Lime Daley

Wordpress xmlrpc.php and Spammers

Fri, 18 Sep 2026 19:23:55 +0000

Spammers love the xmlrpc.php - I just checked one server, and it has ~60K over the last month, and it is only that small because I block 100% of the hits to them and then my firewall blocks the IP addresses if people try multiple times. And basically all of those requests are trying to hack into wordpress sites by testing usernames and passwords. But, the reason for this post is that today I had an actual customer who wanted to use it for a legitimate purpose - he has a 3rd party site that he wants to allow backend access into his site through automated means.

Nifty ssh/config Entry

Sat, 14 Mar 2026 10:01:48 +0000

I've done some interesting things in the past with the config file for the ssh client, but ChatGPT pointed out a neat way to manage an ssh server for which you have two ssh keys and want to be able to login easily to each one at different times. In my case, I'm using Subversion, and use the svn+ssh method of connecting. And I have two users (one for the main LifeType source code and one for my customizations.

In the Never-Ending Saga of the Good Guys vs the Spammers...

Sat, 14 Mar 2026 09:55:36 +0000

I just recently discovered Cloudflare's Turnstile app, which is their answer to stopping spam, and it looks to work quite well, and was easy to code, so I added it to my contact plugin for LifeType. Commenting on LifeType has generally worked pretty well, and we rarely get any spam, but the spammers have recently figured out my hidden input plugin, which was created just over 20 years ago, so it has lived a good life, stopping almost 100% of the spam.

SPF Macro Validation

Thu, 08 Jan 2026 18:02:16 +0000

I came across a "new" feature in SPF records today called macros. It is an interesting idea that hasn't gained widespread adoption, but something I need to think about if it is useful for any of my customers. It is one way around the 10 lookup limit that is easy to hit if you use a bunch of 3rd party mailing services, each which require their own SPF record (and sometimes have quite extensive include statements within each record).

Subversion Server Moved

Fri, 29 Aug 2025 15:50:54 +0000

One of my old physical servers finally died and I had to move the Subversion server to a new machine. This resulted in the ssh host key changing, so if you get this error: svn: E170013: Commit failed (details follow) svn: E170013: Unable to connect to a repository at URL 'svn+ssh://svn@svn.limedaley.com/...' svn: E210002: To better debug SSH connection problems, remove the -q option from 'ssh' in the [tunnels] section of your Subversion configuration file.

Improved Spam Detection

Fri, 15 Aug 2025 07:07:35 +0000

I recently noticed that unblocked spams had gone up and that our mail server was getting error reports from a spam checking service konwn as "validity". Which is yet another list that tries to promote good internet behavior by listing good and bad actors. However, reportedly, they have changed their free service layer from a reasonable number of hits down to 13 per hour. This causes three rules to be hit in the default configuration of SpamAssassin to be hit: RCVD_IN_VALIDITY_CERTIFIED,RCVD_IN_VALIDITY_RPBL, and RCVD_IN_VALIDITY_SAFE, two of which are negative rules (negative means a good email), and thus emails that would have otherwise been tagged as spam were now being marked good.

No News Is Good News?

Fri, 11 Jul 2025 16:35:55 +0000

We haven't had many announcements for quite a while, and that is because everything has been running smoothly. A few new customers here and there, some small website changes, etc. But... Today our mail server got listed on the dreaded SBL (which is a great service, and I use it to block incoming email), not because any of our servers were hacked, but because our ISP had a "fraudulent customer"

New Mail Server!

Tue, 14 Jan 2025 19:10:12 +0000

After much procrastination, Lime Daley has a new mail server, thus finally bringing it up to date with the latest standards, etc. Due to the way the hostnames work, as long as you have your configuration setup correctly, you shouldn't have noticed any problems. If you are now getting login problems, check your configuration according to the link above, and then give us a call to help you figure out what you need to change.

VOIP Provider Switch Pending

Fri, 19 Apr 2024 21:00:14 +0000

Flowroute has served Lime Daley for the last 15 years and they have done well for the most part, but every once in a while they make really bad policy decisions. Last time they almost made me switch to a new provider was a silly decision to charge all customers a monthly fee for 911 access even if they couldn't actually call 911 due it being an incoming-only line or not even registered.

Salary Calculation Based on 401K Contribution Plus Taxes

Fri, 05 Apr 2024 19:53:53 +0000

I was faced with an interesting problem yesterday of trying to calculate the optimal salary for someone who wants to contribute all of their income to their 401K. And "optimal" is defined as "near as possible to the deductible maximum and not have any half penny or rounding issues per month or for the quarterly social security and medicare reports". In previous years (especially last year) it was trivial to get the right number, and I didn't have to think too much.

Mail Migration - Long Overdue

Thu, 18 Aug 2022 03:39:34 +0000

We are moving all email accounts to a new server which will improve reliability, security, and features. We are hoping that customers won't notice any changes, but it is possible that there will be some connection issues, particularly if you have an old email client; it might need to be upgraded to connect to the new SSL certificates and ciphers. Contact us if you have any problems in the coming weeks.

Lets Encrypt / Dehydrated retry

Tue, 02 Aug 2022 06:54:06 +0000

I get sporadic errors when running dehydrated -c from my regular cron job. The errors I get vary from time to time, but they are: ERROR: Problem connecting to server (get for https://acme-v02.api.letsencrypt.org/directory; curl returned with 35) ERROR: Problem connecting to server (post for https://acme-v02.api.letsencrypt.org/acme/authz-v3/xxxx; curl returned with 35) It seems to happen to some servers more than others, particularly newer ones (Debian 11). [@more@] I added this to /etc/dehydrated/conf.

Major Power Loss at the Datacenter

Fri, 15 Apr 2022 10:42:52 +0000

The servers have redundant A/B power connections, but there was a circuit breaker problem at the utility or something that somehow took out both power legs and didn't let the generator startup either. Power went down at 3AM, and came back up at 4ish, but there are still some lingering affects. Update: 06:52AM: Everything seems to be up and running at this point. Let us know if you are still having any problems.

Receiving MMS Messages Is More Reliable Now

Wed, 06 Apr 2022 23:53:01 +0000

After a long time of not being able to figure out why some MMS messages don't come through well, and others are fine, I finally figured it out. PHP's mail() function doesn't do anything with line-wrapping and some email clients and servers have trouble with long lines. The RFC standard is 80 characters (78 plus the carriage return/line feed), and Amazon (which is where the MMS images get hosted temporarily) uses really long lines in their URLs - over 1,000 characters, so I suppose it is reasonable that mail servers don't like emails that go past the standard by 12X.

Virtual server outage

Mon, 01 Nov 2021 01:08:33 +0000

The virtual server system has been having trouble over the last week and the ISP thought they would be ok for a few more days, but a switch died again and took everything down. They are working on it now, but don't have an estimated uptime yet. This affects various websites and all email services use a virtual server as a proxy, though I'm wondering about bringing that proxy server up at a new host.

Programming Class Prices

Wed, 13 Oct 2021 12:02:27 +0000

We accept cash, check, credit card and also government-sponsored educational payments through organizations like ClassWallet, Educational Freedom Accounts, or the Children's Scholarship Fund. If your state has an educational fund that we aren't currently listed as a vendor, we can probably register to be paid using those funds. Class pricing depends on the content and length of class that you choose. [@more@] Introduction to Scratch: Available for any age student; being able to read is quite helpful, though we have some students who are able to navigate the language/site by pictures and only need minimal reading ability.

VOIP Phones

Wed, 13 Oct 2021 11:35:45 +0000

Lime Daley runs a Voice over Internet Protocol (VOIP) phone system that far exceeds what is possible with a traditional phone company. Our customers range from individuals to small business offices. We can save you money on your monthly costs and add additional features that you either can't get or is cost prohibitive with other phone compnaies. [@more@] Our base rate is $10/month for an incoming phone number; this includes e-911 addressing for one address.

Phone Hosting/Systems

Wed, 13 Oct 2021 11:32:19 +0000

We have been running a phone company for the last 15 years, and this part of our business has been expanding recently, as people are moving away from the expense of landlines, and businesses discover that the traditional phone companies are in the dark ages as far as costs and features go. Read more about our pricing and features.

Classes

Wed, 13 Oct 2021 11:26:50 +0000

Lime Daley offers programming classes for students of all ages. For beginner students, we'll explore MIT's Scratch program with some easy samples and then progress to harder assignments, depending on the skill and interest of the student. For advanced students, we will move to a programming language that is actually used for development in commercial environments, Python or C++. Python and C++ will need some setup on your own computer, and we can help you get your development environment setup.

Programming Classes

Tue, 05 Oct 2021 08:55:09 +0000

I've done informal programming classes in the past, but I've been thinking lately of making it more formal. There are a few professional coding classes available, and we've tried some with our own kids Khan Academy is great, though Jonathan was disappointed when he discovered the "fake" javascript world that coding system lives in isn't that practical for making actual programs. Scratch is pretty great too, and I think the best introduction to programming that currently exists, particularly for young kids, because you don't even need to be able to read that well to be able to program proficiently there.

