March 2006 (#124):

• News Bytes, by Howard Dyckoff
• Interfacing with the ISA Bus, by Abhishek Dutta
• PyCon 2006 Dallas, by Mike Orr (Sluggo)
• Migrating a Mail Server to Postfix/Cyrus/OpenLDAP, by René Pfeiffer and pooz
• Build a Six-headed, Six-user Linux System, by Bob Smith
• HelpDex, by Shane Collinge
• Ecol, by Javier Malonda
• The Linux Launderette

News Bytes

By Howard Dyckoff

Contents: News in General Conferences and Events Distro News Software and Product News Magical Realism....

Please submit your News Bytes items in plain text; other formats may be rejected without reading. [You have been warned!] A one- or two-paragraph summary plus a URL has a much higher chance of being published than an entire press release. Submit items to bytes@linuxgazette.net.

svn co svn://svn.linuxfromscratch.org/LFS/branches/udev_update/BOOK/

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Howard Dyckoff is a long term IT professional with primary experience at Fortune 100 and 200 firms. Before his IT career, he worked for Aviation Week and Space Technology magazine and before that used to edit SkyCom, a newsletter for astronomers and rocketeers. He hails from the Republic of Brooklyn [and Polytechnic Institute] and now, after several trips to Himalayan mountain tops, resides in the SF Bay Area with a large book collection and several pet rocks.

Interfacing with the ISA Bus

By Abhishek Dutta

Abstract: The parallel port is a very popular choice for interfacing. Although there are 8 data output lines as well as the CONTROL and STATUS pins of the parallel port, this is often not sufficient for some complex projects, which require more data I/O lines. This project shows how to get 32 general purpose I/O lines by interfacing with the ISA Bus. Though the PCI bus can be a candidate for interfacing experiments, its greater speed and feature-rich nature present great complexity in terms of hardware and software to beginners. This project can be a stepping stone to those thinking of ultimately getting to the PCI Bus for interfacing experiments. It can also be useful for those thinking of making a Digital Oscilloscope using a PC, A/D and D/A converters, a Microcontroller programmer, etc.

First, let's get familiar with the ISA connector:

Pin Description

We have designated as X(n) the side that contains components on all standard ISA cards. Similarly, Y(n) is the side that contains the solder. It is very important for you to be clear on the above convention: you will damage your motherboard if you mistake one for the other.

The description for most commonly used pins are given below:

SIDE X

D0 - D7 (pins X2 to X9)

These are the 8 data lines representing the 8-bit data bus.

A0 - A19 (pins X31 to X12)

These are the 20 address lines that contain the address bits. This bus can address 1MB (2^20=1048576 bytes)

AEN (pin X11)

It is used by the DMA controller to take over to data and address bus during DMA transfer.

Side Y

GND (pins Y1,Y10,Y31)

They are connected to ground of computer.

+5V (pin Y3)

+5 Volt DC output

-5V (pin Y5)

-5 Volt DC output

+12V (pin Y9)

+12 Volt DC output

-12V (pin Y7)

-12 Volt DC output

MEMW(pin Y11)*

The microprocessor makes this line LOW while doing WRITE TO MEMORY.

MEMR (pin Y12)*

The microprocessor makes this line LOW while doing READ FROM MEMORY.

IOW (pin Y13)

The microprocessor makes this line LOW while doing WRITE TO PORT. (eg: when you write outportb(ADDRESS,BYTE), this line becomes LOW)

IOR (pin Y14)

The microprocessor makes this line LOW while doing READ FROM PORT. (eg: when you write byte = inportb(ADDRESS), this line becomes LOW)

DACK0 - DACK3 (pins Y19,Y17,Y26,Y15)*

The DMA controller signals on these lines to let devices know that that DMA has the control of buses.

DRQ1 - DRQ3 (pins Y18,Y6,Y16)*

These pins allows the peripheral boards to request the use of the buses.

T/C (pin Y27)*

The DMA controller sets this signal to let the peripheral know that the programmed number of bytes has been sent.

IRQ2 - IRQ7 (pins Y4,Y25,Y24,Y23,Y22,Y21)*

Interrupt Signals. The peripheral devices set these signals to request the attention of the microprocessor.

ALE (pin Y28)*

Address Latch Enable. This signal is used by the microprocessor to lock the 16 lower address bus in a latch during a memory or port input/output operation.

CLOCK (pin Y20)*

The system clock

OSC (pin Y30)*

It is a high frequency clock which can be used for the I/O boards.

* these pins will not be used in this project

Getting Four Output lines out of an ISA Bus

Before going into the details of the full project let's examine the part that handles the four 8-bit output lines. The addresses in the range 0x338 to 0x33B were not in use by any devices for input/output operations in our computer.

The three 74LS138 ICs handle the address decoding. We configured the circuit to produce a short pulse on the CLOCK line (represented by green lines on the schematic) whenever an address in the range 0x338 to 0x33B and port output (IOW) is requested.

Whenever the 74LS374 gets a CLOCK pulse it latches in the 8-bit data present in the data bus. 74LS245 is a 3-state Octal Bus Transceiver. It reduces DC loading by isolating the data bus from external loads.

[ This is true, at least in theory. Don't use the output to power your favorite toaster oven, and avoid shorting it to Vss or Vcc; anything other than an optocoupler may not isolate quite as well as the manufacturer promises, and IC shrapnel is difficult to pick out of the ceiling. -- Ben ]

To figure out which I/O port addresses are available for use in this project, we examined the contents of ioports in the /proc directory of our Linux system:

[root@thelinuxmaniac~]# cat /proc/ioports
0000-001f: dma1
0020-0021: pic1
0040-0043: timer0
.......................
.......................
01f0-01f7: ide0
0378-037a : parport0
037b-037f : parport0
03c0-03df : vga+
.......................
.......................

It is clear from the above output that the addresses 0x238-0x23B and 0x338-0x33B are not being used by any device. This is often the case in most computers. However, if this address is occupied by some device, then you have to change the wiring of address lines to the three 74LS138 ICs. We'll describe the address decoding technique briefly so that you can set up available addresses for the I/O device you are trying to build.

Address Decoding

We used the 74LS138 3-to-8 multiplexer for address decoding. Suppose we want to assign the addresses 0x338-0x33B for four 8-bit output lines and 0x238-0x23B for four 8-bit input lines.The binary equivalent of these addresses are:

The only address lines that change for any of the eight addresses are A₈, A₁, and A₀ (the whole process of connecting wires to 74LS138 IC is like solving a puzzle!) Connect the remaining wires to the two 74LS138s so that they produce a low output when these lines have the address bits that partially match our addresses. Now, connect the above three lines to the third 74LS138. All 8 outputs of this IC are used to select the 74LS374 latches corresponding to input and output addresses after it is NORed with IOR and IOW; we used the 74LS02 to distinguish between memory IO and port IO addressing.

The Real Stuff

Now, finally, we are ready to describe the functioning of the complete circuit.

Description of the ICs used in this project

74LS138 and 74LS139

Decoders/de-multiplexers; used for address decoding

74LS245

Octal 3-state Buffer/Line Driver/Line Receiver

74LS374

Octal Transparent Latch with 3-state outputs; octal D-type flip-flop with 3-state output

74LS02

Quad 2-input NOR gate

The three 74LS138 IC are used for address decoding along with the two 74LS02s (2-input NOR gate.) Whenever a match is found in the address lines, the respective output line, Y(x) of the third 74LS138 IC (connected to the two 74LS02 IC), goes LOW. These lines along with IOW (and IOR) are connected to the NOR gates (74LS02), which produces a HIGH only when the two inputs go LOW simultaneously.

Hence, the output is high only when:

1. a match is found in the address lines
2. the IOW or IOR lines go LOW, representing the PORT IO operation.

Remember, if we do not consider the second case, our device will conflict with the memory IO operations in the addresses 0x238-0x23B and 0x338-0x33B.

We can see in the circuit diagram that the output lines of NOR gates are connected to the CLOCK pins of the 74LS374 latch. So, whenever the above two cases match simultaneously, the CLOCK pulse is sent to the respective latch and the data that is present on the data bus at that moment is latched in.

Coding - controlling the I/O lines using C

isa.c illustrates the some simple coding methods to control and test the I/O lines of the device created in this project.

if(ioperm(OUTPUT_PORT,LENGTH+1,1))
{
	...
}
if(ioperm(INPUT_PORT,LENGTH+1,1))
{
	...
}

outb(data,port);
data = inb(port);

ioperm() gets the permission to access the specified ports from the kernel; outb() and inb() functions (defined in sys/io.h) read from and write to the specified port.

Some Debugging Techniques

It is not easy to get a complex project to work just by reading an article like this. At some point you will need to debug your hardware. Hopefully, these debugging techniques will help you (as they have helped us - a lot!) to find the problem in your work. You will need a multimeter and some LEDs. What we learned while debugging is that LEDs are the best way to debug hardware of this nature when you don't have sophisticated debugging instruments. Some important techniques we discovered:

Use of Multimeter

A multimeter will be very useful to check the zeros and ones coming across ICs. Verify that expected output is coming at every IC. ZERO will be measured as 0.8V and ONE will be measured as 3.8V (this will vary with computer). This can be used if the address decoding does not work, or when unexpected data is seen on the output lines. DO NOT CONNECT THE MULTIMETER PROBES DIRECTLY TO DATA BUS OR THE ADDRESS LINES. ALWAYS CONNECT IT TO THE OUTPUT OF THE RESPECTIVE ICS!

Use of LEDs

LEDs can be very useful to verify the data bits coming from the output lines; the lighting up of LED will be visible across latches. To check whether the clock pulse is going to the right latch, connect an LED to the CLK pin and send data to that port in a continuous loop, like this:

while(1){
outb(0x80,0x338);
}

There are lots of other debugging techniques which you will probably discover by yourself when you run into problems. Try to ensure that the wiring at the connector that goes into the ISA slot is correct. We checked every part of the device (every IC, all those jumper wires, etc.) and after debugging for about a week we found that IOW and IOR wires were connected to the wrong pins in the ISA slot. So, recheck the wiring. Fortunately, we did not mistake the 12V pin for a 5V pin! ;)

The photo of the device that we constructed is here.

You can get more details and photos related to this project at http://www.mycgiserver.com/~thelinuxmaniac/isa

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I am studying Computer Engineering at the Institute of Engineering, Pulchowk Campus (NEPAL). I love to program in the Linux Environment. I like coding in C, C++, Java and Web Site Designing (but not always). I like participating in online programming contests like that at topcoder.com. My interests keep on changing and I love reading books on programming, murder mysteries (Sherlock Holmes, Agatha Christie, ...) and watching movies.

PyCon 2006 Dallas

By Mike Orr (Sluggo)

My most distinct impression of Dallas was the birds. Two hundred on the electric wires. Another two hundred swoop in for the party. Others sit on nearby trees. Four times as many birds as I've ever seen in one place. All different kinds, all chirping loudly at each other. Now I know where birds go when they fly south for the winter: to Dallas. Especially to the intersection of Belt Line Road and the North Dallas Tollway. Around the intersection stand four or five steel-and-glass skyscrapers. Corporate execs watch the birds through their windows -- and get pooped on when they venture outside. But this isn't downtown; it's a suburb, Addison, with a shopping mall across the tollway. Behind CompUSA is the Marriott hotel where the Python conference took place.

PyCon was started three years ago as a low-budget developers' conference. It had always met at the George Washington University in Washington DC, but attendance has been growing by leaps each year and had reached the facility's capacity. After a nationwide search, the Python Software Foundation decided to sign a two-year contract with a Dallas hotel. That was partly because the Dallas organizers were so enthusiastic and hard-working, the hotel gave us an excellent deal, and we wanted to see how many people in the southern US would attend a conference if it were closer to home. There's no scientific count, but I did meet attendees from Texas, Utah, Arizona, Nevada, and Ohio, many of whom said they had never been to PyCon before. Overall attendance was 410, down from 450. Not bad considering the long move and the fact that many people won't go to Dallas because it's, well, Dallas. But the break-even point was in the high 300s so it didn't bust the bank. The layout had all the meeting rooms next to each other and there were sofas in the hallway, so it was easier to get to events and hold impromptu discussions than last year. The hotel staff was responsive; there were techs on-hand to deal with the sound system. The main problem was the flaky wi-fi, which will hopefully be improved next year (read "better be improved next year".) A hand goes out to Andrew Kuchling, who proved his ability not only in coding and documentation ("What's New in Python 2.x?") but also in conference organizing. This was his first year running PyCon, and he got things running remarkably smoothly.

