Tollef Fog Heen's blog

The week is slowly crawling towards the end. Got up at 10, was at a lecture at about 11:20. Discussed a little with my counselor about the project. Some ideas, at least, but nothing solid so far. He recommended I take a look at track, some early package management utility for FreeBSD. Wasted most of the rest of the day toying around. Got to bed early, played a little with subversion first. I'll have to do some evil hacks with svn for my dotfiles, I think.

The ad system running on zeta.hardware.no was changed today from Advertpro running under mod_perl to a Tomcat based Java system. Seems to work fine so far, though I seriously dislike Tomcat's XML based config files.

elmo prodded me on IRC that my mail host was refusing spam with a "550 Message classified as spam". While this is correct, it causes double-bounces to go to postmaster@debian.org, which is unintentional. At Samfundet we have a setup which doesn't bounce spam sent to lists, it just accepts it and nullroutes it. I don't think that's the right way, but it's better than annoying postmaster@debian with bounces.

I'm using exim4, and this is how I solved it. I replaced my normal spam-bounce rule:

     deny message = This message was classified as SPAM
       spam = nobody:true
       condition = ${if >={$spam_score_int}{100}}{1}{0}}

with:

     deny message = This message was classified as SPAM
       spam = nobody:true
       condition = ${if and {\
                 {!match{$recipients}{tfheen@raw.no}}\
                 {!match{$sender_address}{tfheen@debian.org}}\
                 {>={$spam_score_int}{100}}\
                 }{1}{0}}

     warn message = X-RAW-Devnull: spam
             log_message = Eaten by spam filter \
                         (score=$spam_score, req=10.0)
             spam = nobody

In addition, a special router is needed; mine is called 50rawdevnull:

# A special driver that redirect "X-RAW-Devnull"-ed mail (spam and
# virus sent to mailing lists, see the DATA ACLs) to /dev/null

raw_devnull:
        driver = accept
        condition = ${if def:h_X-RAW-Devnull: {1}{0}}
        transport = devnull

Finally, the devnull transport:

# Archive the mail in /dev/null
devnull:
  debug_print = "T: devnull for $local_part@$domain"
  driver = appendfile
  file = /dev/null

This is a bit hard-coded and could probably be fixed a bit better, but it seems to work fine for me, at least.

Most of my day at the university was spent working on this project called "Experts working as a team" where our "village" has the subject "Art and ICT". We were divided into groups today and we are three people with technical background and now down to one with a non-technical one. This'll be interesting.

Later, I was at Samfundet, installed a PowerMac G3, IRCed, hacked glibc and generally had fun. Good, productive day. See tomorrow's blog or something for more details.

amd64 and multiarch seem to be the hot topic of the day. I've been trying to chase down something which I thought was a linker bug. Of course, it wasn't a linker bug, it was a silly assumption somewhere in gcc. Or, at least I like to believe it is, since else it's a bug somewhere in my lib64c6 package. Anyhow, lib64c6-dev and lib64c6 are almost ready; there are always some bugs which creep in at the last moment. Upgrading gcc seemed to fix my problem compiling binaries.

Most of my evening has been spent discussing how to do 64 bit packages should be implemented. The consensus seems to lean towards having lib64foo and libfoo packages for amd64 and i386 respectively. How to fix the -dev package problem is yet to be decided.