Gourmet Printing

Mon, 21 Dec 2020 02:52:16 +0000

For those of you using Gourmet on a system that doesn't have python-poppler that was removed and so then printing no longer works, there is an easy solution. Simply find an older version of the package python-poppler, and reinstall it. I looked into why poppler was removed, but I forgot the reason, but I need to be able to print my recipes... This will probably break at some point, but hopefully gourmet will be updated to python3 by that point and we'll get to keep using it.

PINE / Alpine Decrypting Password Files

Mon, 26 Oct 2020 20:43:27 +0000

I have an instance of Alpine 2.0 that still has the old-style .pine-passfile that is fairly insecure, but I couldn't find a utility to decrypt it for me, so I grabbed the source code from imap.c from version 2.01 of the alpine source, and modified it to just read in a password file and output the passwords in it. (See below for how to decrypt the newer versions as well)

Mail Client Setup

Fri, 21 Aug 2020 20:26:27 +0000

We use a customized hostname for each customer. The name is some version of your domain name as a prefix to -mail.limedaley.com. So, if Microsoft ever decided to host with us, their hostname would be microsoft-mail.limedaley.com. Contact us if you don't know the correct hostname. Usernames are always your full email address of your primary account (some customers have secondary receiving accounts that use the primary account as the login for sending email.

Amazon Fresh API: PHP/cURL Woes and a Final Solution!

Wed, 29 Jul 2020 20:09:48 +0000

I just spent four hours trying to get the Amazon API to work properly. The documentation is pretty poor, and just has the one example, which as I finally figured out in the end, works completely differently than the "landing" URL, which is the one you actually need to use. How I thought it would work is that I would send my ingredients off to Amazon and they would return a customized link (in the form of the green button like on the verify page) and then I could display that to the visitors.

Script to Generate Self-Signed Certificates Automatically

Sun, 26 Jul 2020 13:30:48 +0000

I always have trouble remembering how to make self-signed certificates, and there are a million different webpages devoted to doing so, but they all do it a little differently, and don't always, work, so here is the millionth-and-one web page, but at least it will work for me. The features I care about are using private IP addresses, private DNS names, public DNS names, a root authority that needs to be imported into the browser's trusted certificates, and remembering/auto-filling passwords automatically.

DKIM Records for Lime Daley Outgoing Email

Wed, 19 Dec 2018 22:24:32 +0000

DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail) is a useful method to help protect your domain from being used in phishing schemes, and also to help your legitimate emails to be delivered. To enable, a change needs to be made on the mail server as well as in the DNS records for your domain. If your DNS is hosted by us, we can make all of the changes for you, so just let us know.

Text Messaging For Your VOIP Phone

Tue, 15 May 2018 07:12:28 +0000

Some of you already know and are using our new SMS and MMS service, but we've never officially announced it, so it seemed like now would be a good time to do so. We currently only have incoming SMS/MMS messaging setup, but are working on getting outgoing messaging working as well. Let us know if you are interested in that service, and how you would want to be able to use it, and we'll see if we can accommodate what you are looking for.

VOIP Server Upgrades

Tue, 15 May 2018 07:07:18 +0000

Lime Daley is proud to announce that our upstream provider has added new VOIP servers for redundancy and geographic performance increases. By switching to the closer server, the latencies are reduced by 80%. While we have seen very few issues in the past, it is good news that the provider is investing in their services as they grow and provide better and better service.

ltsp-build-client error on tcsh: VENDOR environment variable set to unknown

Thu, 09 Mar 2017 04:41:28 +0000

I'm not sure where VENDOR gets set - maybe just in the default tcsh binary, but when I su to root (bash) it saves the environment variable, and the ltsp-build-client script looks to see if the VENDOR variable is set, and if it is, uses that value, which in my case is set to "unknown" which then results in the output of ltsp-build-client to be: /usr/share/ltsp/plugins/ltsp-build-client/common/010-etc-hosts: line 3: /opt/ltsp/amd64/etc/hosts: No such file or directory

Temporary Outage

Sun, 09 Oct 2016 15:31:09 +0000

We lost a second drive in clementine today, which will affect some users and all phone service. We are working on migrating the information to a new server and are hoping to have everything back up shortly. Update: All users and phone service was moved to mandarin, and everything is back up functioning normally.

Fun with Pointers (or maybe Fun with Engineering Students)

Tue, 20 Sep 2016 13:39:47 +0000

I was a teaching assistant for 18-349, Introduction to Embedded Engineering for three semesters in college and I really enjoyed it. One semester, the professor asked each of the TAs to create a test problem, and I had quite a lot of fun with that, though my students didn't. Only two students out of 100+ got it entirely correct, though maybe 30% got most of the problem correct. Students always have trouble with pointers, and understanding how their are addressed, de-referenced, etc.

Notice: Physical Server Move

Sat, 20 Feb 2016 23:29:49 +0000

All of the servers need to be moved this weekend (the move has been in the works for the last three or four years...) and so there will be some downtime for each of the servers, around 15 minutes starting at 5:30AM, and finishing up by 7:30AM on Sunday morning. Hopefully, this time frame will be as least intrusive as possible for you and your visitors/customers. UPDATE: 2/21/2016 7:48AM: Everything went as well as it could have, and most of the servers had even less downtime than expected.

New SSH keys for Orange

Wed, 16 Dec 2015 02:19:24 +0000

We're increasing the security on orange to get it up to (mostly) modern standards. The fingerprint for the RSA key is: SHA256:mOIrhJUd+tgKjvMD21YvZaL3Ew37lqIubNZj0qz6Gjc RSA:2048:4d:b4:d8:0d:0f:74:5f:68:2d:87:b7:df:fb:cb:80:6f Sorry for the inconvenience, but is better to be inconvenienced than insecure...

Hardware failure

Tue, 21 Oct 2014 20:00:06 +0000

Lime Daley experienced an unspecified hardware failure in a hard drive this morning, and caused some sites to be down for a number of hours. The hardware is being worked on at the moment, and most customers are fully back up. Some customers are still missing data, and that data will hopefully be automatically restored over the next couple of hours.

Heartbleed SSL Bug: Resolved

Wed, 09 Apr 2014 07:07:04 +0000

Lime Daley has updated all of our SSL certificates due to the recently discovered bug in the widely used OpenSSL libraries. The vulnerability affected our email and web services. Unfortunately, there isn't any way to detect whether an attacker has made any use of this vulnerability or not. To be safe, you should update any passwords you have. This vulnerability does not apply to those customers on "orange", as that server was using a version of the software that was not affected by this bug.

Planet Memory Review

Mon, 17 Mar 2014 16:47:33 +0000

I have a server that is apparently considered "old", as in, the RAM in it is old enough that manufacturers aren't making much of it any more, and so the prices are starting to go up. I had purchased the machine only half full of processors and RAM with the idea that it would be a cheap upgrade later once I needed it. I'm getting to the point of "

Hardware Maintenance: Clementine

Sat, 01 Mar 2014 14:52:47 +0000

A hard drive failed in clementine, and the plan is to replace the drive today, provided that USPS delivered it to the right place. I'm hoping to replace it without taking the machine down, but we might need to power down the machine for a little while to avoid losing any data during the replacement. I'll update this page as any new information happens. 10:30AM Update: The drive has been replaced, and the machine is back up and running.

How is Lime Daley Like a Trappist Monk?

Mon, 20 Jan 2014 00:50:40 +0000

While the headline sounds like it might be the beginning of a bad joke, the Trappist Monks from Moncks Corner, SC were mentioned in a sermon this morning, and so I thought I would look up the article referenced, as it sounded pretty good: The Business Secrets of the Trappist Monks. The article might be long for some of you, so I'll quote the highlights (though you should at least go read the seven bullet point "

Hack the Hackers

Fri, 20 Dec 2013 21:33:28 +0000

I have a customer who installed a machine with the administrator/root password very weak, and left it open to the internet. Someone guessed the password, logged in, and then helpfully ran 'screen', so I could watch what he did (presumably - he might have been smart enough to do other things, and we will format the drive, but it was neat to see all of his commands, including typos, and guessing at some commands, because he must not have been familiar with CentOS).

Importing Data From Ning

Fri, 26 Jul 2013 16:32:38 +0000

I have a customer who is trying to move their website from ning.com to a new web hosting provider, and ning supposedly provides a method for exporting the data, but they acknowledge that their data format is broken, and so requires manually editing to make it readable by other parsers. They bug they know about is that the ning files start and end with extraneous parentheses, and so those have to be removed prior to reading by any JSON parser.

"What's the Worst Thing That Could Happen?"

Thu, 30 May 2013 13:46:02 +0000

For those of you who know me, you know I find it useful to ask the question, "What's the worst that can happen?" when thinking about whether to do something or not - particularly when it comes to a matter of walking by faith in a particular situation. I find that the answer to that question is usually, "I could get embarrassed", or "I might lose some money", or other such things that don't matter all that much.