There seemed to be more international attendees this year. I met people from the UK, Ireland, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, Japan, Argentina, and a German guy living in China. This is in spite of the fact that EuroPython and Python UK are now well established, and the main pycon.org site is now an umbrella covering both.

Here's the conference schedule. Several of the talks were audio- or video-recorded and will be available here.

Keynotes

Guido ^{Note 1} delivered two keynotes. One was his usual "State of the Python Universe". The other was a look backward at Python's origins. The latter covered territory similar to this 2003 interview, which explains how Guido created Python to try out some language ideas and improve on ABC, a language he'd had both good and bad experiences with. He also explained why Python doesn't have type declarations: "Declarations exist to slow down the programmer." There you have it.

The state of the Python universe has three aspects: community activity, changes coming in Python 2.5, and changes coming in Python 3.0. There has been a lot of activity the past year:

• The Python source is now hosted at python.org in Subversion rather than in SourceForge CVS.
• The Buildbot, which was written in Python, now watches over the Python source. Whenever somebody checks in a patch, the bot tells several volunteer computers on different architectures to download and compile Python and report if anything has broken. "The guilty developer can be identified and harassed without human intervention." The current results are visible on the Web.
• A new website layout for python.org will be rolled out March 5th.
• EasyInstall and eggs are getting some real-world use, especially with the TurboGears project, which depends on some ten third-party packages. ("TurboGears would not have been possible without eggs," says its main developer.)

An .egg is like a Java .jar file: a package that knows its version, what it depends on, and what optional services it can provide to other packages or take from other packages. This is similar to .rpm and .deb but is OS-neutral. It is expected that Linux package managers will eventually use eggs for Python packages. Eggs can be installed as directories or zip files. easy_install.py is a convenient command-line tool to download and install Python packages (eggs or tarballs) in one step. It will get the tarball from the Python Cheese Shop ^{Note 2} (formerly known as the Python Package Index), or scrape the Cheese Shop webpage for the download URL. You can also provide the tarball directly, or another URL to scrape. Regardless of whether the original was an egg or a simple tarball, EasyInstall will install it as an egg, taking care of the *.pth magic needed for eggs.

Waitress: Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam; spam bacon sausage and spam; spam egg spam spam bacon and spam....
Wife: Have you got anything without spam?
Waitress: Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Wife: Could you do the egg bacon spam and sausage without the spam then?

--Monty Python's Spam skit

Python 2.5 changes

The first alpha is expected May 6; the final by September 30. Python 2.4.3 will be released in April, followed by 2.4.4, the last of the 2.4 series. What's New in Python 2.5 is unfinished but explains the changes better than I can.

The most sweeping changes are the generator enhancements (PEP 342) and the new with keyword (PEP 343). These allow you to write coroutines and safe blocks. "Safe" means you can guarantee a file will be closed or a lock released without littering your code with try/finally stanzas. The methodology is difficult to understand unless you have a Computer Science degree, but the standard library will include helper functions like the following:

#### OPENING/CLOSING A FILE ####
f = open("/etc/passwd", "r")
with f:
 for line in f: # Read the file line by line.
 words = line.strip().split(":")
 print words[0], words[1] # Print everybody's username and password.
 # The file is automatically closed when leaving this block, no matter
 # whether an exception occurs, or you return or break out, or you simply
 # fall off the bottom.

#### THREAD SYNCHRONIZATION ####
import thread
lock = thread.allocate_lock()
with lock:
 do_something_thread_unsafe()
 # The lock is automatically released when leaving this block.

#### DATABASE TRANSACTION ####
with transaction:
 c = connection.cursor()
 c.execute("UPDATE MyTable SET ...")
 # The transaction automatically commits when leaving this block, or
 # rolls back if an exception occurs.

#### REDIRECT STANDARD OUTPUT ####
f = open("log.txt", "w")
with stdout_redirected(f):
 print "Hello, log file!"
 # Stdout is automatically restored when leaving this block.

#### CURSES PROGRAMMING ####
with curses.wrapper2() as stdscr: # Switch the screen to CURSES mode.
 stdscr.addtext("Look ma, ASCII graphics!")
 # Text mode is automatically restored when leaving this block.

The same pattern works for blocking signals, pushing/popping the locale or decimal precision, etc.

Coroutines are generators that you can inject data into at runtime. Presumably the data will be used to calculate the next yield value. This not only models a series of request/response cycles, but it also promises to radically simplify asynchronous programming, making Twisted much more accessible. Twisted uses callbacks to avoid blocking, and that requires you to split your code into many more functions than normal. But with coroutines those "many functions" become a single generator.

Other changes for 2.5 include:

• The ternary operator lives after all! Equivalent to Perl's ?: operator, it's now spelled:

  TRUE_RESULT if EXPRESSION else FALSE_RESULT

  This echoes the list comprehension syntax, keeping Python consistent.
• Dots in import statements to make relative imports obvious.
• A streamlined AST tree for the Python compiler.
• New functions any() and all(), which return true if any or all of their arguments are true.
• Curried functions via functional.partial.
• Dictionaries that accumulate all values for a key in lists (collections.defaultdict).
• Several third-party packages that will will hopefully be merged into the standard library:
  • Setuptools (and thus easy_install.py)
  • WSGIRef (a protocol for web application servers)
  • cElementTree (a pythonic XML DOM)
  • ctypes (call a C function directly from Python)

Guido resisted ctypes for a long time because it "provides new ways to make a Python program dump core" by exposing it to arbitrary C bugs. Skip Montanaro responded by listing several ways you can already make Python dump core (try these at home), and it was decided that ctypes wasn't any worse than those.

Python 3.0 changes

Now that Guido is employed at Google and can spend 50% of his paid time hacking Python, 3.0 doesn't have to wait until sometime after his 5-year-old son Orlijn graduates college. The planned changes for 3.0 are listed in PEP 3000. Guido highlighted the string/unicode issue: the str type will be Unicode, and a new bytes type will be for arbitrary byte arrays.

There's one late-breaking change, or rather a non-change: the unloved lambda will remain as-is forever. lambda creates anonymous functions from expressions. Attempts to abolish it were undone by use cases that required syntax that's arguably worse than lambda, and Ruby-style anonymous code blocks didn't fare any better. Programmers who overuse lambda should still be shot, however.

BitTorrent

The other keynotes were on Plone and BitTorrent. I missed the Plone talk, but for BitTorrent Steve Holden interviewed Bram Cohen, BitTorrent's creator. Bram talked about hacking while slacking (he wrote most of his code while intentionally unemployed and living on savings), his new job as the owner of Bittorrent Inc (not much time to code), why he chose Python for BitTorrent, why BitTorrent doesn't make you into a carrier of malware (you won't be uploading anything you didn't specifically request to download), Pascal, and many other topics.

I made a wonderful faux pas the first evening at dinner when I sat next to Bram, unaware he was going to speak. I asked what he did, and he said he invented BitTorrent. I didn't remember what that was and kept thinking of Linux's former version control system, whose name I couldn't remember. Yet the term "torrent file" kept crossing my brain, clearly a configuration file and not related to the Linux kernel. Finally I remembered, "BitTorrent is that distributed file download thing, right?" Bram said yes. So I asked the guys across the table, "What was the name of Linux's former version control system?" They said, "BitKeeper". Ah ha, no wonder I got them confused. I thought no more about it, then Bram ended up mentioning BitKeeper several times during his keynote, usually in terms of how bad it is. He talked about BitKeeper vs. git (Linux's new version control system), git vs. other things, and then about BitTorrent vs. Avalanche. Avalanche is a distributed file download system from Microsoft, which Bram called vaporware in his blog, stirring up a lot of controversy (including a newspaper article in Australia).

For those who think BitTorrent is all about illegally downloading copyrighted songs and movies, Bram points to SXSW, a music and film festival which will be using BitTorrent to distribute its performances. "The Problem with Publishing: More customers require more bandwidth. The BitTorrent Solution: Users cooperate in the distribution." Other articles point out that a BitTorrent client normally interacts with 30-50 peers, reducing the strain on the original server by thirtyfold.

Bram also warned people to download BitTorrent directly from www.bittorrent.com and not from some random Google search. Shady operators are selling scams that claim to be BitTorrent but contain spyware or viruses. The real BitTorrent is free to download, and is Open Source under a Jabber-like license. The company does accept voluntary donations, however, if you really want to give them money.

Session talks

The rest of PyCon was session talks, tutorials, lightning talks, Open Space, sprints, and informal "hallway discussions". The most interesting talks I saw or wanted to see were:

Python in Your Pocket: Python for Series 60

Nokia has released a version of Python for its S60 mobile phone which includes Bluetooth and mobile Internet. The slides showed it displaying stats from the GSM towers, weather reports, a stock market graph, an online dictionary, and a stupid guitar tuner. There are Python libraries to access the phone's battery usage, to dial a number, take a picture, manage your inbox and address book and calendar, and display arbitrary graphics and sound. You can write programs using an emulator and download the working programs to the phone via Bluetooth. (Note: the URL points to a slide show. Click anywhere to go to the next page. There appears to be no way to go backward.)

The State of Dabo

Dabo is an application development framework inspired by Visual Basic. It provides a high-level API for GUI design and SQL database viewers. The database viewer is something I've wanted for years: a simple way to make CRUD grids and data-entry forms similar to Microsoft Access. Only MySQL, PostgreSQL, and Firebird are supported so far, but others are on the way. The GUI API is so elegant that the wxPython developers themselves have started using it rather than their own API, which is a thin wrapper around the wxWidgets C++ library.

State-of-the-Art Python IDEs

A survey of several Python IDEs, based on research done by the Utah Python Users' Group.

Building Pluggable Software with Eggs

A tutorial on Python's new packaging format.

Docutils Developers Tutorial: Architecture, Extending, and Embedding

Docutils is the project name for ReStructured Text (ReST), a wiki-like markup format. Several talks mentioned using Docutils, and several Python projects have adopted it for documentation, data entry, etc. One talk explained how to make slides with it. Another speaker didn't make slides and had to download and learn Docutils the night before the talk, but he was able to get his slides done anyway.

What is Nabu?

ReST includes a construct called field lists that look like email headers; they represent virtual database records. ReST does not define the database or say what kind of record it is, only that it's a record. Nabu is the first application I've seen to fully exploit this potential. Nabu helps you extract relevant records from all documents into a central database, which can then be queried or used in an application. You'll have to decide beforehand which fields a "contact record" or "URL bookmark" should contain, and how you'll recognize one when you see it. Nabu's author Martin Blais keeps an editor open for every task he does, to record random notes, TODO plans, contacts, and URL bookmarks. The random notes are unstructured ReST sections; the contacts are field lists scattered throughout the document. He also has a file for each trip he's been on, containing random observations, restaurants to remember (or forget), etc. Nabu is also suitable for blog entries, book lists, calendar events, class notes, etc. One constraint is you must put "something else" between adjacent records so ReST knows where each record ends. Putting multiple records in a bullet list satisfies this constraint.

Web frameworks

"Python has more web application frameworks than keywords," it has been rightly observed. A few people go further and say, "You're not a real Python programmer until you've designed your own web framework." (Hint: subclass BaseHTTPServer.HTTPServer in the standard library; it's easy!) So it's not surprising that PyCon had three talks on TurboGears, two on Django, three on Zope (plus several BoFs), and a couple on new small frameworks. All the discussion last year about framework integration has made them more interoperable, but it has not cut the number of frameworks. If anything, they've multiplied as people write experimental frameworks to test design ideas. Supposedly there's a battle between TurboGears and Django for overall dominance, but the developers aren't competing, they just have different interests. Jacob Kaplan-Moss (Django developer) and I (TurboGears developer) ran the Lightning Talks together, and we both left the room alive. Some people work on multiple frameworks, hoping the holy grail will eventually emerge. Much of the work focuses on WSGI and Paste, which help tie diverse components using different frameworks together into a single application. Some work focuses on AJAX, which is what makes Gmail and Google Maps so responsive and is slowly spreading to other sites.

Lightning talks

Lightning talks are like movie shorts. If you don't like one, it's over in five minutes. They are done one after the other in hour-long sessions. Some people give lightning talks to introduce a brand-new project, others to focus on a specialized topic, and others to make the audience laugh. This year there were seventeen speakers for ten slots, so we added a second hour the next day. But in the same way that adding a new freeway lane encourages people to drive more, the number of excess speakers grew rather than shrank. We ended up with thirty speakers for twenty slots, and there would have been more if I hadn't closed the waiting list. The audience doesn't get bored and keeps coming back, so next year we'll try adding a third hour and see if we can find the saturation point. Some of the highlights were:

Testosterone

"A manly testing interface for Python." It's a CURSES-based front end to Unittest. It may work with py.test too since it just displays whatever the underlying routine prints.

rst.el

A ReStructured Text mode for Emacs.

