While setting up my new server, I followed the guide found here. Because of SmartBro’s braindead policy of forcing its subscribers to use their flaky SMTP server, I am forced to work around this issue by running SMTPS instead. I followed Step 5 of the guide and I was wondering why Evolution could not connect to the server. I have already enabled port 465 to go through on Bastille firewall but running nmap on the server does indicate that Postfix was not listening on port 465 as it should be.

I even went as far as regenerating my self-signed SSL certificates to be sure I had everything buttoned down. This just another one of those face-in-palm moments where the cause of the problem was so obvious. I forgot to enable SMTPS in master.cf. I simply uncommented the following lines in master.cf:

smtps     inet  n       –       n       –       –       smtpd
  -o smtpd_tls_wrappermode=yes
  -o smtpd_sasl_auth_enable=yes
  -o smtpd_client_restrictions=permit_sasl_authenticated,reject

Then I restarted Postfix and nmap now reports port 465 open.

You are ruining the fun for everyone. If you are doing SEO or SEM for someone, you are wasting your time by posting comments on this site. Here’s why:

• All the links on my comments thread are given the rel="nofollow" attribute. What this means for you is that all these links to your target site will NOT be picked up by Google, Yahoo, or MSN Search.
• I have the Akismet spam filter plugin installed and enabled. What this means for you is that your comment is caught before it even reaches my moderation queue. It also helps make Akismet even better at catching spam. So the more you post, the more you will make it harder for “SEO practitioners” and “Link Builders” to spam blogs with Akismet spam filters enabled.
• If by some slim chance, your post does not get caught by Akismet, it goes into my moderation queue. What this means for you is that now your post will surely get marked as spam and sent to Akismet to further strengthen it. So you lose, again.
• When Google penalizes a site, it will also penalize other sites linked to it as well. I have gone down to PR 2/10 from PR 4/10, no thanks to you idiots. I would love nothing more than to bring you down to the same PR by linking your site to mine. But you will do that to yourself on your own if you keep spamming.

So, before you hit that “Submit Comment” button think twice.

Lastly, to those who pay people to do SEO, SEM, or “Link Building”, here’s my advice: Don’t. You have nothing to gain from these people. “Building quality links” or “quality traffic” requires quality content. These people will only flood your site with useless hits.

Got a new server a couple of days ago and I just completed upgrading iwojima to a new version of Ubuntu. I’m now running Ubuntu 8.04 LTS on the desktop and all I can say is that it’s a step forward for Linux on the desktop. I still can’t wrap my head around the reason for making Mozilla Firefox 3 Beta 5 the default browser on an LTS (Long-term Support) release. But it looks like it was a good decision to do so. The only thing missing are some key extensions that I use a lot, such as Firebug and the Del.icio.us extension.

For a Beta release, Firefox 3 is pretty solid and feels really fast. I haven’t had nspluginwrapper crash on me yet, as opposed to the previous version which would crash from time to time especially when viewing sites with multiple Flash movies. Hopefully, Evolution mail client crashes have been fixed in this LTS release. It’s caused me a lot of grief before when it would crash randomly and then keep crashing when I restart it.

Desktop effects still suck though. When I enabled it, I still get that ugly black screen flash whenever I start Firefox. The new clock applet finally supports multiple timezones, very useful since I deal with clients in different timezones.

Two apps the I use a lot, Wine and Cinelerra, both have repositories for 8.04 so it looks like I have everything I need. Overall it feels like a solid release worth of the “LTS” designation.

Finally after weeks of fumbling through the Internet looking for cheap reliable managed hosting, I now have my own server. I’m still in the process of setting things up in preparation for the virtual hosting service that I will be offering for Studio Arsenic clients. I have tried installing ISPConfig as my hosting control panel only to find that it’s woefully inadequate for my needs so I decided to settle on Webmin with the Virtualmin GPL module.

Server Specs:

• Intel Xeon 3220-Quad Core 2.4GHz
• 2GB Generic DDR Memory
• 250GB Western Digital WD Caviar RE 16 WD2500YS

Runs CentOS 5 of course.

I will be posting more on my experiences with setting this thing up in the coming days. I still need to recover from the frustrating episode I had with installing ISPConfig.