Archive Page for Wordpress Blogs

Tue, 14 May 2013 03:27:44 +0000

A customer wanted a "site index" page for their Wordpress site, which in blog terms means an "archive" page. You can use the wp_get_archives() function, but that doesn't give you much in the way of customization. I thought about using the "format=custom" parameter, and try to parse the information afterwards, but that seemed like a pain, so I threw away that function call, in favor of calling get_posts, and then doing all of the setup myself.

Storm Status

Tue, 30 Oct 2012 01:20:09 +0000

Since the servers are located on the east coast, we are potentially affected by Hurricane Sandy. But, the backup power systems were tested this morning, generators have their fuel tanks topped up, and we are not expecting any problems with the service. Stay safe at home checking your email... :)

Domains Made Easy / GoDaddy DNS outage

Mon, 10 Sep 2012 20:05:03 +0000

For those customers who use domainsmadeeasy as their DNS provider, you are likely seeing sporadic outages. A hacker has claimed responsibility, but hasn't said why. DomainsMadeEasy's phone is busy/down, so I haven't been able to talk to them to get an estimated uptime. I suppose there is one reason to use the company I use for DNS (who have recently changed their policy to not allow me to tell you who that is?

Server outage

Thu, 23 Aug 2012 03:52:52 +0000

It's been a while since I've had anything interesting to report, and that's usually considered a good thing... We're having some trouble with one of the servers and replacement parts are on order and will be installed tomorrow. In the meantime, if you are on "tangerine", your web page will be inaccessible. Email will still be delivered relatively normally in most cases, and will be saved for later delivery in all other cases.

Changing Paths While Migrating Subversion Repositories

Tue, 13 Mar 2012 21:55:03 +0000

Note: This is extremely hacky, and you had better make sure you have a backup, as it is quite easy to wreck the repository. Scenario: I was moving a subversion repository from one server to another, and in the process, I also wanted to update the paths, since the first repository had been a general purpose repository, and the second was only for one particular customer, and so didn't need the extra path info at the beginning.

Internet Routing - Level3

Mon, 22 Aug 2011 15:26:57 +0000

Level3 (an upstream provider for Lime Daley) appears to be having some issues today, and that is causing some flakiness in our network. Staff is onsite monitoring the issue, and may end up moving traffic off of Level3 until they fix their issue. [Update: it turned out to be a Sprint issue, and it took them a while to figure it out. It only affected the connections between some people and some websites.

Groan: New International System of Units

Tue, 19 Apr 2011 14:44:54 +0000

A little humor for your day, courtesy of Jack Gannsle. Ratio of an igloo's circumference to its diameter = Eskimo Pi 2000 pounds of Chinese soup = Won ton 1 millionth of a mouthwash = 1 microscope Time between slipping on a peel and smacking the pavement = 1 bananosecond Weight an evangelist carries with God = 1 billigram Time it takes to sail 220 yards at 1 nautical mile per hour = Knotfurlong 16.

Boring Announcement

Wed, 13 Apr 2011 02:36:11 +0000

Not much to say, but I figured there hasn't been anything posted in a while, so thought I should at least post something. Lime Daley has expanded our existing servers a bit - one customer now has 16GB of RAM exclusively for their site, and another customer needed more disk space, and so we installed a RAID6 array with 8TB of usable space.

Procmail Recipe to Filter Addresses in the From Field

Wed, 13 Apr 2011 02:32:17 +0000

I've noticed a common spam method lately, which I'm not quite sure what the idea is since it is so obviously spam, and trivially filterable that it doesn't seem like it will last very long, but a couple have ended up in my inbox, and since I really don't like emails in my inbox I decided I would write a filter to keep this type out. :0: * ^From:[^@]+@[^@]+@

State of the Lime: 2011

Thu, 27 Jan 2011 17:52:27 +0000

Another successful year has passed for Lime Daley, and since I like statistics, when I happened to notice a large amount of spam being silently thrown away today, I took the opportunity to check up on the stats for the last year. EMAIL We received 5 million emails in the last 12 months. We bounced 74% of that email back to the original sender because it was being sent from computers known to be spammers.

Network Upgrade

Mon, 20 Dec 2010 22:06:38 +0000

We'll be upgrading some networking equipment on December 22 between 2:00 and 6:00 AM EST. You might see some delays and brief outages during that maintenance window. UPDATE: 2010/12/22: 6:30AM: Most equipment has been upgraded without any downtime. The job ended up getting split into two pieces, so there will be another maintenance window on 12/24 as well. UPDATE: 2010/12/24: 7:00AM: All devices have been upgraded. We had a couple minutes of downtime around 4:00AM.

Quicker Email Delivery

Mon, 20 Dec 2010 21:55:11 +0000

We are now using dnswl.org's mail server whitelist to bypass greylisting, which means that for known legitimate mail servers (all 101,686 of them at the moment), greylisting will be bypassed, which means that your e-mail will arrive a little bit sooner.[@more@]We'll eventually turn off spam filtering for those servers with the "high" rating, which should mean that advertisements from companies that you've actually signed up for will be less likely to arrive in your spam folder.

Intermittent Network Connectivity

Mon, 27 Sep 2010 14:03:45 +0000

Our upstream provider is currently seeing intermittent network connectivity at this point. We are looking into it further. UPDATE: 11:05EDT: The cause was a misconfigured machine on our network causing a denial of service to other connections. The machine has been removed from the network, and as of 10:25EDT, everything looks good, but we'll continue monitoring.

DNS Outage/Slow

Sat, 07 Aug 2010 14:53:32 +0000

2010/08/07, 10:55AM: The company we use for DNS services is having some issues this morning and some queries are not being answered, and some are being redirected to our European servers, and causing various delays. If you host DNS with Lime Daley, you might see some flakiness in accessing services on your domain. Incoming mail should not be lost, as the senders' servers will retry automatically. And we've opened a support ticket with our upstream providers to make sure they know about the issue.

Simple TinyMCE Integration Into Moodle 1.9.x

Thu, 24 Jun 2010 18:15:28 +0000

There are a handful of solutions out there to integrate TinyMCE and Moodle, but some of them are obsolete, and some contain all sorts of things other than the TinyMCE files. So, I started by reading this entire page, and then figuring out which versions no longer worked, and finally settled on John Stabinger's version (link to stabinger.us was removed, since it appears the site was bought by SEO spammers), which was pretty good, though it contained a lot of extra stuff.

Minor Change to the Apache2 Configuration: DirectoryIndex

Thu, 20 May 2010 15:54:44 +0000

We don't think it will affect anyone's current websites, but we've turned off DirectoryIndex'ing by default for security* reasons. If you desire this behavior in a certain directory, you can turn it back on by adding (or editing an existing) .htaccess file and adding the line: Options +Indexes And the old functionality will be restored. * Where "security" is defined as security through obscurity, and not any real definition of security at all, but it keeps the script kiddies away.

HTML Obfuscation

Fri, 19 Feb 2010 18:04:43 +0000

I just finished a fun project today for a customer that involves trying to prevent HTML from being easily copied. It isn't possible to prevent someone like myself from getting the content, but you can go pretty far in preventing an average user from getting the content. There are a couple commercial solutions available, but they fail in different ways, mostly notably not working in some browsers (I still need to test mine with Safari and Opera), but even in Internet Explorer, all of the solutions I saw let you "save as text" and you get the entire text content of the page.

HOW-TO: Get Your Facebook Application to Show Up on a Page's Wall and Boxes Tab

Sat, 30 Jan 2010 04:22:41 +0000

It about to be deprecated, so this information won't be worth much in a month or two, but for some reason, the documentation on how to post stuff to a page's wall is really sparse, and took me a while to figure out, so here goes, and I'll try to add in the keywords that I searched for while trying to find the answer.[@more@] The problem: I have an application that can successfully post to a user's wall, boxes and separate tab (If you haven't gotten that far, you have other issues, probably related to using an old API, or not filling in the setFBML parameters appropriately), but the application will only post to a fan page's tab, and not the wall or boxes tab.

Electronic Distributor

Thu, 21 Jan 2010 16:48:14 +0000

Lime Daley is proud to announce that we are expanding our business into the area of consumer electronic products. We can sometimes get better prices than what is available to the general public, but we see the added value for you is that if there are any problems with the product, you get to deal with Lime Daley, rather than some large company somewhere that doesn't really care about you and your business.

The Secret to Upgrading osCommerce from 2.2ms2-2006-08-17 to 2.2rc1

Wed, 20 Jan 2010 17:17:02 +0000

I've been working with a customer to upgrade his osCommerce installation. The interesting points of the upgrade are that he has a highly customized installation, both in the template and code. Subversion comes to the rescue for all of that. And I got his source code checked in (had to first figure out what version he was running, since it turns out he originally installed 2.2ms1, and had partially upgraded to 2.