Python in Argentina

Facundo Batista talked about Python use in Argentina and the PyAr users group. There are a hundred members throughout the country, and around fifteen that gather for a meeting in Buenos Aires.

Internet Censorship in China

Philipp von Weitershausen gave a quick overview of what it's like to use the Internet in China. There are 120 million users, with 20 million more added every year. Chinese sites respond much more slowly than international sites. Some 50,000 officials monitor what sites people visit. Wikipedia, the BBC, and VOA are blocked completely due to undesirable political content. Other sites go up and down, and the error keeps changing. Sometimes it's a timeout, other times an error message. Encrypted connections timeout. How do people feel about not having access to Wikipedia? Only 2% of Chinese Internet users know it exists, so most don't know what they're missing or think it's a big deal.

How to Replace Yourself with a Small Bot

Ben Collins-Sussman had too much time on his hands and wrote an IRC bot that masqueraded as himself. He put it on a channel and waited to see how long until people noticed. The bot had five or so canned remarks like "Did you check the FAQ?", which it recited at random whenever anybody addressed him. Hmm, maybe The Answer Gang here at the Gazette needs one of those. The experiment didn't succeed too well because the bot said wildly inappropriate things at the wrong time.

[ I don't understand what you mean by "didn't succeed", Mike - seems to me that wildly inappropriate responses to a question is perfectly normal IRC behavior... so how could anyone tell? -- Ben ]

There were other good talks too but since I was coordinating I couldn't devote as much attention to them as I would have liked.

Sprints

I attended the TurboGears sprint and worked on Docudo, a wiki-like beast for software documentation, which groups pages according to software version and arbitrary category and distinguishes between officially-blessed pages and user-contributed unofficial pages. We wrote up a spec and started an implementation based on the 20-Minute Wiki Tutorial. This version will store pages in Subversion as XHTML documents, with Subversion properties for the category and status, and use TinyMCE for editing. TinyMCE looks like a desktop editor complete with toolbars, but is implemented in Javascript. We've got parts of all these tasks done in a pre-alpha application that sort of works sometimes.

Other TurboGears fans worked on speeding up Kid templates, adding unittests, improving compatibility with WSGI middleware and Paste, using our configuration system to configure middleware, and replacing CherryPy with RhubarbTart and SQLObject with SQLAlchemy. Don't get a heart attack about the last two: they are just experimental now, won't be done till after TurboGears 1.0, and will require a smooth migration path for existing applications. We had a variety of skill levels in our sprint, and some with lesser skills mainly watched to learn some programming techniques.

There were ten people in the TurboGears sprint and fifty sprinters total. Other sprinters worked on Zope, Django, Docutils, the Python core, and a few other projects.

The sprint was valuable to me, even though I'm not fully committed to TurboGears, because I'm starting to write TurboGears applications at work: it was good to write an application with developers who know more than I do about it. That way they can say, "Don't do that, that's stupid, that's not the TG way." I would have liked to work on the RhubarbTart integration but I had to go with what's more practical for me in the short term. So sprinting is a two-way activity: it benefits the project, and it also benefits you. And it plants the seeds for future contributions you might make throughout the year.

Impressions of Dallas

Dallas was not the transportation wasteland I feared (ahem Oklahoma City, Raleigh, Charlotte...) but it did take 2-3 hours to get to PyCon without a car, and that includes taking a U-shaped path around most of Dallas. An airport shuttle van goes from the sprawling DFW campus to the south parking lot a mile away. From there another airport shuttle goes to the American Airlines headquarters, an apartment building (!), and finally the Dallas - Fort Worth commuter train. That's three miles or thirty minutes just to get out of the airport. The train goes hourly till 10:30pm, but not on Sundays. It cost $4.50 for an all-day rail/bus pass. The train pokes along at a leisurely pace, past flat green fields and worn-down industrial complexes, with a few housing developments scattered incongruously among the warehouses. Freight trains carried cylindrical cars labelled "Corn Syrup" and "Corn Sweetener". Good thing I wasn't near the cars with a hatchet; I feel about corn syrup the way some people feel about abortion. The train stopped in downtown Dallas at an open section of track euphemistically called "Union Station". I transferred to the light rail (blue line) going north. This train was speedy, going 55 mph underground and 40 mph above, with stops a mile apart. Not the slowpoke things you find in San Jose and Portland; this train means business. The companies along the way seem to be mostly chain stores. At Arapaho Station (pronounced like a rapper singing, "Ah RAP a ho!") in the suburb of Richardson, I transferred to bus 400, which goes twice an hour. A kind soul on the train helped me decide which bus to catch. The bus travels west half an hour along Belt Line Road, a six-lane expressway. It crosses other six-lane expressways every twenty blocks. Dallas has quite the automobile capacity. We're going through a black neighborhood now. The driver thinks the Marriott is a mile away and I should have gotten another bus, but the hotel map says it's at Belt Line Road and the North Dallas Tollway. When we approach the intersection with the birds, all is explained. The road the hotel is named after goes behind the hotel and curves, meeting the tollway. So the map was right.

[ A note from my own experience in Dallas, where I teach classes in the area described above: a shuttle from DFW is ~$20 for door-to-door service, and takes less than a half an hour. -- Ben ]

Around the hotel is mostly expense-account restaurants for the executive crowd. We didn't find a grocery store anywhere. So I learned to eat big at meals because there wouldn't be any food until the next one. There was a mall nearby and a drugstore, for all your non-food shopping.

The weather was... just like home (Seattle). Drizzle one day, heavy rain the next, clear the day after. Same sky but ten degrees warmer. Then the temperature almost doubled to 80 degrees (24C) for three days. In February! I would have been shocked but I've encountered that phenomenon in California a few times.

Saturday evening a local Pythoneer took two of us to downtown Dallas. Downtown has several blocks of old brick buildings converted to loft apartments and bars and art galleries, and a couple coffeehouses and a thrift shop. Another feature is the parking lot wavers. I swear, every parking lot had a person waving at the entrance trying to entice drivers. It's 10pm, you'd think the lot attendants would have gone home. Especially since there were plenty of metered spaces on the street for cheaper. There weren't many cars around: there were almost as many parking lots as cars! It was a bit like the Twilight Zone: all these venues and not many people. We went to Café Brazil, which is as Brazilian as the movie. In other words, not at all.

PyCon will be in Dallas next year around February-April, so come watch the birds. The following year it might be anywhere in the US.

Footnotes

¹ Guido van Rossum, Python's founder.

² The name "Cheese Shop" comes from a Monty Python skit. The Cheese Shop was formerly called the Python Package Index (PyPI), but was renamed because PyPI was confused with PyPy, a Python interpreter written in Python. They are both pronounced "pie-pie", and the attempt last year to get people to call PyPI "pippy" failed. Some people don't like the term "Cheese Shop" because it doesn't sell any cheese. But the shop in the skit didn't either.

Talkback: Discuss this article with The Answer Gang

Mike is a Contributing Editor at Linux Gazette. He has been a Linux enthusiast since 1991, a Debian user since 1995, and now Gentoo. His favorite tool for programming is Python. Non-computer interests include martial arts, wrestling, ska and oi! and ambient music, and the international language Esperanto. He's been known to listen to Dvorak, Schubert, Mendelssohn, and Khachaturian too.

Migrating a Mail Server to Postfix/Cyrus/OpenLDAP

By René Pfeiffer and pooz

Once upon not so very long ago, a proprietary mail service system decided to stop working by completely suspending all activities every 15 minutes. We quickly used a workaround to regularly restart the service. After that, the head of the IT department approached Ivan and me and asked for a solution. We proposed to replace the mail system by a combination of Postfix, Cyrus IMAP, and OpenLDAP along with a healthy dose of TLS encryption. This article sheds some light on how you can tackle a migration like this. I am well aware that there is plenty of information for every subsystem, but we built a test system and tried a lot of configurations because we didn't see a single source of information that deals with the connection of all these parts.

Preparations

First I have some words of caution.

Moving thousands of user accounts with their mailboxes from one mail platform to another shouldn't be done lightly. We used a test server that ran for almost two months and tried to look at most of the aspects of our new configuration. Here is a rundown of important things that should be done in advance.

The Idea

You need to have a rough idea of what you want to achieve before you start hacking config files. Our idea was to replace the mail system running on CommuniGate Pro with a free software equivalent. Since our infrastructure is spread among multiple servers, we only had to worry about the mail server itself: how to recreate the configuration, how to move the users' data, and how to reconnect it with our external mail delivery and web mail system. We have external POP3/IMAP users that access their mail directly, and the web mail system uses IMAP. The relation of every server and service is shown in this little picture.

Putting everything together: we wanted a Cyrus server to handle the mailboxes, a Postfix server to deal with incoming and outgoing email, and an OpenLDAP server to hold as many settings as possible. The LDAP tree gets a lot of requests (we get 80000+ mail requests per day), so we decided that every server involved with user email should have a local copy in the shape of two OpenLDAP slave servers. The green lines in the diagram are read operations. The red lines are write operations. The blue lines denote SMTP transactions. Mail enters our system at the firewall, and every mail for outside domains is handled by the firewall, too. We will now take a look at how the services in the white boxes have to be configured in order to work in tune.

Encryption with OpenSSL

All of the software packages involved in the mail system are capable of using encryption via Transport Layer Security (TLS). We like to use TLS with SMTP, have our OpenLDAP servers do all synchronisations via LDAPS/LDAP+TLS, and offer IMAPS and POP3S.

TLS can be implemented by using OpenSSL and putting the necessary keys and certificates into the right place. You need the following files:

• a key for every server that uses TLS
• a certificate for that key, also on every server that uses TLS
• a certificate from the Certification Authority (CA) that signed your key in order to verify certificates

mkdir myCA
chmod 0700 myCA
cd myCA
mkdir {crl,newcerts,private}
touch index.txt
echo "01" > serial
cp /usr/share/examples/openssl/openssl.cnf .

Use the sample openssl.cnf file and edit the values in the section ca or CA_default. The paths need to point to the directories we have just created. You also need to edit the information about your CA in the root_ca_distinguished_name section. A sample openssl.cnf is attached to this article.

When you have taken care of your CA's configuration you can create its private key and certificate.

openssl req -nodes -config openssl.cnf -days 1825 -x509 -newkey rsa -out ca-cert.pem -outform PEM

openssl genrsa -rand /dev/random -out yourhost.example.net.key
openssl req -new -nodes -key yourhost.example.net.key -out yourhost.example.net.csr

openssl ca -config openssl.cnf -in yourhost.example.net.csr -out yourhost.example.net.cert

In order to use encryption and to allow certificate verification, you will have to copy your CA's certificate ca-cert.pem, your host's key yourhost.example.net.key, and the key certificate yourhost.example.net.cert to your system configuration. We will soon see how we use these parts together with Postfix and OpenLDAP.

OpenLDAP Structure

The idea is to use a central OpenLDAP server to store all user settings and some of the Postfix lookup maps. We use the LDAP tree of our organisation dc=example,dc=net and create a subtree for all our accounts. Then we create another subtree for the Postfix settings. You can think of the subtrees being containers for data, mainly accounts.

• ou=accounts,dc=example,dc=net
  • ou=system,ou=accounts,dc=example,dc=net
    • cn=cyrus,ou=system,ou=accounts,dc=example,dc=net
    • cn=postfix,ou=system,ou=accounts,dc=example,dc=net
    • cn=webmail,ou=system,ou=accounts,dc=example,dc=net
    The above three entries are read-only accounts for Postfix, Cyrus and a web mail system in order to do lookups.
  • ou=users,ou=accounts,dc=example,dc=net
• ou=edv,dc=example,dc=net
  • ou=server,ou=edv,dc=example,dc=net
    • cn=mailstore,ou=server,ou=edv,dc=example,dc=net
      • cn=postfix,cn=mailstore,ou=server,ou=edv,dc=example,dc=net
        • lookupName=aliases,cn=postfix,cn=mailstore,ou=server,ou=edv,dc=example,dc=net
        • lookupName=mydestination,cn=postfix,cn=mailstore,ou=server,ou=edv,dc=example,dc=net
        • lookupName=virtualdomains,cn=postfix,cn=mailstore,ou=server,ou=edv,dc=example,dc=net
        • lookupName=virtualusers,cn=postfix,cn=mailstore,ou=server,ou=edv,dc=example,dc=net

• account
• greenUser
• pkiUser
• posixAccount
• sambaSamAccount
• shadowAccount

• cn - the full name of the user
• gidNumber - group id number (we use 100 as default)
• homeDirectory - the user's home (we use /home/user.name as default)
• mail - full mail address
• sambaSID - only used for Samba (we use S-1-0-0 as default)
• uid - the user's user name used for the login
• uidNumber - the user's numerical id
• userPassword - the user's password

The gidNumber, homeDirectory and uidNumber attributes are only necessary if you have services other than POP3/IMAP get their information from the LDAP tree. Cyrus and Postfix don't need them. The same is true for the sambaSID. Since we reorganise our user account data anyway, we can do it properly in case other applications want to use the LDAP tree as well. Additional attributes handy for mail processing are the following.

