probably one of the first websites to do so (remember when websites were grey?) It was pretty-much content-free - built it in about 1994 because a company asked me to write an HTML training course. I agreed immediately and then rushed home to find out more about HTML than how to spell it.

Since about 1994 I’ve been a user of various F/OSS tools. I went to the dark side for a long time, and spent years working as a programmer on proprietary systems. No more. I spend a lot of time (most of my waking day) working with open source software. Given that I spend so much time reviewing, testing and comparing Open Source packages, I thought I’d start publishing some of that work for others to use. My key interest is in applying Open Source software to real-world problems and how this can provide real, measureable business benefits.

So, expect reviews, how-tos, and articles on open source topics and how they relate to businesses in the UK.

Hell, I might even write some code , too.