Procmail Programming

Thu, 07 Jan 2010 17:53:02 +0000

I've written a couple procmail scripts over the years, and I thought I should publish them since it might help someone. The following script goes in /etc/procmailrc which allows users to disable the spam check for whatever reason - perhaps they use a different program or otherwise don't need the spamassassin check. (see next script, where my virtual users use a different spamd, since the user doesn't actually exist, so I need to change the username in spamc, and call a different spamd which is listening on a different port than the default spamd) :0fw

Paypal Transaction Processed: Thank You!

Thu, 10 Dec 2009 17:27:19 +0000

Thank you for your payment. Your transaction has been completed, and a receipt for your purchase has been emailed to you. You may log into your account at https://paypal.com/ to view the details of this transaction. Click for support or other questions regarding your purchase.

Wordpress: Cache RSS Feeds to Lower CPU Usage

Wed, 09 Dec 2009 22:23:28 +0000

I did some work for a client who was having high CPU load issues with their tiny (20 posts, no comments) Wordpress installation. They already had the super-cache plugin installed (I think that should be shipped by default in wordpress), but the super-cache plugin (as of version 0.9.6.1) doesn't cache RSS feeds, so for each of the ~5000 viewers of the RSS feed, the feed is regenerated each time, causing this tiny site to be the largest CPU usage of all sites on this particular shared server.

Terms of Service

Tue, 01 Dec 2009 17:43:55 +0000

This User Services Agreement ("Agreement") is an agreement between the customer ("User") and Lime Daley, an internet service provider located at 44 Church Street, Hillsboro, NH ("Lime Daley"). "Services" refers to email and any other services provided to User by Lime Daley. This document may be updated and/or modified at any time. Service Uptime Guarantee (applies only to Users with a Service Level Agreement) Lime Daley provides an uptime availability target of 99.

Support Information

Tue, 01 Dec 2009 17:43:48 +0000

Read any recent announcements. Looking for your invoice or your support tickets? Check the online support system. Call us on the phone: 412-360-7844 Account Management https://<your-server-name>.limedaley.com:8443/ The final result should look something like: https://orange.limedaley.com:8443/ If you aren't sure what your server name is, email support, and we'll get right back to you. Email https://<your-domain>-mail.limedaley.com/ These links are a little harder to show you examples. To form the correct URL, you should leave the "

Privacy Policy

Tue, 01 Dec 2009 17:43:39 +0000

Lime Daley shares your concerns about privacy on the Internet. In order to better protect your privacy, Lime Daley has provided this notice explaining its online information practices and the choices you can make about the way your information is collected and used on the Site. Furthermore, this Privacy Policy, being part of the Terms, works in conjunction with the Terms and Conditions of Use, but does not modify or supercede them.

Welcome to Apollo and AT&T Callvantage customers

Fri, 28 Aug 2009 17:47:55 +0000

Lime Daley often acquires new customers when they leave a previous provider who either doesn't provide support, or the support that is provided consists of mostly trying to figure out what language they are speaking. The person doesn't want to have to know technical details of why their site is getting the infamous 503 Internal Server Error, nor why their emails sometimes take 15 or 30 minutes to be delivered, and they are attracted to Lime Daley because they know they will get an engineer on the phone immediately, and problems are taken care of without hassle.

Lime Daley Statistics

Wed, 05 Aug 2009 19:03:51 +0000

Total servers: 6 New servers this year: 3 Total customers: 32 New customers this year: 6 Domains: 130 Email addresses: 1858 Monthly Data transferred: 1.6TB Monthly Emails: 705,000 84% is definitely spam and thrown away immediately 3% is possible spam and put in spam folders Thanks to God and our customers, Lime Daley is continuing to grow strong.

SOCKS Proxy Settings

Wed, 17 Jun 2009 17:05:58 +0000

To setup a SOCKS proxy to tunnel traffic through a semi-disagreeable firewall, you can use this command line: ssh -N -c 3des -D 1080 user@hostname This is simpler than doing the "regular" static port forwarding by setting up each port separately with the -L option.

Asterisk: Audible Caller ID

Sat, 06 Jun 2009 15:29:11 +0000

In addition to hosting phone services for other people, I also host my own phone numbers (personal and business). I prefer to not have different phones for each line, but I like any phone to be used for either number at any given time. I haven't gotten around to setting up distinctive ringing for the different lines, but instead, our home computer audibly announces the caller's name and number, and, for the business calls, which menu choice they made.

Asterisk: Recording Custom Sound Files

Sat, 06 Jun 2009 15:25:59 +0000

Some of my customers have a hard time creating the space-efficient .gsm files for their voice menus, so I created a simple extension where they can call up the Asterisk server, and record the menu as they want it, and then it can be placed into their dialplan. (The number of voice menus that are created are small enough so I haven't gotten around to making the system more robust, where it would automatically move the file into a customer accessible place (and keep track of which customer recorded which menu).

Asterisk: Blacklisting For Multiple Users

Sat, 06 Jun 2009 15:00:37 +0000

There are a number of tutorials for people trying to setup blacklisting for their Asterisk server, but they all seem to assume that there is only one user on the server, or at least all users want to share the same blacklist. Since I host for multiple, unrelated people, they don't necessarily want to share the same blacklist, so I had to come up with a configuration that would work for all customers.

Lime Daley Security Settings / Umask (Wordpress Super Cache Plugin Access)

Fri, 29 May 2009 20:57:32 +0000

Due to Lime Daley's security model with the shared hosting customers, one setting you might need to be aware of depending on what php software you are using is the default "umask" on the system.[@more@] For PHP, it is set to 0077, which is appropriate for any files that are created by a php application, and then need to be accessed by that application, or via FTP. However, the "gotcha" is that those files will not be able to be served straight to the user by the web browser.

CMS Choices

Fri, 29 May 2009 16:26:27 +0000

I've not been happy with any of the choices that are available for content management, but lately I've been warming to Drupal. Each system has its downfalls, and upgrades seem to be pretty bad on all of the ones I've used extensively (webgui, drupal, joomla).[@more@] I haven't tried to do major upgrades on newer versions of webgui, and its probably gotten better (it couldn't have gotten worse) than the 6.

Embedded Software/Hardware

Wed, 06 May 2009 22:08:10 +0000

Though most of this web site is dedicated to the web hosting portion of the company, Lime Daley also provides hardware and software engineering services. We have published a sample of projects to demonstrate what Lime Daley can do for you. Contact us for more information or a quote for your project.

How do I make a Lime Daley if I don't have fresh limes?

Mon, 04 May 2009 17:12:47 +0000

Here is the recipe for a Lime Daley if you don't have fresh limes: ice to taste 3 tablespoons lime juice 2 drops Boyajian lime oil 1 twelve-ounce bottle Blenheim "Old #3" (red cap) ginger ale Put ice in a tall glass. Add lime juice and lime oil. Slowly pour in Blenheim. Stir well.

Data Center Migration

Wed, 29 Apr 2009 19:29:27 +0000

No news is good news as they say, so you haven't heard from me in a long time. My upstream provider has built a new data center, and tonight is the night for my servers to move to the new location. The new location has been up and running without any glitches for a couple of months, so I don't expect any issues with the move. For those customers on "shared" hosting plans, you shouldn't see any difference, for those customers with colocation plans, you will now have better access to the facilities, and there are some bonus perks of conference room space and in general a nicer facility than the old one.

I assume that as a small company, you react slowly and often aren't available?

Sat, 18 Apr 2009 16:55:29 +0000

Not at all. Lime Daley offers round the clock support for all urgent requests. When submitting a ticket via our online support system, you will be asked whether the request is urgent or not. If the request is truly urgent, i.e. your site is malfunctioning, or some other techical problem, please make use of the "urgent" status and provide a callback number and someone will be paged immediately and return your call.

Lime Daley's Recommendations

Thu, 09 Apr 2009 14:11:03 +0000

In the course of doing business with various vendors, we have come across those that we recommend to others whenever we get the chance. (We also have vendors that we'd specifically not recommend, but that's for another day.) Teraswitch is our upstream provider, and also a reliable hosting provider in the Pittsburgh area. Let them know you heard about them from Lime Daley. My DNS provider is excellent, but unfortunately, due to a recent change in their terms of service, I am not allowed to tell you who that is - seems like a really bizarre marketing decision, but they forced me to agree to those terms if I wanted to continue using their service.

ALPS Touchpad Configuration in Debian

Thu, 09 Apr 2009 11:25:24 +0000

After spending hours trying to get the HAL/FDI method to work, I resorted to modifying the xorg.conf directly, though I was able to only add a couple lines, since my current xorg.conf is basically empty, with everything being auto-detected. The main difference that I wanted (from lots of other posted information) was that I liked the fdi method of configuring things (xorg.conf has always been a scary file to play with) and so I didn't want to have to hard-code everything, which means, as far as I could figure out, to not have a ServerLayout section at all since once I added that to get the touchpad to work properly, it broke everything else.