• accountStatus - useful for disabling/enabling users without deleting them
• mailAlternateAddress - here you store any aliases the user has
• mailForwardingAddress - address where the user's mail gets forwarded to
• mailQuotaSize - mail quota of the mailbox in kiloBytes
• mailReplyText - text for use with autoreplies such as vacation messages
• mailServer - server where the account is valid

Two other new classes are the lookupName and lookupTableEntry for the Postfix lookup tables. Postfix supports arbitrary lookup schemes. lookupName is a container for single lookupTableEntry entries that match a lookupKey to a lookupValue. This allows for a very simple mapping of anything to anything.

lookupKey=rene.pfeiffer@example.net   ---> lookupValue=lynx
lookupKey=ivan.averintsev@example.net ---> lookupValue=ivan
lookupKey=disable@example.net         ---> lookupValue=devnull

For your convenience this schema definition is also in a separate file. Use it as you like.

Extracting Settings from the old System

User Configurations

First of all it is necessary to extract all the account information including user names, passwords, quote settings, aliases, and the like. The CommuniGate server offers an LDAP export. Querying all user data can be done with a Perl script named cgate_migrate_ldap.pl. The script extracts the attributes cn, sn, uid, mail and userPassword. The result is written to our new LDAP server. If the user already exists on the target server, the user information is compared and updated provided there is a difference. You can take a look the the script's options by using perldoc cgate_migrate_ldap.pl.

Unfortunately this export does not cover all necessary information, so we had to write a second Perl script that collects additional information from the server's account.settings files. These files look like the following, and usually live inside the user's directory /var/CommuniGate/Accounts/user.name.macnt/.

{
 DefaultMailboxType = MailDirMailbox;
 ExternalINBOX = NO;
 MaxAccountSize = 100M;
 MaxWebSize = 0;
 Password = XXXXXXXX;
 RealName = "Rene Pfeiffer";
 RPOPAllowed = NO;
 Rules = ((0,"#Vacation",(("Human Generated","---"),(From,"not in","#RepliedAddresses")),
  (("Reply with","Ich bin vom 6. bis 13. Oktober 2005 fuer Nachrichten\enicht erreichbar.
  Bitte alle dringenden Anfragen\ean help@example.net richten."),
  ("Remember 'From' in",RepliedAddresses))));
}

cd /var/CommuniGate/Accounts/
find . -type f -name account.settings | xargs -i{} tar -r --numeric-owner -f ~/as.tar {}

mkdir accounts
cd accounts
tar -xf ~/as.tar
find ~/accounts -type f -printf "%h%f\n" > ~/as_list.txt

~/cgate_account_settings.pl --target ldapmaster.example.net ~/as_list.txt

rene.pfeiffer = (r.pfeiffer,rpfeiffer,lynx);

~/cgate_alias_settings.pl --target ldapmaster.example.net aliases.data

That's all we wanted to extract. Important note: The scripts we used worked well enough for our case. We tried to get as much information as possible. We didn't want to parse everything. So be careful and test these scripts before you use them on live data. They might miss something.

Mailing Lists

The CommuniGate Pro has a built-in list server. It works fairly well, but it has the habit of rewriting the mail headers when forwarding mail to lists (and to users - that's one of the reasons why we decided to switch). So far we haven't seen any sign of the list configuration. They aren't exported via LDAP and the user settings don't have any list settings. Since we wanted to move the lists to our new list server and therefore to change their addresses anyway, we extracted all list members and created simple exploder lists with Postfix hash tables. The CommuniGate stores all list information in the /var/CommuniGate/Accounts/LISTS/ folder. The files ending with .list contain all subscribers. A shell script can read all lists and create the maps for the Postfix.

./create_list_maps.sh /var/CommuniGate/Accounts/LISTS/ ~/cgate_lists

We will use cgate_lists in our Postfix configuration later. Important note: This simple script ignores deactivated users on mailing lists. This is only a temporary solution until you can recreate the lists on a real list server and have the list owners check their subscribers.

IMAP Namespace and Mailboxes

Whenever you copy mailboxes from one server to another, you have to keep in mind how the clients see the mail data. We tried to make the move as smooth as possible. Two things got into our way. First of all, the Cyrus IMAP server treats the INBOX as the root and shows all other mail folders "below" the INBOX. The old mail system used a flat-hierarchy namespace.

Old server: imap://imap.domain.xyz/Sent
Cyrus IMAP: imap://imap.domain.xyz/INBOX/Sent

Most clients get the idea and display the folders accordingly. We had to hack our webmail in order to subscribe all the old folders with the new namespace in order not to bother our web users. Clients such as mutt, Thunderbird or Sylpheed handle this change for you; however, you still need to rearrange the folder structure. Some clients need to recreate the account settings by adding a new account.

Another issue concerns the user names. By default Cyrus uses the netnews namespace convention. This means that a "." is used to separate hierarchical layers (as the Usenet does). If you allow "." to appear in a user's login, then you need to configure Cyrus to use the UNIX hierarchy convention. Cyrus uses the simple option unixhierarchysep=yes|no in its configuration. By doing this a "/" is used as a separator. Don't be suprised to see something like "user.rene^pfeiffer" in the logs or mail store. This is how a mailbox is addressed by Cyrus IMAP, and the "." in the login is handled internally as a "^".

A Word about Transferring Quotas

When we extracted the user settings, we copied them 1:1 into the LDAP tree and into the Cyrus user settings. We also did this for the quota. To our great surprise, this created a rather unpleasant situation. Apparently the CommuniGate and the Cyrus server compute the quotas differently. Mailboxes that were almost at the limit on the old system became over quota on Cyrus. So we had to add 5 MB to the quota of every user in order to accommodate the mail from the old mailbox. Make sure that you have a buffer for this, or your users will lose emails.

Configuration

Ok, let's get our hands dirty and configure the servers.

OpenLDAP Setup

Designing an LDAP hierarchy is a complex topic. You can spend months thinking about the best way to go. We won't do an elaborate design. We need to store our users' settings and the Postfix lookup tables, that's all. If you want to extend your LDAP tree beyond that, make sure that you get well acquainted with the concepts. We use OpenLDAP for all LDAP servers. Most Linux distributions have a pre-packaged version. You can also compile the server from source. Use whatever method you feel comfortable with - but make sure that you can handle the upgrades and the bug fixing. We compiled OpenLDAP from source and used the following options.

./configure  --sysconfdir=/etc/ldap --localstatedir=/home/ldap/var \
--with-cyrus-sasl --with-threads --with-tls --enable-slapd --enable-crypt \
--enable-spasswd --enable-wrappers --enable-ldbm --enable-perl --enable-shell --enable-slurpd

• the OpenLDAP binaries and libraries
• a directory where your configuration is stored (such as /etc/ldap/)
• a System V init script that starts and stops your OpenLDAP server (usually this is to be found in /etc/init.d/, the source distribution has templates).

The OpenLDAP distribution includes a couple of schema definitions. These cover the basic LDAP object classes and their attributes. We extended the schemas by using additional schema files from Sendmail, Samba, Mozilla, and a modified schema file from qmail-ldap. You can simply add the schema files to your existing configuration. However, you have to take care that your schemas don't define any attributes twice. It's best to test that in advance. We will now build the configuration for the master and the two slave servers.

Master Server

Basically an OpenLDAP server is a program that exports a directory filled with databases via the network. You have to configure the paths to the database store, where it finds the schema files, where it stores its process ID, and the permissions for the LDAP tree. I have provided a sample slapd.conf config file, and I will highlight the most important options. First we have the schema files.

include         /etc/ldap/openldap/schema/core.schema
include         /etc/ldap/openldap/schema/cosine.schema
include         /etc/ldap/openldap/schema/nis.schema
include         /etc/ldap/openldap/schema/misc.schema
include         /etc/ldap/openldap/schema/inetorgperson.schema
include         /etc/ldap/openldap/schema/sendmail.schema
include         /etc/ldap/openldap/schema/samba.schema
include         /etc/ldap/openldap/schema/mozillaOrgPerson_V0.6.schema
include         /etc/ldap/openldap/schema/greenmta.schema
include         /etc/ldap/openldap/schema/lookup.schema

The next important part deals with encryption. I mentioned earlier that every server should have a key and a certificate. Copy these files to your config directory and tell OpenLDAP to read and to use them. You also have to include your CA's certificate if you want to check the signature.

TLSCACertificateFile    /etc/ldap/openldap/cacert.pem
TLSCertificateFile      /etc/ldap/openldap/master.example.net.cert
TLSCertificateKeyFile   /etc/ldap/openldap/master.example.net.key
TLSRandFile             /dev/random

We use /dev/random as the entropy source since our servers have hardware entropy generators. If your machine lacks good entropy sources, you should use /dev/urandom instead.

Now we define where our databases live and what the root of the LDAP tree will be. We also configure an OpenLDAP super user.

database	bdb
suffix		"dc=example,dc=net"
rootdn		"cn=ldaproot,dc=example,dc=net"
rootpw		{SSHA}Rwilfur49jrtPsw7dJJPp5RBoX2f+gHV
directory	/var/lib/ldap

lynx@wombat:~$ /usr/local/sbin/slappasswd -s 6202f430d9c9a97da8d041946847643f
{SSHA}Rwilfur49jrtPsw7dJJPp5RBoX2f+gHV
lynx@wombat:~$

The password is 6202f430d9c9a97da8d041946847643f. The output of slappasswd can be pasted into the config file. The last option defines the directory where the databases are stored.

The OpenLDAP master server holds the master copy of the LDAP tree. Every change is copied immediately to all slave servers. This is called replication. It is a kind of instant backup with the difference that the date is transferred to live servers. The master server needs to know where to copy the data to. This can be configured by using the replica directive.

replogfile /var/lib/ldap/replogfile
replica uri="ldaps://slave1.example.net" starttls=yes bindmethod=simple \
	binddn="cn=ldaproot,dc=example,dc=net" credentials="6202f430d9c9a97da8d041946847643f"
replica uri="ldaps://slave2.example.net" starttls=yes bindmethod=simple \
	binddn="cn=ldaproot,dc=example,dc=net" credentials="6202f430d9c9a97da8d041946847643f"

Every replica line describes the slave server along with the full login information. The account at the slave server needs full write permissions, or else the information on the slave servers can't be written. That's why we used the LDAP superuser. Another approach is to define a special replication user just for this purpose. The master server keeps a log of changes for every slave. In case a connection to a specific slave is lost, the changes get buffered and are sent to the slave as soon as it is reachable again.

Slave Servers

The OpenLDAP slave servers have a similar configuration to the master server. You have to keep some important things in mind.

• The slave has neither replica nor replogfile directives.
• The slave has an additional updatedn option that must be the same as the binddn used in the master config file.
• The DN mentioned in the updatedn option must have write access to the tree.
• If you wish to write to your slave server, you have to include an updateref directive that points to your master server. Clients issuing write operations will then be redirected to the master.

1. Shut down the master server.
2. Extract a copy of the master's data in LDIF notation by executing slapcat -f /etc/ldap/openldap/slapd.conf master_dump.ldif.
3. Copy the resulting master_dump.ldif file to your slave server.
4. Fill the slave's database by executing slapadd -f /etc/ldap/openldap/slapd.conf master_dump.ldif. Make sure the OpenLDAP server there is shut down!
5. Restart the master server.
6. Start the slave server.

After that, your master server should log into the slave and send updates as soon as you modify the master LDAP tree. Master and slaves have a steady TCP connection that you can see by using netstat. Important note: Don't forget to create a new key and certificate for the slave or else the encryption won't work.

Postfix Setup

We used standard Debian Postfix packages. You have to install the packages postfix, postfix-ldap, postfix-pcre, and postfix-tls for the functionality we need. If you compile from source, make sure you have the PCRE, OpenLDAP, and OpenSSL development files installed.

Lookup Tables

The Postfix server can be linked to any LDAP V3 server. Since the OpenLDAP server is similar to an electronic phonebook, it makes sense to connect the Postfix to any entries that it might have to look up when receiving email.

