Recently I started a fun project around real time DNS blacklists (RBLs) that are used by many mailservers to block spam from servers that are listed in such blacklists. My scripts helps to keep the system adminstrator informed, as soon as one of his hosts is found to be listed in such a blacklist. It does this by checking the servers against a list of blacklists and sends out e-mail notifications to the owners of those servers if a listing is found. Also de-listing messages, reminders and weekly summarys are sent out.
I’m looking for beta-testers that want to get their own Servers monitored against about 80 RBLs. If you’re interested, let me know by mail.
Posted in Geek stuff.
Tagged with beta, blacklist, checker, development, dnsbl, mailserver, php, project, rbl, tool.
By Mario Rimann
– 2009/11/18
Packt Publishing was so kind to send me another book to have a look at it. This time about the monitoring system Cacti. The book is pretty short while giving a good overview about the whole system. This includes setting up Cacti, configure graphs and hosts – and also how to implement your own scripts to generate data to be logged. I followed the steps in the book and had cacti set up in a really short time – compared to fiddling around myself.
Thumbs up – great book!
There was just one issue: The name “Oetiker” is not written with “ck” as in the book…
Posted in Geek stuff.
Tagged with book, cacti, monitoring, packtpublishing, review.
By Mario Rimann
– 2009/11/03
Kürzlich musste ich von meinem neuen Arbeitsort Rotkreuz nach Zürich an eine bestimmte Adresse. Der SBB-Fahrplan spuckte dazu folgenden sehr coolen Fahrplan-Vorschlag aus.
Ich habe mich dann entschieden, die Bahnhofstrasse hoch zu laufen weil ich eh noch viel zu früh war, und habe dort dann das Tram Nummer 8 genommen. Vom Bahnhof aus hätte man aber sicher auch den Bus Nummer 31 nehmen können, der hätte einem ähnlich schnell und mit weniger Laufen ans Ziel gebracht…
Posted in Funny Stuff.
Tagged with bus, fahrplan, Funny Stuff, öv, public transport, sbb, timetable.
By Mario Rimann
– 2009/10/06
Recently I was facing a Magento installation that has it’s Cache in a RAM-Disk to enhance the performance of the shop. From time to time the Cache-Drive was filling up to the max and we decided to monitor it via a little shell script. As soon as a certain size is reached, the Magento-Cache get’s emptied and the administrator is informed about it. The script can be run daily or more often, depending on your setup.
TO="mail@example.org"
SUBJ="Magento Cache Disk"
# Limit is 200M as the disk contains 256M in max
SIZE="204800"
# check the current size
CHECK=$(df | grep cache | awk '{print $3}')
if [ "$CHECK" -gt "$SIZE" ]; then
rm -rf /path/to/your/magento/var/cache/*
echo "Cache Disk was $CHECK Bytes big and thus emptied" | mail -s "$SUBJ - emptied" "$TO"
else
# echo "Cache Disk was $CHECK Bytes big and not emptied" | mail -s "$SUBJ - no action taken" "$TO"
exit 1
fi
Nice to see, that such stuff can easily be automated with a little shell script.
Posted in Geek stuff.
By Mario Rimann
– 2009/10/04
Last week I recieved a copy of Packt’s new book “Magento Beginners Guide“, written by William Rice. Alltough I’ve already got another book on that topic, I’ve read through it. It begins at the basics and also explains in detail how to upload stuff via FTP to your hosting provider. Then it goes on to describe how to set-up a Magento Onlineshop from the beginning. Categories, Taxes, Style customization, the different product types, handling payment and shippings are all covered together with some other topics.
Overall, the book makes a very positivie impression, especially since Packt seems to have changed their typography since the last book I’ve read. It’s well illustrated and contains many screenshots with detailed step by step tutorials. I’d like to recommend this book to everyone that is looking for a helpful book for Magento Newbies.
There’s just one remark to the content that bugs me: The author writes that Magento can be run “on almost every hosting service”. Well, technically that’s true. It will work – somehow. But as soon as your store grows, Magento will eat up way too much performance and it will get pretty slow on a shared hosting infrastructure. I don’t see this as a problem for Magento Shop-Owners, if the store grows, they should be able to pay a dedicated hosting. But that should be mentioned somewhere in the book.
Posted in Web Development.
Tagged with book, magento, packtpublishing, review.
By Mario Rimann
– 2009/10/04
Stefan Lung (dessen Nachname erst kompliziert in seinem Blog gesucht werden muss) hat einen Artikel über die Konvertierung bestehender MySQL-Datenbanken mit ISO-8859-1 Kodierung hin zu einer UTF-8 Kodierung veröffentlicht.
Sind ein paar interessante Informationen in seinem Post, jedoch hört sich vor allem der Anfang sehr nach 1&1-Bashing an… Nett wäre auch die Erwähnung gewesen, dass über die Kommandozeile viel mehr möglich ist, und definitiv keine händische Korrektur der Zeichen nötig ist: Tools wie iconv helfen.
Posted in Uncategorized.
By Mario Rimann
– 2009/09/13
Tolleiv Nietsch has posted an announcement of a new website he launched some days ago: http://www.encodechain.com/
This website allows one to try out different functions and even chain them. I like the JavaScript frontend!
Posted in Geek stuff.
Tagged with decode, encode, function, Funny Stuff, md5, php, test.
By Mario Rimann
– 2009/08/23
I’m proud of having found and “eliminated” a security issue in a TYPO3 extension which was now removed from TER. Via this way, I’d like to thank the TYPO3 Security Team for their great support and their crystal-clear information after submission of an issue. Keep up that good work guys!
We’ll see when I find time to look through the code of other extensions to search for some security problems.
Posted in TYPO3.
Tagged with bulletin, extension, security, TYPO3.
By Mario Rimann
– 2009/08/19