Welcome Circuit Cellar Readers

Wed, 08 Apr 2009 21:48:54 +0000

A hearty welcome goes out to those engineers and hobbyists who have found us via the recent Circuit Cellar article about our DOS USB project last year. We hope to post more articles about past projects soon. The articles will be back-posted (with timestamps to match the dates the projects were completed), so be sure to check the projects page again later. If you are interested in hiring Lime Daley for embedded software and/or hardware, we'd be happy to hear from you.

Website Updated

Wed, 08 Apr 2009 21:45:45 +0000

Probably not very exciting news for most of you, but to try to keep the cobbler's-kids-don't-have-shoes syndrome at bay, we've updated our web page, which will hopefully be easier to navigate.

Why Lime Daley?

Mon, 02 Mar 2009 19:46:59 +0000

Answer 1: The Drink and Inspiration Here is the recipe for a Lime Daley: ice to taste 1 lime, cut in half or quarters 1 twelve-ounce bottle Blenheim "Old #3" (red cap) ginger ale Put ice in a tall glass. Squeeze lime over ice and drop in the rinds. Slowly pour in Blenheim. Stir well. Be prepared for the strongest kick a non-alcoholic drink can have. How do I make a Lime Daley if I don't have fresh limes?

Thinking In "Blog"? Nope. But Thinking In Code? Yes.

Wed, 25 Feb 2009 17:35:25 +0000

Some people have been talking about whether they think in blogging, as in: "this is so much fun, I should blog about it", or, "look how cute the kids are being, I should grab a camera so I can post it on flickr", etc. I didn't particularly relate to that, but this morning I re-discovered a cipher book I liked as a kid, and thought it would be fun to go through some of it.

IRS Recovery Rebate Credit Calculator

Tue, 17 Feb 2009 21:22:47 +0000

The IRS is supposed to be working on an online calculator to help everyone figure out how much of a rebate (if any) they are due this year. I was confused about my own taxes, and so once I figured it out, thought I would write an online calculator to help the rest of you. Try it out here.

Recovery Rebate Calculator

Tue, 17 Feb 2009 18:41:41 +0000

The IRS hasn't published their calculator yet, and I have been reading about lots of people trying to figure out what to do with line 70 on their 1040 (ie. the famous RRC that is causing probably more time wasted than was worth the money that was sent out last year. So, I wrote a calculator this morning. I went through a bunch of cases, so I think I got all of them, but of course, who knows, with all of the tax tricks, etc.

Helper Shell Scripts for Worklog

Mon, 08 Dec 2008 20:25:56 +0000

As I wrote earlier, I use worklog to keep track of my time. I use some other scripts to help manage worklog's output, and now that I made one of the scripts work even nicer today, I figured I should post them. [@more@] I use get-time to see where I spent time on a particular day. It defaults to today, but you can give it an argument like "yesterday", "

Sprint Outage - Solved

Mon, 24 Nov 2008 22:11:55 +0000

One of our upstream providers (Sprint) has been having connectivity problems for the last hour, and worse, even after routing to/from them is turned off, they have something misconfigured, so they are grabbing traffic that they don't own, and so generating circular loops into never-neverland. The worst of it seems to be over, and most traffic seems to be resolving well, but it is not 100% up yet.[@more@] As a side-effect of this, I learned about a nifty chart that shows how the big network guys are doing in regards to network times between each other.

Software Development

Fri, 14 Nov 2008 14:46:19 +0000

I have been quite behind in my magazine reading, and this morning I caught up to August (2008 - at some points, it has been necessary to specify the year when saying how far behind I am). There is an interesting article in Dr. Dobbs, by Scott Ambler, regarding methods of estimating costs of software development, and whether the typical, fixed price model is even ethical.[@more@] "fixed price refers to a project where the cost, schedule and scope are set early in the lifecycle.

Web Hosting

Thu, 30 Oct 2008 18:16:47 +0000

Our servers are located at a reliable co-location facility in Pittsburgh, PA, with backup power and redundant internet connections. We support many different types of users: Whether you are a small company who wants to be able to hang out a shingle on the web, someone who wants to host a personal web site, or a large company looking to host your site with hundreds of thousands of hits a day, we have something for you.

What sort of spam filter do you use?

Wed, 29 Oct 2008 16:59:45 +0000

Will I get any spam if I use your filter? How do you know what email is spam, and what isn't? Will you bounce emails you think are spam back to the original sender? Some filters block legitimate email, what do you do to make sure that doesn't happen? [@more@] There are three spam filters in place. The first bounces messages back to the sender if their IP address is on known spammer IPs.

Why don't you have $2/month plans?

Wed, 29 Oct 2008 16:58:52 +0000

You get what you pay for. Our services are customized and reliable. All of our accounts are on RAID1 or RAID5 hard drives, which gives you the reliability you need for your website. We don't want to waste our time and yours with cheap packages. However, we do have a blog-only (LifeType) package available for $5/month.

Can I have my own dedicated server?

Wed, 29 Oct 2008 16:57:25 +0000

Yes. There are various options depending on if you want to buy, lease to own, or just rent the server. We encourage Debian Linux, and run the "testing" version, which provides up-to-date applications (as opposed to the "stable" version), yet provides security patches and stability (as opposed to the "unstable" version). However, we can accommodate other preferences. Contact us for details. If you are interested, we can implement user mode linux which may be a cheaper alternative depending on your needs.

Why don't you use CPanel, Plesk, or Ensim?

Wed, 29 Oct 2008 16:57:10 +0000

The reason we got into this business is we like administrating machines, and don't need or want graphical tools to hide the details. We do use usermin, and some custom scripts which let our customers manage their own accounts. Lots of other tools make it harder (or even impossible) to administer the specialized accounts that we provide. When working on systems for other people, we often run into issues that would take merely seconds on our servers to change one line of a text file, but on their server, it takes the technician a long time while the customer is on the phone waiting for him to figure out how to do it correctly.

How do your SSL certificates work?

Wed, 29 Oct 2008 16:57:02 +0000

There are four ways for you to have an encrypted (HTTPS) site while using Lime Daley hosting services. Self-signed certificate Shared certificate Standard certificate Let's Encrypt certificate All methods provide the same amount of security and encryption. The trade-offs are price versus convenience for your site's visitors. A self-signed certificate will popup a warning when visiting your site for the first time, confirming that the visitor wants to install the certificate into their browser.

Dynamic DNS

Wed, 29 Oct 2008 16:56:43 +0000

If you want to be able to access your computer from outside your home (such as accessing your home computer from your workplace, or running a web or game server), but your ISP doesn't give you a static IP address, you need dynamic DNS. [@more@] There are many providers who offer dynamic dns for certain pre-defined domains. I have used DynDNS.org for a long time and that is an option for you.

Can I accept credit card payments on my website?

Wed, 29 Oct 2008 16:56:28 +0000

We don't offer automatic credit card charging, but some customers accept credit cards securely with SSL, and then manually charge the cards with their own merchant accounts. PayPal provides APIs (code) to charge credit cards via your website.

What payment options does Lime Daley accept?

Wed, 29 Oct 2008 16:55:25 +0000

Lime Daley accepts the following payment methods: Business or personal checks Purchase orders with 30 day terms Paypal account (mass payments preferred, with discount available) Credit cards (M/C, Visa, Amex, Discover) via Paypal International wire transfers (US$20 fee)

Developers' Corner: Can I manage my email accounts through a remote API?

Wed, 29 Oct 2008 16:53:45 +0000

Yes. We offer the ability to remotely manage your email aliases and accounts via a simple HTTP/HTTPS protocol, which allows you to develop your own applications and devices and be able to interact with our servers. [@more@] Some customers of ours use this to offer email to all of their customers using mobile devices. Their customers can manipulate their accounts through simple GUIs on the mobile device, and technical support can monitor and configure the customers' access through their own web site.

Colocation: I already have my own server; can I host it with you?

Wed, 29 Oct 2008 16:52:02 +0000

Yes, we offer managed and unmanaged colocation. [@more@] For unmanaged colocation, you can start with us, and as your usage grows, you can expand as much as you need to. It is a seamless transition if you want to purchase rack space directly from our provider, and we can help you get started. For managed colocation, Lime Daley has over 30 years of experience in administering various Windows and Linux machines, and enough skill and knowledge at our disposal to keep your server running and secure.

Custom Application Hosting

Wed, 29 Oct 2008 16:51:04 +0000

Lime Daley is the most customizable web host you will find. We specialize in hosting applications that you can't find elsewhere. [@more@] We have some customers that prefer to manage their own software, and enjoy our loose restrictions on shell accounts. Other customers don't want to ever see a command line and would rather see their web page up and running without having to think about whether they typed a forward slash or a backward slash.