• alias_maps - aliases that should be used when doing local delivery
• mydestination - the list of domains that are local
• local_recipient_maps - list of local recipients, this helps Postfix to decide whether to accept the mail before it is completely transferred
• virtual_alias_domains - list of domains that are virtual and whose users are mapped to local mailboxes
• virtual_alias_maps - the mapping of the virtual addresses to the local mailboxes itself

By retrieving this information from the LDAP tree, you can map almost everything to your local mailboxes. Our scenario has one main domain that goes into mydestination (plus the local names for the machine). All satellite domains with just a few aliases go into the virtual_alias_domains where the email address is mapped to real local mailboxes by our lookupTable object class.

Well, this is all nice, but how is it written to the Postfix configuration? Let's start with mydestination. Usually you list the local domains as a simple string like this:

mydestination = agamemnon.example.net, localhost.localdomain, localhost

mydestination = localhost, ldap:/etc/postfix/mydestination.cf

server_host = 127.0.0.1
server_port = 389
search_base = lookupName=mydestination,cn=postfix,cn=mailstore,ou=server,ou=edv,dc=example,dc=net
scope       = sub
timeout     = 30
bind        = yes
bind_dn     = cn=postfix,ou=system,ou=accounts,dc=example,dc=net 
bind_pw     = XXXXXXXXXX
version     = 3
start_tls   = no
query_filter     = (lookupKey=%s)
result_attribute = lookupValue

alias_maps = hash:/etc/aliases, hash:/etc/postfix/cgate_lists
virtual_alias_domains = ldap:/etc/postfix/virtual_alias_domains.cf
virtual_alias_maps = ldap:/etc/postfix/mailforwards.cf ldap:/etc/postfix/virtual_alias_maps.cf 
                     ldap:/etc/postfix/ldap-user-aliases.cf
local_recipient_maps = ldap:/etc/postfix/local_recipient_maps.cf $alias_maps $virtual_alias_maps

The alias_maps are the local lookup tables for the system aliases. We use no LDAP lookup there, because we're dealing with static names. We also put the migrated mailing lists there. They consist of simple exploder lists where the left side is the name of the list and the right side holds all subscribers. Bear in mind that this is a poor substitution for a full list server and a temporary solution at best.

The virtual_alias_domains is a table with virtual domains, just as the name implies. This is only "half" of a lookup table since Postfix only needs to know if a domain is present and counts as virtual or not. Postfix therefore only evaluates the result of the LDAP search - found or not found. Technically this means that you can put what you want into the lookup value when adding a virtual domain. You can take a look at virtual_alias_domains.cf to see that there is no difference from the lookup method we already discussed.

We then define the virtual_alias_maps by a number of three LDAP lookups. The order is important.

1. mailforwards.cf checks the attribute mailForwardingAddress. If it is present, then Postfix forwards the mail to this address. Local mailboxes are valid targets, but you need to name them without the domain.
2. virtual_alias_maps.cf does the mapping of virtual users to real mailboxes. For example, we map rene.pfeiffer@example.org to the mailbox rene.pfeiffer.
3. ldap-user-aliases.cf maps any alias addresses stored in the attribute mailAlternateAddress to the primary email address stored in mail.

The last lookup definition deals with anything that is recognised as local. That's the job of local_recipient_maps. We consider anything local that is either defined in alias_maps, virtual_alias_maps, or by the lookup configured in local_recipient_maps.cf. The LDAP table simply looks in the account branch for any valid user account.

Local Delivery to Mailboxes

Any mail bound for local recipients must be stored into the mailboxes. Postfix doesn't handle mailboxes, but the Cyrus IMAP server does. Both servers support the Local Mail Transfer Protocol (LMTP). LMTP is a queueless mail transmission protocol used for local mail transport, as the name suggests. Postfix's configuration file needs the following directives.

mailbox_transport = lmtp:localhost
lmtp_sasl_auth_enable=yes
lmtp_sasl_password_maps=hash:/etc/postfix/lmtp_passwd
lmtp_sasl_security_options = noanonymous

localhost	lmtpadmin:secretpassword

It advises Postfix to use the username lmtpadmin with the given password when using LMTP on localhost.

TLS Encryption

TLS is the last setting we need. Postfix supports TLS encryption with many configuration options. The bare bones setup needs only a few. Here is the part for the SMTP server subsystem:

smtpd_tls_cert_file       = /etc/ldap/openldap/mailstore.example.net.cert
smtpd_tls_key_file        = /etc/ldap/openldap/mailstore.example.net.key
smtpd_tls_CAfile          = /etc/ldap/openldap/ca-cert.pem
smtpd_use_tls             = yes
smtpd_enforce_tls         = no
smtpd_tls_ask_ccert       = no
smtpd_tls_req_ccert       = no

smtpd_tls_dh1024_param_file = /etc/postfix/dh_1024.pem
smtpd_tls_dh512_param_file  = /etc/postfix/dh_512.pem

openssl gendh -out /etc/postfix/dh_1024.pem -2 -rand /dev/random 1024
openssl gendh -out /etc/postfix/dh_512.pem -2 -rand /dev/random 512

By executing the above command, the parameters are generated. Important note: The above lines use /dev/random as the entropy source. Again, if your server has no good entropy sources such as sufficient disk I/O or hardware entropy gatherers, then you should consider using /dev/urandom instead.

Postfix acts as an SMTP client when delivering outbound mail. This part has separate TLS config options.

smtp_use_tls                 = yes
smtp_tls_note_starttls_offer = yes
smtp_tls_CAfile              = /etc/ldap/openldap/ca-cert.pem

They are similar to the server options above.

You can read the whole Postfix configuration main.cf and see all of the options together.

Cyrus IMAP Setup

We used the Debian Cyrus IMAP package. It is quite painless to install, and you only need to take care of a few things. The configuration files you will be dealing with are

• /etc/cyrus.conf for general settings
• /etc/imapd.conf (which also handles the POP3 settings)
• and /etc/saslauthd.conf for the login.

Login Configuration

Whenever an user wishes to fetch email via IMAP or POP3, the Cyrus server needs to verify the login information. One possibility to do this with our OpenLDAP servers is to use the SASL AUTH daemon and plaintext authentication. Plaintext isn't a problem since we offer TLS for every connection. Every client capable of TLS is able to encrypt the session with the Cyrus server. The LDAP parameters are defined in /etc/saslauthd.conf:

ldap_servers: ldap://127.0.0.1/
ldap_version: 3
ldap_timeout: 10
ldap_time_limit: 10
ldap_cache_ttl: 30
ldap_cache_mem: 32768
ldap_scope: sub
ldap_search_base: ou=accounts,dc=example,dc=net
ldap_auth_method: custom
ldap_bind_dn: cn=ldaproot,dc=example,dc=net
ldap_password: 6202f430d9c9a97da8d041946847643f
ldap_filter: uid=%U

The SASL AUTH daemon is told to connect to the local LDAP slave and to search for a match between login name and the attribute uid. In order to check the password, the daemon has to bind as LDAP superuser, because only the superuser has access to the userPasswd attribute. If you are uncomfortable with this, you can define additional LDAP users that may check userPasswd. The other parameters set limits and the search tree. Important note: This file mustn't be word-readable! It contains an important password, so guard this information well.

Now your SASL AUTH daemon knows where to look for login information. You still have to tell the Cyrus IMAP that it should utilise the SASL AUTH daemon.

Cyrus Configuration

Now we turn to the other two configuration files, namely cyrus.conf and imapd.conf. I won't explain every single option; I'll focus on the things that connect our services instead. In order to make Cyrus use the SASL AUTH daemon for authentication, you need to check for the following entries in imapd.conf:

allowplaintext: yes
sasl_mech_list: PLAIN
sasl_pwcheck_method: saslauthd

• sasl_minimum_layer: 0 to allow unencrypted connections or use
• sasl_minimum_layer: 128 to allow only connections with a minimal security level.

tls_cert_file: /etc/ldap/openldap/mailstore.example.net.cert
tls_key_file: /etc/ldap/openldap/mailstore.example.net.key
tls_ca_path: /etc/ssl/certs

• tls_imap_require_cert: 0 to allow anyone to connect or
• tls_imap_require_cert: 1 to allow only clients with a valid certificate.

If you want to use the second method, you have to make sure that every mail client can verify your certificate. Thus the first way only encrypts, while the second checks for the right identity.

As for the settings that control mail delivery via IMAP or POP3, be sure to check for

popminpoll: 0

We ran our server with popminpoll: 1 to reduce the impact of impatient mail clients. If you do this, then Cyrus will lock out any software that polls too often. Surprisingly there are a lot of mail clients out there that do funny stuff with poll intervals and use multiple connections while polling email. We switched the checks off. The load you save on the server will only be redirected to the phone support lines. For us it wasn't worth the effort. The same is true for APOP. APOP is a way to hide the password from sniffers when fetching email. We prefer TLS, so we turn APOP off.

allowapop: no

You have to define admin users for the Cyrus server. Admin users are regular Cyrus users with privileges.

admins: cyrusadmin postmaster
lmtp_admins: lmtpadmin

We have two Cyrus superusers named cyrusadmin and postmaster (we need a postmaster mailbox anyway). We also have a separate admin lmtpadmin. These accounts have passwords and can be used on the Cyrus command line or via the Cyrus Perl packages Cyrus::IMAP::Admin.

Migrating the Users

The migration of all user account meta data is done through the three Perl scripts. This takes care of any settings concerning login, email adresses, aliases, quotas and the like. Bear in mind that the three scripts work well enough, but they are not 100% accurate. You will miss some mail forwardings or other things. All this takes place on the LDAP side. We still have to deal with the IMAP mailboxes and their content.

Synchronisation with the LDAP Tree

Since we must all bow to the master LDAP tree, we came up with a script that reads every user description from the master, connects to the Cyrus IMAP server, compares account information, and updates them on the Cyrus side, including the creation of new mailboxes. The Perl module Cyrus::IMAP::Admin is very handy for things like this. cyrus_syncboxes.pl does the synchronization. It is designed to run on the mail server, since this server also carries an LDAP slave, but you can feed options to the script to make it talk to other hosts as well. It has documentation that can be viewed by using perldoc cyrus_syncboxes.pl.

Moving the Mailboxes

Now is the critical moment. We need to migrate the users' mail. Gilles Lamiral has created a fine piece of software for this job. It is called imapsync. It synchronizes IMAP boxes. By using it on an empty and a full IMAP box, it recreates the folder structure of the full box on the empty one. You can use it like this:

imapsync --host1 oldserver.example.net --user1 r.pfeiffer --password1 XXXXXXXX \
         --host2 newserver.example.net --user2 r.pfeiffer --password2 XXXXXXXX \
	 --syncinternaldates

It then copies the whole mailbox of user r.pfeiffer from oldserver.example.net to newserver.example.net. The switch --syncinternaldates preserves the folder internal timestamps of the messages. Every mail has two timestamps - the RFC 822 date in the header and the RFC 2060 Internal Date Message Attribute. Most IMAP clients can be configured to display either date. If you preserve the internal timestamps, you will have less trouble with IMAP clients or users getting confused about changing timestamps in messages. imapsync has many more features, but we only needed to use this one.

You have to call imapsync for every mailbox. If you have several thousand mailboxes, then you need to use a little shell script and a list of usernames with the passwords in CSV (Comma Separated Value) format.

user0001;password0001;user0002;password0002
user0011;password0011;user0012;password0012

{ while IFS=';' read  u1 p1 u2 p2; do
   imapsync --user1 "$u1" --password1 "$p1" \
            --user2 "$u2" --password2 "$p2" \
	    --syncinternaldates
done ; } < login_data.csv

Now is the time for some fresh coffee and the last checks before the new system goes online. The syncing of the mailboxes takes a while. We needed several hours for about 14 GB of mailbox data.

Testing

After doing all the steps I have described, you should have a shiny new mail system with lots of users and mailboxes. Before you put everything into production mode, you should spent some time on testing the whole setup. You can tell Postfix not to create terminal bounces by using

soft_bounce = yes

in main.cf. If valid mail is rejected, you can see it in the logs and correct the settings. Also check the access to the mailboxes by using POP3 and IMAP clients. Leave the old server for a while so that you can compare folder contents. If you are comfortable with everything, switch to production mode, but make sure you monitor the new system closely. Well, have fun with the new setup!

Tools

You need tools to get your work done. Here are ours.

Scripts & Configuration Files

Our own scripts were exclusively written with the help of Perl and Bash. This article includes all necessary scripts and configuration files to tackle a mail migration from CommuniGate Pro to Postfix/Cyrus/OpenLDAP. From then on, you need more tools such as front ends for user administration. There are some tools you can use, or you can also write your own. It depends on what you need.

Packages

No animals or software were harmed in the course of the migration. You might wish to take a look at the following tools and recipes and thank their authors.

• Cyrus IMAP Server
• imapsync
• JXplorer
• OpenLDAP
• OpenSSL Certificate Authority Setup
• phpLDAPadmin
• PHP PEAR Net_Sieve
• Perl LDAP
• Postfix
• SmartSieve - Sieve Script Manager

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pooz is a system administrator/Web application hacker working in Vienna, Austria. Free/Open Source software has been his tool of choice since early 90s.

Build a Six-headed, Six-user Linux System

By Bob Smith

Introduction

A Multi-Seat Linux Box: This tutorial shows how to build a multi-head, multi-user Linux box using a recent distribution of Linux and standard USB keyboards and mice. Xorg calls this arrangement a "multi-seat" system.

Advantages of a Multi-Seat System: The advantages of multi-seat systems in schools, Internet cafes, and libraries include more than just saving money. They include much lower noise pollution, much less power consumption, and lowered space requirements. For many applications, power and noise budgets are as important as initial cost.

Requirements: To build a multi-seat system you need a video adapter, keyboard, and mouse for each seat. For six seats, you'll also need a motherboard with an AGP slot and five available PCI slots. In our test system we used USB keyboards and mice exclusively, but you can use a PS/2 keyboard and mouse for one of the seats if you wish.

Xorg 6.9 or later is required, but this already ships with many of the major distributions. Our test system uses the free version of Mandriva 2006 and we did not rebuild the kernel or install any additional packages.

Overview

1. Select and Install the Hardware
2. Install Linux
3. Record Hardware Configuration
4. Modify xorg.conf
5. Modify gdm.conf

Step 1: Select and Install the Hardware

If possible, try to use accelerated video cards, but for increased reliability, avoid video cards with on-board fans. Use recent video cards; older video cards often have a problem sharing the PCI bus. We've had good luck with nVidia cards but you can try recent cards from other manufacturers too.

Hardware for our test system: For our system we chose to use video cards based on the nVidia MX4000 chipset. They are accelerated, have no fans, and it was nice having one driver for all six video cards. The downside of nVidia is that the driver is closed source and you need to download and install it. If you use an nVidia card, be sure to check their web site for the recommended BIOS settings for your cards.

We used an ECS 755-A2 motherboard with an AMD64-3200 processor and 1 GB of RAM. Our power supply is a CoolMax 140mm Power Supply and the CPU heat sink is a Thermaltake "Sonic Tower". During our testing we added a low noise fan to cool the video cards. Airflow is in at the bottom, past the video cards, up past the CPU cooler and out through the power supply. This airflow seemed to work pretty well. At quiescence, the CPU temperature was 31C, rising to only 38C after fifteen minutes of kernel compile. The current from the mains at quiescence was 0.25 amps, and during a kernel compile it was 0.35 amps.

You will probably need some USB hubs to connect all of the keyboards and mice. One problem to think about before permanently installing the hardware is cable management. Seven power cords, six monitor cables, three USB hubs, six keyboard cables, and six mice cables: that is a lot of cabling!

Step 2: Install Linux

Do the installation with all of the hardware connected and powered up. Mandriva did a great job detecting and configuring all six of our video heads. Select a default run level of 3 so that X does not start automatically after boot. You can check the installation by logging in and running startx. If all has gone well you should be able to move your mouse across all six monitors.

Mandriva allows up to ten entries in the /dev/input directory. We needed twelve since we had six keyboards and mice. We increased the limit to sixteen by changing the line in /etc/udev/ruled.d/50-mdk.rules from:

    KERNEL=="event[0-9]*", NAME="input/%k", MODE="0600"
to:
    KERNEL=="event[0-9a-f]*", NAME="input/%k", MODE="0600"

Step 3: Record Hardware Configuration

Video cards are identified by their address on the PCI bus. We can list the hardware on the PCI buses using the lspci command. On our test system, the lspci command gives the following result:

lspci | grep VGA
00:09.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation NV18 [GeForce4 MX 4000 AGP 8x] (rev c1)
00:0a.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation NV18 [GeForce4 MX 4000 AGP 8x] (rev c1)
00:0b.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation NV18 [GeForce4 MX 4000 AGP 8x] (rev c1)
00:0c.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation NV18 [GeForce4 MX 4000 AGP 8x] (rev c1)
00:0d.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation NV18 [GeForce4 MX 4000 AGP 8x] (rev c1)
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation NV18 [GeForce4 MX 4000 AGP 8x] (rev c1)

The mice are easy to locate. Each mouse has an entry in the /dev/input directory. An ls can identify the mice.

ls /dev/input/mouse*
/dev/input/mouse0  /dev/input/mouse2  /dev/input/mouse4
/dev/input/mouse1  /dev/input/mouse3  /dev/input/mouse5

more /proc/bus/input/devices

I: Bus=0003 Vendor=046e Product=530a Version=0001
N: Name="BTC Multimedia USB Keyboard"
P: Phys=usb-0000:00:03.3-4.2.1/input0
H: Handlers=kbd event6 
B: EV=120003 
B: KEY=1000000000007 ff87207ac14057ff febeffdfffefffff fffffffffffffffe 
B: LED=1f 

I: Bus=0003 Vendor=046e Product=530a Version=0001
N: Name="BTC Multimedia USB Keyboard"
P: Phys=usb-0000:00:03.3-4.4.1/input0
H: Handlers=kbd event7 
B: EV=120003 
B: KEY=1000000000007 ff87207ac14057ff febeffdfffefffff fffffffffffffffe 
B: LED=1f 

A table is a nice way to view all of the above information.

Seat	Video Card	Keyboard (/dev/input/)	Mouse (/dev/input/)
0	00:09:0	event6	mouse0
1	00:10:0	event7	mouse1
2	00:11:0	event8	mouse2
3	00:12:0	event9	mouse3
4	00:13:0	event10	mouse4
5	01:00:0	event11	mouse5

Note the slight change in how the video cards are addressed. Also, you'll find the numbering of the keyboards and mice easier if you plug each mouse into the same hub as its corresponding keyboard. Don't worry too much about matching the video head to the keyboard. After setting everything up you can move the monitors or the keyboards around as needed.

Step 4: Build xorg.conf

# Seat 5
Section "InputDevice"
    Identifier     "Keyboard5"
    Driver         "evdev"
    Option         "Device" "/dev/input/event11"
    Option         "XkbModel" "pc105"
    Option         "XkbLayout" "us"
    Option         "XkbOptions" "compose:rwin"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
    Identifier     "Mouse5"
    Driver         "mouse"
    Option         "Protocol" "ExplorerPS/2"
    Option         "Device" "/dev/input/mouse5"
    Option         "ZAxisMapping" "6 7"
EndSection

Section "Device"
    Identifier     "device5"
    Driver         "nvidia"
    VendorName     "NVIDIA Corp."
    BoardName      "NVIDIA GeForce4 (generic)"
    BusID          "PCI:0:13:0"
EndSection

Section "Monitor"
    Identifier     "monitor5"
    ModelName      "Flat Panel 1024x768"
    HorizSync       31.5 - 48.5
    VertRefresh     40.0 - 70.0
    ModeLine       "768x576" 50.0 768 832 846 1000 576 590 595 630
    ModeLine       "768x576" 63.1 768 800 960 1024 576 578 590 616
EndSection

Section "Screen"
    Identifier     "screen5"
    Device         "device5"
    Monitor        "monitor5"
    DefaultDepth    24
    SubSection     "Display"
        Virtual     1024 768
        Depth       24
    EndSubSection
EndSection

Section "ServerLayout"
    Identifier     "seat5"
    Screen      0  "Screen5" 0 0
    InputDevice    "Mouse5" "CorePointer"
    InputDevice    "Keyboard5" "CoreKeyboard"
EndSection

   sort /etc/X11/xorg.conf | uniq

[ 'sort xorg.conf|uniq -d' would also be helpful - just in case you had mistakenly repeated any of the device strings. -- Ben ]

Testing Your Xorg.conf File: It is a good idea to test your configuration and to sort out the keyboards and mice by bringing up the heads one at a time. Login remotely so that you are not using any of the video heads. Enter the following commands for each of the six heads (0 to 5). (The commands below are for head 5.)

X -novtswitch -sharevts -nolisten tcp -layout seat5 :5 & 
xterm -display :5 &

The above commands might be sufficient if you don't need user logins. For example, a six headed kiosk might need only X and a web browser on each head.

Step 5: Modify gdm.conf

Modify the [servers] section near the bottom of the /etc/X11/gdm/gdm.conf file to tell gdm which X servers to start. The lines should be:

0=Standard0
1=Standard1
2=Standard2
3=Standard3
4=Standard4
5=Standard5

[server-Standard5]
name=Standard server
command=/usr/X11R6/bin/X -nolisten tcp -novtswitch -sharevts -layout seat5
flexible=true

Once everything is configured, you should be able to start graphical logins by switching to runlevel 5.

telinit 5

Test Results, Costs, and Problems

Cost: Not including the monitor, each seat in our system cost about $67. This includes $40 for the MX4000 based video card, $20 for a USB keyboard, $5 for a USB mouse, and $2 for half of a USB hub. Our test system used expensive keyboards that have a built-in USB hub which we intended for per-user flash drives or audio players.

The shared part of our system cost about $520. This includes $180 for the CPU, $50 for the motherboard, $90 for RAM, and $50 for the CPU heat sink. The case, power supply, and disk drive had a combined cost of about $150.

We give these prices just for comparison. You may find lower prices that these and we'd certainly recommend that you replace our $230 CPU and motherboard with an Athlon 2800+ set that costs about $80. We have not included the cost of the monitors since these prices are in free fall and your particular needs and tastes may dictate what you spend.

Problems: Did you catch the phrase "between resets" above? While the system worked very well, it was extremely unstable. In particular, we got a kernel oops fairly often when we logged out. A syslog trace of one such oops is available here. We've tried several things to fix this problem including:

• turning APIC off and on
• reducing the number of heads
• trying the 'nv' and 'vesa' drivers
• using NoInt10
• upgrading to the official X11R6.9 release
• upgrading to the 2.6.15 kernel
• using xdm and fvwm instead of gdm and Gnome

A much less severe problem is that some programs assume that there is a single user on the PC. Screen savers can take a lot of CPU power and both KDE and Gnome complain if they don't have audio output. Any shared resource, such as audio or a CD burner, can be a problem.

As a longer-term concern, we will need to address security issues surrounding multi-seat computers. Whether from students or cafe patrons, these systems are going to come under deliberate, malicious attack. Can we trust KDE and Gnome to withstand such attacks?

Summary

Further Reading

Xorg man pages: Xorg provides a full set of manual pages that describe the xorg.conf file and all of the commands used in getting X-Windows to run. The manual page for xorg.conf is at:
    http://wiki.x.org/X11R6.9.0/doc/html/xorg.conf.5.html

The manual pages for the X commands are at:
    http://wiki.x.org/X11R6.9.0/doc/html/manindex1.html

Talkback: Discuss this article with The Answer Gang

Bob is an electronics hobbyist and Linux programmer. He is one of the authors of "Linux Appliance Design" to be published by No Starch Press.

HelpDex

By Shane Collinge

These images are scaled down to minimize horizontal scrolling.

All HelpDex cartoons are at Shane's web site, www.shanecollinge.com.

Talkback: Discuss this article with The Answer Gang

Part computer programmer, part cartoonist, part Mars Bar. At night, he runs around in his brightly-coloured underwear fighting criminals. During the day... well, he just runs around in his brightly-coloured underwear. He eats when he's hungry and sleeps when he's sleepy.

Ecol

By Javier Malonda

The Ecol comic strip is written for escomposlinux.org (ECOL), the web site that supports es.comp.os.linux, the Spanish USENET newsgroup for Linux. The strips are drawn in Spanish and then translated to English by the author.

These images are scaled down to minimize horizontal scrolling.

Click here to see the full-sized image.

Click here to see the full-sized image.

Click here to see the full-sized image.

These cartoons are copyright Javier Malonda. They may be copied, linked or distributed by any means. However, you may not distribute modifications. If you link to a cartoon, please notify Javier, who would appreciate hearing from you.

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The Linux Launderette

Contents:

Staffing Manager--Hampton, VA

Re: [LG 93] help wanted #1

Department of Homeland Security funding Open Source projects

[OT]Intelligence test for fluent-in-English crowd (not me, apparently)

The usual brilliant Redmond strategy: checkmate in two moves

Like, it's so totally Val

Re: [LG 122] 2c Tips #4

Cartoon about blogging

I caught an amusing phish from the eBay...