Secure Document Hosting

Wed, 29 Oct 2008 16:50:45 +0000

Do you need access to important medical and legal documents while away from home? Do you wish that there was a secure way to have those documents easily retrievable no matter where you are? Lime Daley's secure document hosting service will enable you to upload documents safely, categorize them as appropriate, and then retrieve them later with a PIN number for each category. [@more@] This secure solution will enable health care providers and other authorized persons to get current contact information, medical/legal information as to your requests about your care, etc.

How do I disable the spam filter?

Wed, 29 Oct 2008 16:44:02 +0000

I like getting spam, and I don't want to use your really, really good spam filter, but instead get all the advertisements for enlarging various body parts. Can I do that? [@more@] Lime Daley uses a couple of spam filters in order to eliminate most spam that you receive. Only one piece of the spam filter isn't configurable, and fortunately for you, that part has never been known to be wrong.

How do I forward my email to my Yahoo account?

Wed, 29 Oct 2008 16:43:53 +0000

One customer reported this trouble: If you are trying to download your Lime Daley email from Yahoo and get the following error: Unfortunately, there was a problem: POP server does not support LAST command. You may only retrieve POP mail from this server using "get all messages." [@more@] You need to turn off "retrieve new messages only" in the settings. You might also have to turn off "leave mail on server" to avoid downloading duplicate mail.

FTP Login failure

Wed, 29 Oct 2008 16:42:03 +0000

I am getting a "530 Login authentication failed" message, but I know I am typing in the correct username and password. [@more@] Your IP address might have been placed on a blacklist due to too many failed logins. You can ask on our contact page to have your ip checked and removed. Your IP address will automatically be submitted along with your request when you fill out that form. Please include the username you were using and what time you were trying to login.

Customer Referral Program

Wed, 29 Oct 2008 16:41:31 +0000

Any existing Lime Daley customer can take advantage of our referral program to reduce or eliminate costs – or even get a check in the mail – when he refers a new customer who utilizes Lime Daley for software development, web site design or web site hosting. [@more@] You will get a percentage of that customer's payment deducted from your next invoice. Should the deduction(s) exceed the balance owed, a check will be issued to you.

Servers

Sat, 25 Oct 2008 15:19:18 +0000

Our current servers: Processor cores 2 * 2.4GHz (orange) 2 * 3.2GHz (tangerine) 4 * 3.6GHz (clementine) 8 * 2.6Ghz (ugli) 12 * 2.4Ghz (tangelo, pummelo) RAID RAID1 (orange, tangelo, pummelo) RAID5 (tangerine, clementine) RAID6 (tangerine) NAS/RAID (ugli) RAM 2GB (ugli) 4GB (orange, tangerine, clementine) 64GB (tangelo and pummelo) Passive cooling for reliability (orange, clementine, tangelo, pummelo, ugli) Active resource monitoring Debian Linux (we follow the "testing" release schedule) All servers have redundant internet connections as well as battery and diesel power backups.

Partial Outage - Solved

Wed, 15 Oct 2008 16:41:03 +0000

The most troubling outage in Lime Daley's history occurred this week - causing sporadic outages for a couple of days on one of our servers. No email was lost, though customers might have seen their web site down, or timeouts when trying to check their email. It turns out to be a bug in the linux kernel that shows itself on certain hardware. We are not clear as to why it only showed up recently, but are happy to report that a workaround exists, and the server seems to be stable going forward.

Web Hosting Provider Closing Down? Join Lime Daley!

Wed, 06 Aug 2008 08:28:09 +0000

A hearty welcome goes out to the FYI.net and IGDC.com customers whose hosts are closing down in the next couple weeks. Lime Daley is going strong, and we are happy to provide service to you.

SSH Login Attempts

Wed, 09 Jul 2008 03:40:22 +0000

I think I have written before about DenyHosts, but this evening, it prevented somewhere around twenty thousand individual hosts trying to login to one of my servers. The hackers have gotten smarter - that they used to just try from one host, which was trivially blockable, even manually. But, thanks to denyhosts (and the fairly easily trackable behavior by the hackers), they think they get a couple chances to guess a password before being blocked.

USB Flash Disk on DOS

Tue, 01 Jul 2008 18:28:18 +0000

No, you aren't reading the Internet Wayback Machine - this is 2008, and the National Institute of Mental Health still uses DOS for testing subjects. (If it isn't broken, don't fix it... And they can be much closer to real-time accuracy with DOS rather than Windows.) However, as the data sets get larger, and floppy drives become increasingly less common, it is harder and harder to get the data off of their testing machines back to the experimenters' desktops to analyze the data.

Power Outage

Tue, 03 Jun 2008 12:53:16 +0000

Switch and Data, the company where our servers are located, experienced a complete power outage last night for a couple seconds, causing all servers to be rebooted. The technicians were doing some scheduled maintenance, but the outage was unscheduled, they are looking into the problem further to try to prevent the problem from occurring in the future. The outage reduced our current month's uptime to 99.9955%, the lowest it has been in a long time.

Domain Registry Support - Phishing Scam

Tue, 27 May 2008 13:49:46 +0000

Watch out for calls or e-mails from companies claiming to verify your information. I got a call today regarding one of our customer's domains, trying to get information to "verify" the ownership. Presumably they are trying to take over ownership of the domain. An easy question to ask them is if they are the current registrar for the domain. (Of course they could lie about that, but Domain Registry Support is honest enough to ignore the question and just keep restating who they are, rather than saying "

Thank You! To Our Customers

Mon, 26 May 2008 19:43:10 +0000

Lime Daley internet hosting is in its fourth year of officially providing internet hosting, though some of you have been using services unofficially for longer than that. In that time, we have grown to 22 customers, primarily small companies and organizations, a large handful of individuals and a couple mid-sized companies, resulting in about a thousand email addresses and one hundred web sites.

PHP4 to PHP5 upgrade

Mon, 26 May 2008 19:39:11 +0000

PHP4 support was discontinued by the authors as of January, 2008. Lime Daley will be moving everyone to PHP5 this Friday, May 30. We will go through each site to try to make sure it is still working, but depending on what PHP applications you are using, particularly if you wrote it yourself, there might be issues in migrating. There are two temporary solutions that you can use if your code doesn't work in PHP5.

Spam Statistics

Mon, 19 May 2008 17:50:06 +0000

Statistics update for all of Lime Daley's servers. It is always amazing to me to see how much spam is sent by known spammers, and is trivially easy to throw away. I just checked the current stats, and Lime Daley is on target to reject 2 million spams this year. That doesn't include spams that are more questionable (122 thousand), and will be passed onto the user's spam folders for them to verify that they are spam.

Easier User Administration, Webmail, etc.

Fri, 16 May 2008 17:50:38 +0000

Lime Daley now supports SSL for all email connections for all customers, if they use their assigned domain name for accessing our servers. Contact the support department for details, but generally, the appropriate name is <your-domain-name>-mail.limedaley.com. This hostname can be used for SSL (and non-SSL, though we recommend SSL for security; TLS is also available) connections for SMTP, POP, IMAP as well as webmail and configuration by going to https://<your-domain-name>-mail.

Password Reset For Some Email Accounts

Wed, 23 Apr 2008 03:09:43 +0000

We had a database problem today that required some email account passwords to be regenerated. We apologize for the inconvenience, and have contacted most of the affected customers by phone or alternate means.

Network Maintenance

Mon, 21 Apr 2008 00:17:50 +0000

On May 5th, between midnight and 6AM, Sprint will be shutting down their network for four hours. The network will automatically failover to one of the other providers, so you should only see some network slowdowns and possibly some outages for thirty seconds or so as the routes switchover.

VMWare 1.0.5 Server patch for 2.6.25 kernel

Fri, 18 Apr 2008 04:28:25 +0000

I had the privilege of installing VMWare 1.0.5 on a brand new 2.6.25 kernel. I downloaded the 2.6.XX patch for vmware 1.0.4, applied the one change from asm to linux in vcpuset.h. That had worked for me before when using 1.0.5 on a 2.6.24 kernel, but today I downloaded a 2.6.25 kernel for someone and of course, someone changed something slightly, causing the vmware module (vmnet) to no longer compile.

Maintenance Update

Sat, 05 Apr 2008 17:44:09 +0000

I had hoped that this blog would be used for more interesting things other than outage reports, but so far, that hasn't happened. This morning a circuit breaker blew at the ISP, causing one of the servers (containing one customer) to go down for 30 minutes. The power switches are probably going to be reorganized today, and all of the servers might be rebooted at some point, not exactly sure what the status is at this point.

LifeType 1.2.7 released

Mon, 31 Mar 2008 00:38:10 +0000

After a slightly hectic day yesterday, when I noticed some strange behavior on one of my servers, we released a new version of LifeType. While I am not impressed that the bug existed in the first place, I think it is pretty neat that a development fixed was released within 4 hours of the bug being discovered, and an official release within 36 hours. The last time we had a security issue, we released the fix in less than 24 hours, but it is harder on a Sunday.