---

Staffing Manager--Hampton, VA

Fri, 03 Feb 2006

From Susan Brown

[Jimmy] I just find this incredibly amusing... but, I am easily amused

James,

If you are a superstar and have exceptional customer service skills, come join our professional team!

$SPAMMERIFFIC Corporate Resources is currently seeking a top-notch staffing manager to work with our light industrial team. This is a staff position located within $SPAMMERIFFIC.

$SPAMMERIFFIC Corporate Resources is a regional market leader in the delivery of diversified, high quality employment services. We offer a complete range of employment opportunities: temporary, temporary-to-hire, direct-hire and contract. $SPAMMERIFFIC specializes in placements for administrative and clerical positions, accounting and finance, legal/medical, mortgage/insurance, professional/technical, light industrial, and engineering. $SPAMMERIFFIC brings top-flight companies and outstanding professionals together. We care about character and quality, and our passion is to match the world's most innovative people with the world's most innovative companies. And we strive to do it better than anyone else!

Position requires; strong organizational skills; ability to work as part of a team; strong communication and time management skills; a drive to succeed; ability to multi-task, good follow through, and professional demeanor. This position offers a competitive pay structure including commission and benefits! E-mail resume and salary requirements to head_spammer@spammeriffic.com.

www.$SPAMMERIFFICcorp.com

**********************************************************************


The information transmitted is intended only for the person or entity
to which it is addressed and may contain confidential and/or privileged
material. Any review, retransmission, dissemination or other use of,
or taking of any action in reliance upon, this information by persons
or entities other than the intended recipient is prohibited. If you
received this in error, please contact the sender and delete the
material from any computer.

**********************************************************************

[Jimmy] I love these... I think I'll collect the whole set

---

Re: [LG 93] help wanted #1

Sat, 04 Feb 2006

From Jerry Matheny

[Jimmy] Ah. I guess Ben changed the old list addresses in the back issues...

Are your the "Big D from LV"?

---

Department of Homeland Security funding Open Source projects

Wed, 15 Feb 2006

From Benjamin A. Okopnik

From Bruce Schneier's "Cryptogram":

The Department of Homeland Security is funding the security of open-source products, including Linux, Apache, MySQL FreeBSD, Mozilla, and Sendmail. I think this is a great use of public funds. One of the limitations of open-source development is that it's hard to fund tools like Coverity. And this kind of thing improves security for a lot of different organizations against a wide variety of threats. And it increases competition with Microsoft, which will force it to improve its OS as well. Everybody wins. http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1909946,00.asp

[Jimmy] This spawned a long thread...

See attached dhs.html

[Jimmy] There was also a lengthy thread about the use of flash in LG

See attached flash.html

---

[OT]Intelligence test for fluent-in-English crowd (not me, apparently)

Mon, 06 Feb 2006

From Predrag Ivanovic

Check this out:

http://intelligence-test.net/part1

I would love to see your answers(I got 8/33 ). This is hard.

[Jimmy] I was talking about this sort of thing with a girl I know the other day. To really know a language, you have to know the popular culture in that language, the kinds of things kids learn, etc. To her credit, she has been reading some English-language fairy tales -- I can think of quite a few movies and books that would make absolutely no sense if you had never heard "Little Red Riding Hood", for example.

At least it says "if you excuse the cultural bias".

[Brian] But perhaps not biased enough. I didn't see "50 W to L Y L", nor did I see "1 is the L N". Even though I went to a school where rugby was played (although my mission was to drink the beer), I missed that one (and several others)

There certainly should have been "2 W on a P", in our context.

27/33

[Jimmy] I'll bet you didn't get 3 B M (S H T R): 3 blind mice (see how they run). "39 B of the O T" nearly eluded me, as I was raised to consider there to be 45, not 39

[Breen] Cultural bias indeed. I don't think many on this side of the pond would have got 6 B to an O in C. (I did but I'm eccentric...)

[Frodo] LOL - I guess you are in a minority indeed with that answer, in North America.

The one that took me longest was "9 P in S A" - I was never taught that fact in school.

[Breen] I noticed the O T ambiguity, too.

[Frodo] The only reason I got that one, was cause it said "66 B of the B".

[Jimmy] Erm... still the same thing, because C have the 6 B of the A.

[Jimmy] Oh... 25/33

[Breen] 30/33 here.

[Frodo] Almost ashamed... 33/33

My love for trivia quizzes and such helped, I guess.

[Breen] Quizzes like this have been around for quite a while - I first saw one about 25 years ago in Games Magazine - it even had some of the same questions.

[Sluggo] But what does this have to do with intelligence? It's just recognizing pop phrases.

[Jimmy] Not really. Many of the items were facts that most people should be able to recognise: 90 D in a R A, 24 H in a D, etc. Some were extremely culturally biased: I only figured out "6 B to an O in C" after Breen mentioned being on the wrong side of the pond for it

[Kat] The process of "solving the puzzle" is a certain sort of brainpower. Sorta.

Meanwhile, I've managed to get to 32/33, but #30 is still eluding me.

[Ben] [grin] So how many did you get, Mike? As it says at the bottom, it tests verbal ability and linguistic pattern recognition - which are, in large measure, what many IQ tests consist of. You should do pretty well.

Me, I'm giving up after spending most of an hour on it; it's obvious that I'm dumb as a brick. On the other hand, I've got a strong suspicion that the four I didn't get (14, 19, 30, and 31) have to do with things that I just have no clue about - i.e., I think 31 has something to do with cricket, and 19 is some damn special version of 'unlucky Friday' that I just can't get.

[Brian] And of course I suffer the fate of smartasses everywhere. A flip answer springs to mind (say, "13 Levels in Barad Dur"), and the true answer has no route past the image thereby entrenched.

[Ben] [LAUGH] Yeah. I got hung up on the whole Bible-related tone of the thing for a while (how the heck would I know about that stuff, other than just having basic familiarity with the context and the poetry of the thing?) - couldn't get past "in C" looking like "in church" every time I looked at it.

[Brian] But those sorts of teasers are fun, although I suspect far less indicative than some believe.

[Ben] It's not usually the type of thing that I'm into - although this one was fun. I used to do the NY Times crossword puzzle on the way to work when I was living in Brooklyn. The train took 52 minutes (+/- a minute or two) from my stop to 34th Street in Manhattan, and I could usually finish it before I got off the train - although Fridays were tough (about 50/50). I don't know if they still do this, but the crosswords in NY Times used to get progressively harder throughout the week.

[Kat] Yes, they do, so far as I know.

[Breen] They certainly do. Saturday is the toughest. Sundays are sui generis - a completely different sort of puzz (besides being 21x21 instead of 15x15). [I also hang out online with puzzle constructors.]

[Kat] Incidentally, when I passed this link on to a puzzle-loving friend, I was informed that it's actually copyright Games magazine.

[Breen] Right - although you can't easily copyright the type of puzzle, many of the clues are right out of the original in Games lo, these many years ago.

[Sluggo] I think I've said it before, but...

Two plus two is four
Four times three is twelve
Twelve inches make a ruler
A famous ruler was Queen Elizabeth
Queen Elizabeth sailed the ocean
Oceans have fish, fish have fins
The Finns fought the Russians
Russians are red, so fire engines are red
'Cause they're always rushin'

'Course, when did Lizzie I ever get in a boat? Or is this II?

[Jason] Got about half of them, the gave up/got bored. Tried to look in the javascript to see what the answers were for the ones I missed, but they were smart enough to use SHA1. But we know the first letter of each word, and only a couple words are unknown for each question, so a dictionary attack is probably feasible...

[Thomas] B T C, J. For the record, I scored 25. It's not an intelligence test in the slightest mind -- so don't feel bad about any of it.

[Jimmy] It only dawned on me yesterday what "100 C in a D" was. While I was shaving. Ouch!

[Rick] It's a bit culture-biased, isn't it?

[Kapil] Some entirely outrageous ones have been included in an effort to make the test more "culture-inclusive". One of my friends discovered what "9 P in S A" was and even with "Google Earth" or the equivalent I wouldn't have ever known enough to answer that.

In fact, some of the culture-specific ones were easier for me because I assumed that the author of these tests had a certain cultural bias and factored that in into the guesses I made. So even though I didn't know (e.g.) that there were "39 B in the O T" I could guess the answer and then the web page (with JavaScript enabled) verified that my guess was correct.

I liked the way the author of the tests had made them impossible to cheat on. Maybe it is now standard practice for on-line tests but it was a new one on me.

[Rick] But, e.g., the Brits might find "100 P in a P" somewhat mysterious.

[Jimmy] 100 peas in a pod?

[Jay] It's harder when they don't have the intelligence themselves to parse the responses only for keywords. If leaving out the number they put on the prompt from the reply makes me wrong, I'm smarter than they are, and I can't be bothered.

---

The usual brilliant Redmond strategy: checkmate in two moves

Mon, 23 Jan 2006

From Benjamin A. Okopnik

[Jimmy] This thread kept going...

Yes, but for *whom?*

http://www.gmtoday.com/news/technology/computers/topstory20.asp

Seems that Vista is going to require machines with more resources than (my estimate) half the US population, and probably 95% of the people in the rest of the world, own.

To be sure, Microsoft has said lesser computers will still be capable of
running Vista, just with some of the special features that differentiate
it from older versions of Wind0ws automatically turned off.

"Lesser" computers? I love it.

Dell has a section on its Web site, at www.dell.com/vista, which
highlights computers the company recommends for those planning to
upgrade to Vista. For models for the home and home office, the
recommended desktop is priced at $1,749. The laptop costs $2,699.

Better and better, every day. Y'all ready to rush right out and buy the top-buck gizmo of the day?

[Pedja] Ben, Vista is scheduled to launch at Christmas this year,right? Do you think that is a coincidence? By that time, "Vista-ready" computers (Micr0$0ft's recommended hardwareX2) won't be all that uncommon,and Christmas shopping madness will do the rest. Same story was when XP launched, what, 5 years ago?

It's the same old formula that Micr0s0ft has been using all along - however, at this point, it's been turned on its head. Yes, the US is where most of the computer buying power is - but the top of the market is by far not the only buying public out there. Neither Joe Average in Chicago nor his cousin Giuseppe Averaggio in Milan (nor most of their other relatives all over the world) can afford to just toss their current system just because Micr0s0ft has decreed that they should; aside from the expense, other considerations - e.g., the hassle of installing all the new hardware, dealing with replacing anything that fails to work, adapting to the new system, "upgrading" the software that turns out to be non-compatible with their new OS - make it a very low-percentage game. Yeah, there are new adopters all over the place - but many of those have already installed Linux, anyway. Yeah, there are companies that, for various (generally non-technical) reasons will "upgrade" to Vista... but given the general awareness of Linux now, and the fact that people realize that changing over is going to require adapting anyway, there's a certain (and I believe, large) percentage of people that will decide to get out of that game and switch to Linux.

This is besides the fact that there are more and more companies and individuals switching over every day.

(*Don't* anybody breathe. If Micr0s0ft actually falls for this one, we're home free.)

[Pedja] Will you please explain?

Sure. If you don't have a whole lot of spare cash, and your computer is becoming less and less useable day by day (remember what happened shortly after XP appeared?)

[Pedja] Yes, the hype was massive. "The only OS you'll ever need,mangles your files and cures cancer (has dancing hamster in technicolor, too!)". Heh. That's madness, I tell you, madness...

- and particularly if you need to produce documents, etc., for business purposes _and can't_ due to progressive OS/software incompatibilities, then where are you going to go? This kind of heavy-handed, bull-in-a-china-shop moves by the Redmond folks drive wagonloads of people over to Linux, and from a certain cynical perspective, I'm actually glad to see them doing it.

[Pedja] Arrogance will bury them, DRM and 'trusted computing' too. Imagine Joe Average User trying to rip his S0ny 'enhanced' CD using WMP 11, or installing 'unapproved' software to his brand new Vi$ta machine, and failing. Imagine man realizing that he is 0wned and his freedom to do whatever he bloody wants with things he payed for, taken away from him 'for his own good'. Imagine his anger and frustration. And then he hears of this Linux thing, which has its own quirks, but it's all about freedom. Is this a dawn of the new era, Ben? We can only hope so .

---

Like, it's so totally Val

Fri, 10 Feb 2006

From Mike Orr

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/theater/259118_wedding11q.html Review of "The Wedding Singer" play, a 1985 cliche-o-drama

(No, I haven't seen it.)