Debian Installed Relatively Painlessly on my Sony Laptop

Fri, 28 Mar 2008 15:56:39 +0000

I am sure this will excite many of our normal readers, but I have finally (after four years) switched my laptop to Linux. Now that I am using it everyday, it is much nicer to be in this environment, instead of having putty windows all over the place. Perhaps if I had a better window manager for windows, I would have been alright, but anyway... I have a Sony PCG-V505DC2 for those search engines to help other folks trying to figure out any issues with installing Linux, and Debian specifically.

Note to Self

Fri, 21 Mar 2008 01:27:36 +0000

When a customer says that he has a smaller project than the one I just did, don't pay attention, and think about the quote, rather than simply estimating the time as less than the previous project. Yesterday, I did a project for a friend (one who let me have better access than average to the real estate listings) and it took an hour and a half and was 107 lines of code.

Parcel ID parser

Tue, 18 Mar 2008 02:13:00 +0000

I don't know if it is only relevant to Allegheny County or if it is more universal, but a friend asked me to write a parcel id (parcel/block/lot) parser to help him out in his real estate searches. It was kind of a fun project (3 hours) and it was neat to see how well it worked out in the end. It takes stuff on the right, and turns it into the stuff on the left: 0318-C-00080-0000-00 <= 318 C 080

Perl Debugging

Thu, 17 Jan 2008 20:16:45 +0000

Our photo album wouldn't publish on this last update, and it took quite a while to figure out what the problem was.[@more@]Originally, the error had to do with the library Encode not being compiled correctly, and I had to run enc2xs on the Encode module. I am not sure whose "fault" that was, cpan or Debian, though a recent Debian upgrade is what caused the problem to show up. After I fixed that error, another error showed up, "$text is undefined in XML::RSS::_encode().

VPNC / Resolvconf / Set search string

Tue, 15 Jan 2008 04:06:40 +0000

I found what I would call a bug in resolvconf today, though probably most people don't run a VPN server like I wanted to, so no one ever noticed before.[@more@] The internal DNS server at one of my clients somehow loses its connection to folks connected via the VPN. That is an unsolved problem, and I haven't been able to figure out why that happens. So, I now host the DNS outside of the building, even though they are local (192.

Bandwidth Limits Removed

Fri, 14 Dec 2007 17:35:19 +0000

I discovered only yesterday (despite suspicions for a month or two) that when the network was switched a while ago, bandwidth caps had been placed by our ISP. They have been removed, and I was able to hit 80Mbps incoming and outgoing - I don't have a faster connection anywhere else with which to test it. But, for those of you who had noticed the previous 1Mbps cap and not complained, or figured it was your connection, you can be happier now.

Fun with Spam

Thu, 13 Dec 2007 14:53:23 +0000

I have been getting a bunch of spam through my contact form over the last couple of days, so I thought I would check out what they are trying to do. The domain's contact information is protected by privacyprotect.org, so we can't know who they are, though I filled out a form showing them their customer is a spammer, we'll see if they actually do give me the contact information or not.

Using tcpd_wrappers with pure-ftpd

Wed, 19 Sep 2007 20:04:10 +0000

pure-ftpd isn't designed to work with TCP wrappers, which is unfortunate, because then I can't simply add an ip address to /etc/hosts.deny to block the hackers when they guess passwords. But, since the hackers have tried to login to my servers thirty thousand times this month, and occasionally get good usernames, and theoretically might guess a right password eventually, I needed to figure out a solution.[@more@]The solution is to use the external authentication method before checking the "real" authentication methods, and simply check the IP address.

"You must dial a 1 for this call to go through"

Tue, 21 Aug 2007 21:25:09 +0000

I have been having lots of fun (that's the bad kind of fun, not the good kind) configuring Asterisk for my new IT job. It has been a pretty big pain getting it to work correctly with a couple different VOIP providers as well as the landlines. I had a good day today, figuring both how to get Teliax to forward the calls to our landline (since I can't seem to register the connection with Teliax, via SIP or IAX), as well as I figured out the problem with outbound calls using the verizon line.

Banned Comments?

Mon, 09 Jul 2007 20:54:11 +0000

For those of you who have gotten an "You entered an invalid URL" message when leaving a comment, no I didn't set out to ban you from commenting - it is that you didn't put an "http://" in front of your URL. Due to some security bugs, the input checking code was tightened up a couple months ago, and part of that changed how the URLs were parsed. After months of procrastinating, I finally got around to working on the problem - and it took all of five minutes to add a new type of filter that checks the URL prior to validation and prepends an "http://" to the beginning if you forget.

LifeType update to 1.1.6

Wed, 14 Feb 2007 03:19:27 +0000

One of the LifeType users reported a security problem in the RSS parser that allowed any file on your system to be read. ick. Oscar has fixed it and 1.1.6 will be released tomorrow. Everyone on my server has been upgraded already and it probably isn't too critical for them, at least in the case of retrieving their mysql password, which was the reported problem, since mysql doesn't allow remote access, so it would have to be a customer of mine.

Subversion Code: Using Vendor Branches to Keep Local Changes Synchronized

Sun, 03 Dec 2006 02:58:40 +0000

I usually end up forgetting how to do this, so here are my instructions of how to keep Usermin, an administration tool I use for my Lime Daley customers, up-to-date with the developers' changes.[@more@]wget usermin-1.240.tgz tar -xzf usermin-1.240.tgz # get the vendor's last version svn checkout /svn/vendor/usermin/current # remove all the files cd current find -type f ! -wholename *\/.svn\/* -exec rm \{} \; cp -r ../usermin-1.240/ . # usermin by default uses perl in the /usr/local/bin directory

First Outage...

Mon, 28 Aug 2006 17:43:26 +0000

Well, it was bound to happen sooner or later. Lime Daley had its first outage. My ISP had a router that failed, and caused the network to go down for 5 minutes. Five minutes isn't all that much, but isn't really acceptable for me. So, I will probably move the machine to my other host, who has redundant internet connections, and is supposed to be immune from this sort of thing.

SNMPD upgrade error

Wed, 29 Mar 2006 15:11:33 +0000

Since it took me a while to figure out the answer, I will post this here to try to help the next guy who has trouble when upgrade snmpd to 5.2.2. The rest of you won't care about this post.[@more@]could not open /proc/net/if_inet6 cache has existing timer id. Error opening specified endpoint "localhost:161" The first two are warnings (as far as I know) and can be ignored. The last is the important part, and because the latest version (at least on Debian) defaults to checking on localhost, you no longer need to explicitly specify localhost in the snmpd.

Lime Daley Logos

Wed, 29 Mar 2006 03:10:07 +0000

A couple people have asked about putting a "powered by LimeDaley" logo on their site, so we made a couple logos for you to choose from: Transparent logo: Transparent logo with border: White background:

Using Alternative Shells in Windows

Fri, 17 Feb 2006 21:07:31 +0000

For my company's next product, we are thinking about replacing the normal explorer shell with our own, but we want to be able to access the explorer.exe for debugging, etc. It turns out that when you start explorer, it checks to see if it is listed as a shell, and if it is, and this is the first instantiation of the explorer process, it loads up the desktop/start menu/etc. If the answer is no to either of those cases, it just loads the "regular" file manager view.

Merant OpenMake

Wed, 16 Nov 2005 15:33:04 +0000

Since we paid for the professional license, we get OpenMake for "free", so I figured I would try it out. The conclusion is that it isn't worth anything.[@more@]The longer version is that it, like all Merant products, is quite hard to actually get up and running. When the manual says, "you aren't required to enter the host name for the license manager during install", what they meant was, "we forgot to put the dialog in, so you will have to go hunt for license.

GnuCash / Debian update

Mon, 14 Nov 2005 21:15:56 +0000

I guess I am asking for it, running the gnucash source (1.8.9), but running everything else from Debian testing. I upgraded like usual, somewhere around every week, and didn't think anything of it, because aptitude/Debian always takes care of everything for me. But yesterday, Heather discovered that gnucash wouldn't run any more. oops.[@more@]She got this error: ERROR: In procedure dynamic-link: ERROR: file: "libgw-gnc", message: "libgtkhtml.so.20: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory"

SMTP Authentication

Tue, 08 Nov 2005 23:59:22 +0000

Like so many other articles on this subject, I will start by saying that I looked at various documents, but none of them worked perfectly for me, so I will write up my own steps. Most of the regular readers of this blog will not care at all about SMTP authentication, TLS, SSL, port 25, 465, 587, postfix (the oldstable postfix-tls) or Debian, though search engines should nicely find those keywords for those people who do care about them.

Readable Code

Wed, 03 Aug 2005 13:37:22 +0000

I think this is the worst code I have ever seen, except where people were trying to make code hard to read. This code is in a video driver, written by Silicon Motion.[@more@]This is the function at the top level, supposedly easy to read, since it is using these lovely macros. POKE_32(DE_WINDOW_SOURCE_BASE, FIELD_VALUE(0, DE_WINDOW_SOURCE_BASE, EXT, m_SMISettings.m_bUMA) | FIELD_VALUE(0, DE_WINDOW_SOURCE_BASE, ADDRESS, VgxSurfAddr(((SMISurf*) (pBltParms->pSrc))->OffsetInVideoMemory())) | 0); Now, to investigate what this does, here are the subsequent macros.

Email Random Signature Generation

Wed, 25 May 2005 12:34:18 +0000

I wrote a random signature generator for Pine, my email client. It worked great for a number of years, but with a recent upgrade of Pine, it started having trouble a couple of times a day, where the signature would be correctly rotated, but Pine would hang prior to sending the message, and would not save the content of the message either.[@more@]I had to kill the process and retype the message.

Lime Daley Hosting Begins

Sun, 15 May 2005 17:47:32 +0000

We have hosted a server and multiple sites at our house for 6 months, and we are now ready to make the leap to the colocation facility. There won't be any downtime during the switchover.

PHP Zip Uploader Script

Tue, 18 Jan 2005 03:52:42 +0000

I wrote this script a while back to upload (via HTTP) a zip file full of .pbm files, convert all the pictures to bitmaps, put the bitmaps in a zip file, and then send it back to the user.[@more@]I don't know how secure it is, so I wouldn't leave it around published somewhere on a server, but functionally, it works pretty well.

Mail Statistics

Sat, 15 Jan 2005 03:40:14 +0000

I finally got around to fixing up the mail statistics graph, after I accidentally erased all of our personal email for the past year.

Plog Template Update

Mon, 13 Dec 2004 17:36:46 +0000

It had always annoyed me that you couldn't use smarty commands in the stylesheet files in plog. It turns out it wasn't that hard to figure out, and the original authors had it basically done, but if you believe the comments, didn't think it worked yet.[@more@] It is helpful to change /class/template/templateutils.class.php, specifically the "setContentType" function to read: header("Content-Type: " . $mimeType); Then, make a file in your template directory called style.

Version Manager Setup

Wed, 01 Dec 2004 18:14:24 +0000

Whether you know the program as Merant, Serena or PVCS, the setup is difficult, and despite the sales department insistence that you don't need a full-time person to run their servers, I am starting to doubt it. Here are the instructions to setup a new project using the file server model with split archives.[@more@] I am using Version 8.0.2.3, so be aware what stuff applies to you, and what does not.

Test Director Problems

Wed, 17 Nov 2004 14:45:02 +0000

For those of you who have successfully installed Mercury's Test Director, and have it die suddenly, you need to check the IIS/NTFS permissions. (Note, for those of you asking questions, you should read all four pages of comments - there are various questions and answers given throughout the comments, and you will be able to get your answer quicker than waiting for someone to see your question) [@more@] Test Director uses the IIS IUSR_SERVERNAME user by default, and if you haven't set your permissions correctly on your directories, this user will not have access to the files.

Spam: In Perspective

Fri, 05 Nov 2004 04:19:02 +0000

A friend of ours was complaining about spam, and Heather agreed, and said she had been getting tons of spam lately. I questioned her on that, since I am in charge of the filters that filter our spam, and I think they do a pretty good job: maybe 15-20 spams got through in the last two years. She said, well, I got one yesterday, and one today.

Version Control Comparison

Fri, 15 Oct 2004 18:42:29 +0000

I have been evaluating different version control programs for my company for the last month or two. My current evaluation is that all of them are broken, although I hope to discover a good solution someday soon.[@more@] Serena's Version Manager (PVCS) I have spent a lot of time with Version Manager, and it has a number of deficiencies. Unfortunately, this is the product my company uses. They originally switched to VM because has client apps on mac, unix and windows.

Windows Shell Auto-Completion

Wed, 06 Oct 2004 11:49:51 +0000

On all the windows machine I use, I have auto-completion turned on for the dos prompt. Apparently, I must have gotten that behavior from TweakUI, and since I always install it on a new machine, I thought it was on by default, but apparently not.[@more@]If you don't have TweakUI, you can edit the registry key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/Software/Microsoft/Command Processor/CompletionChar and HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/Software/Microsoft/Command Processor/PathCompletionChar I use a tab key to auto-complete, so I use the value 9, but I think you can use whatever you would like.

RawWrite

Tue, 21 Sep 2004 12:26:55 +0000

I needed to create a floppy disk today, and needed to find RawWrite again, since my Cygwin dd seems to not be making it correctly. I found a nifty GUI version of RawWrite that is nicer than the old command line version. Sure, the command line works fine, and I am all for command-line things, and no mouse usage, but sometimes it is nice to not have to remember the command-line options.

Perl Initialization

Tue, 31 Aug 2004 19:07:35 +0000

When I was installing RT (Request Tracker) I got an error, since I hadn't ever set up CPAN before. After searching for a bit, here is the solution. I figured I would post this here to help others in the future find it in google quicker.[@more@]Error: Number found where operator expected at /usr/lib/perl5/5.8.0/CPAN/FirstTime.pm line 485, near "<= 60 && -s _ > 0". (Missing operator before 0?) Solution: Run "

More Color Stuff

Mon, 23 Aug 2004 12:33:47 +0000

I added a small color changing picker (bottom right of this page), if you don't like my purply colors. Of course, you can only pick the colorsets that I let you, and right now there isn't much interesting, but I will get around to making some more at some point.[@more@]We probably need a crazy color one that would make your eyes hurt, and then maybe one that is calmer.

Adobe Acrobat Slow Loading

Fri, 20 Aug 2004 02:22:43 +0000

Ever notice how it now takes a year for Acrobat Reader to load up? You can speed it up about 20x or so, by moving the plugins you don't use out of the "startup" folder. If you put the files into the "optional" folder, I believe it will still be able to find them when you want to use them, and it will load them then. A reasonable default is to leave ewh32.

Cygwin

Wed, 18 Aug 2004 19:25:49 +0000

Since I just wasted a bit of time trying to figure out how I had configured Cygwin the first time, so as to help someone else set up their account, I figure I will post the instructions here:[@more@]cygwin.bat: @echo off e: chdir e:/progra~1/cygwin/bin set path=%path;e:/progra~1/cygwin/usr/bin tcsh -l /etc/passwd: daleyj:unused:1000:513:Jon Daley,U-DALEYJ/daleyj,S-1-5-21-...:/home/daleyj:/bin/tcsh /etc/csh.login: comment out "set path" set term=cygwin, instead of set TERM=linux ~/.login: #source /etc/csh.login // I guess that means the above change to csh.

Networked Industrial Thickness Measuring System

Sat, 01 May 2004 18:58:23 +0000

Lime Daley's (even before the name "Lime Daley" existed) first project was to create a device that could measure the spacing between two giant rollers (40 feet long, 6 feet in diameter) in a paper mill. Measuring the thickness of deformation of the rollers against each other (with the sensing device in between) we were able to accurately display how far apart the rollers were from each other. The idea is to make sure that the rollers are aligned properly to produce paper of an even thickness.

RandomSig

Sun, 01 Jun 2003 16:00:06 +0000

Scott Hansma originally wrote a plugin for Eudora in 1997. When he graduated, he asked if I wanted to take over control of the source, as he wasn't interested in working on it any more.[@more@] I said that I was, and I added a couple features, but never got them up to release quality. Now, in 2003, I have started development again, as I still have not found a good plugin for making random signatures, and this one needs some work.

Real-Time Data Collection Inside a MRI Scanner

Wed, 10 Feb 1999 20:35:30 +0000

One project that Jon did while working at Carnegie Mellon University was to create a "button box" that collected data from a subject inside an MRI scanner as well as data from the scanner itself. The project was "real-time" in the sense that we needed the hardware and software to be accurate within 20 or 30 milliseconds (which depending on what field you are in, you might laugh at that number being "real-time").

Contact Information

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

We are available via phone or email whenever you need us. Urgent requests (site problems, etc.) will be answered via phone 24 hours a day. Less critical issues will be answered during extended business hours via email. Phone:412-360-7844 Mailing address:44 Church Street Hillsboro, NH 03244 Email:support @ limedaley.com

Pricing Details

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

See the notes at the bottom for an explanation of the annotated items. If you don't need lots of features and just want disk space or bandwidth, cheaper options are available. Cost(1)BasicBasic PlusCorporateCorporate Plus Billed Annually$15/month$25/month$70/monthvaries Billed Monthly$25/month$40/month$100/monthvaries Setup Fee$20$25$50$100 Resources Disk Space100 MB1 GB20 GB120+ GB Data Transfer1 GB / month10 GB / month40 GB / month512Kbps(3) Email Addresses1UnlimitedUnlimitedUnlimited FTP Accounts(11)38UnlimitedUnlimited Mailing Lists181020 Email ForwardingUnlimited Email AliasesUnlimited Subdomains7(5)10(5)30(5)Unlimited(5) Parked Domains102030Unlimited PostgreSQL/MySQL Databases(12)158Unlimited Technical Info Operating SystemLinux / Debian -- testing release Web ServerApache 2.