[Jimmy] Looks like it's based on the Adam Sandler movie.

On a similarly 80s note, I whiled away the hours at work last night listening to The Cure's Greatest Hits

[Thomas] Which? Staring At The Sea was a nice album.

[Jimmy] Greatest Hits. It's a CD/DVD package.

[Thomas] Talking of which, I'm listening to The TearDrop Explodes. I much preferred Julian Cope's solo work -- but it's still good, nevertheless.

[Jimmy] Never really got into them, though I do get mixed up between them and Echo and the Bunnymen, for some strange reason.

I suppose I'll find out when my sister gets into them -- she has a bad case of 80s envy

[Thomas] That's not so strange when you consider that Ian McCulloch who was a brief member of The Teardrop Explodes, went on to be the lead singer for Echo and the Bunnymen.

[Jimmy] Ah. Well, Dave Fanning (Ireland's closest equivalent to John Peel) used to play them, but at the time I was more into grunge and punk[1] stuff.

I miss those simpler times, when MTV played music, and everything was on one channel, so you were exposed to different genres instead of just whatever's in favour with 14 year old girls today.

My friend is a writer for Time, which owns People. He says People is by far the best selling magazine in the industry. I couldn't believe it, who reads People? But it's all those women in check-out lines picking it up.

[Jimmy] Don't forget doctors' and dentists' waiting rooms!

[Thomas] This is true. I can remember, about six/seven years ago when my parents first got sky. The MTV2 channel back then would just play continuously in one hour slots, listeners' requests for music videos.

[Jimmy] Eek. I'm thinking about, say, 11 years ago when there was just one MTV Europe, and everything was... well, like MTV2 as you described

They did have some oddball programmes with the odd live band, but mostly it was music with a minimum of chatter.

[Thomas] Typically there'd be fifteen songs in an hour. It was great. The ecclectic mix of music and genres was indeed an eye-opener.

There's a new American radio format like this, although it's programmed rather than requests. They have a large playlist of a wide variety of rock genres (60s-00s), and they play them in a random order even if it puts dissimilar songs next to each other. Supposedly it's popular because people are tired of the same old songs again and again. It was started by one network ("JACK FM") but there are other stations doing it too. The LA station has the most interesting website: http://www.931jackfm.com

[Thomas] Alas, the format is no more -- and it has gone the American way of: "Random talking with whiny Amercians is what the people want, whilst getting out of playing music."

[Jimmy] Well, they still have those kinds of programmes, but only at insomniac hours

They even have a metal show that plays videos by bands like Nile. Much as I love them, I don't understand why they bother to make videos, knowing they have such a limited appeal.

[Jimmy] (Queens of the Stone Age's "Songs for the Deaf" album has fake American DJ banter between songs. One of the best goes "K.L.O.N. - Clone Radio. We sound more like everybody else than anybody else". Rings oh-so-true

[1] Though probably not anything Mike would consider to be punk, apart from the Sex Pistols and the Ramones. Maybe

[Thomas] Patti Smith.

Haha. I have a soft spot for the early "non-punk" punk bands like Blondie. But for later punk, it's gotta be like early 80s oi/punk or I'm not interested. Innovation is fine -- psychobilly is cool, and I'd like to hear more punk/surf (Agent Orange). Just keep the same tempo and stacatto. And my adversion to metal influences in punk remains.

[Jimmy] I like the hardcore stuff... punk, but faster, and with musical ability. But, as I've said before, that stuff didn't come from having metal influences; if anything, the reverse was the case.

Hardcore is too monotonous for me. No, it didn't come from metal. I'm talking about metal influences on individual bands or the punk/metal hybrids, as well as Motorhead and AC/DC sneaking into punk bands' repitoire. Like this one local band Contingent an acquaintance sings in. It's called hardcore. Um, no it isn't.

[Jimmy] Well... you can't really help AC/DC slipping in as an influence for almost any rock band since the 70s. Or Spinal Tap

Not just an influence. Dropkick Murphys actually perform AC/DC songs at shows.

Punk attitude: angry losers
Punk music: fast but not extremely, stacatto, unique rhythms and vocal styles
Punk look: trim and tight

Metal attitude: arrogant
Metal music: outgrowth of hard rock (Zeppelin, Hendrix, psychedelic),
non-danceable, frequently screaming vocals, quasi-ballads
Metal look: scruffy

Post-punk attitude (grunge etc): resigned losers
Post-punk music: a wide variety, borrows more from rock
Post-punk look: scruffy, slacker (plus a lot of other variations)

Notice the difference?

[Jimmy] Sure, not that I agree

I've actually been going back to my New Wave roots. Missing Persons, Bowie, Duran Duran, the Police -- all monstrosities I've re-acquired recently. My own personal 'fuck you' to the record industry (see SWF thread) and the output of most current bands. Plus a little bit of "real men do listen to new wave (and eat quiche)" rebellion.

[Jimmy] Eep. My roots are bands like Smashing Pumpkins and Soundgarden, so there's not much digging for me to do.

Actually not digging. The record stores are giving them away for $4 because nobody wants them. Your stuff would be at the recently-inflated price of $9 (used). Plus I can get them on vinyl rather than CD, so I avoid the CD premium.

[Thomas] This is something I am seeing a lot here too. What I would class as "good" music is being put in these so-called "bargain buckets" as a quick sale. Bands like 'Love' are always in there. It's even more a shame in that although 'Forever Changes' as an album is rated very highly, it's also degraded -- it now has a label of being "passed its time", simply because it's so common to see it in these bargain buckets.

I couldn't believe an ad I saw yesterday, offering The Clash and other classic albums for the "great discount price" of $8.99. Ahem? For albums that have been out for years and have long paid for themselves and should now be worth $6?

[Thomas] See above. I found my copy of Mellow Candle's Swaddling Songs that way.

[Jimmy] Hmm. I don't mind buying remastered albums on CD for more than they would be worth normally, as long as there's something other than a fresh mix. A few of the early Cure albums now come with a second CD of outtakes etc., which is worth it (and makes me glad I didn't rush out and buy them a few years ago

The worst thing about listening to metal is that metal labels like Roadrunner are really into ripping off fans: every album is released twice; first in a jewel case, then six months later in a digipack with bonus tracks. It's impossible to tell in advance whether or not the bonus tracks are worth waiting for -- more often than not they're just live tracks -- but it really seems like a punishment for liking a band enough to buy their album as soon as it comes out.

I made that mistake once with Radiohead's "Hail to the Thief". Both versions were released simultaneously, but I wanted the "special" artwork in the cardboard case, which turned out to be nothing special.

What's funny is, new wave albums will soon become collectors' items and disappear from the record stores, and reappear on eBay for $100 each. Even ones that you thought should never have seen the light of day. I thought a lot of used stuff like the Clash would always be plentiful, but it has already disappeared into collectors' hands, at least around here. If I'd've known that, I would have kept all the records I'd gotten rid of over the years. I had all my CDs stolen in 2000, and some of the Industrial stuff is practially irreplaceable now.

[Jimmy] Well... my CD collection has basically been merged with my brother's. Not a problem while we're both at home, but I'm moving out next week... I'll probably just leave my CDs here rather than go through the inevitable "who owns what" arguments. (And partly because I'd rather use my MP3 player, and don't own a CD player anyway

I was never really into buying things for the sake of collecting -- I'm more interested in the contents than the physical item -- but there are a few albums that I'm glad I own on both vinyl and CD because of the artwork. If I ever find "Master of Puppets" or "Reign in Blood" on vinyl, my normally subdued collector's instinct will take control

I generally don't collect things for resale. It's more a matter of keeping things you'll never find again, that you're likely to want later. Or if you like a certain subculture, building up a "complete" collection of used items over the years. ("See! I got all of this used. This one came from a thrift shop, this one from a garage sale, this one a friend gave to me, this one I got while visiting England, this one a friend brought me when he was visiting the US...")

But in the 80s and 90s I was moving a lot, so I was more interested in being portable and lightweight than saving stuff. In high school, My cousin came to live with us with all her possessions in a Volkswagon, and I thought, "Wow, that's cool." I never managed that, my moves went up from two pickup truckloads to four, but that's mainly coz I have furniture now. [1] In high school (1982) I could always find 60s old album I wanted used, from Beatles to Kinks to Jefferson Airplane, and I loaded up on Rush. I just assumed that would always be the case, so I unloaded anything I didn't have an immediate want for. But I didn't anticipate how short-lived the Industrial and Ambient eras would be or how quickly the material would disappear. Maybe it's just coz I moved from mainstream music to obscure music, and that always happens with obscure music.

[1] Henry Rollins' bed story is so funny. He had a favorite futon that he used for eight years, so it was all scrunched down now. His girlfriend saw it and said, "Henry! You can't sleep on that! We have to get you a proper bed." So she dragged him to the bed store. He told the clerk, "I've never shopped for a bed before. How do you do it?" The clerk said, "Just lie down on several till you find one you like." So he did, and one bed was so comfortable it talked to him, "Come to Henry!" So he bought that one. But he couldn't bear to get rid of his beloved futon, so he kept it under the bed.

[Jimmy] Though I have managed to track down some obscure Irish bands recently: Scheer were the most recent

---

Re: [LG 122] 2c Tips #4

Sat, 07 Jan 2006

From Daniel J. Priem

For such problems i use
http://btmgr.webframe.org/
smart boot manager.

[Rick] So close to a senryu, and yet so far.

---

Cartoon about blogging

Sun, 29 Jan 2006

From Jimmy O'Regan

http://www.comics.com/comics/pearls/archive/images/pearls20060121046729.jpg

---

I caught an amusing phish from the eBay...

Fri, 17 Feb 2006

From Benjamin A. Okopnik

Here's one that might get past a number of people; other than the way-too-crude XSS attack imitation, it's going to be rather effective for a certain segment of the population.

About a day ago, Kat put up some of our boat cruft up on eBay. Last night, I got this email:

Your registered name is included to show this message originated from eBay.
Learn more.

[hdrLeft_13] Question about Item -- Respond Now                             eBay
  eBay sent this message on behalf of an eBay member via My Messages.
  Responses sent using email will go to the eBay member directly and will
* include your email address. Click the Respond Now button below to send your *
  response via My Messages (your email address will not be included).

[s]
   Question from rubyndao                 [s] Marketplace Safety Tip Marketplace Safety Tip
  This message was ! sent while               Always remember to complete your transactions
  the listing was active.                     on eBay - it's the safer way to trade.
  rubyndao is a potential buyer.
                                              Is this message an offer to buy your item
                                              directly through email without winning the item
  Hi,              ********************       on eBay* If so, please help make the eBay
                   *Respond to this   *       marketplace safer by reporting it to us. These
  I would like to  *question in My    *       external transactions may be unsafe and are
  know S&H and     *Messages.         *       against eBay policy. Learn more about trading
  also if you      *                  *       safely.
  have a buy it    *http://           *
  now              *contact.ebay.co.uk* 
                   */ws/eBayISAPI.dll *
  Thanks           *M2MContact&item=  *       Is this email inappropriate* Does it breach
                   *4589070441&       *       eBay policy* Help protect the community by
  Ruby             *requested=        *       reporting it.
                   *yamama_r6&qid=    *
                   *1470018712&       *
                   *redirect=0&       *
                   *sspagename=       *
                   *ADME:B:AAQ:UK:2   *
                   ********************

  *
  *
* *
  *
  *
  *
  *
  *
  Thank you for using eBay
  http://www.ebay.com/
  *
  *

  *
  Learn how you can protect yourself from spoof (fake) emails at:
  http://pages.ebay.com/education/spooftutorial
  *
  This eBay notice was sent to kvnmtchll200@aol.com on behalf of another eBay
  member through the eBay platform and in accordance with our Privacy Policy. If
  you would like to receive this email in text format, change your notification
  preferences.
  *
  See our Privacy Policy and User Agreement if you have questions about eBay's
  communication policies.
  Privacy Policy: http://pages.ebay.com/help/policies/privacy-policy.html
  User Agreement: http://pages.ebay.com/help/policies/user-agreement.html
  *
  Copyright © 2005 eBay, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
  Designated trademarks and brands are the property of their respective owners.
  eBay and ! the eBay logo are registered trademarks or trademarks of eBay, Inc.

Notice anything unusual? Here are a couple of things that sent up red flags for me right away:

1. "Your registered name is included to show this message originated from eBay." Really? Where is it, then?
2. "This message was ! sent while" - I don't think that eBay formats their messages per the Jargon File.
3. "Respond to this question in My Messages" - these are supposed to be _my_ messages, and it shows an eBay.uk address? Uh-huh.
4. "This eBay notice was sent to kvnmtchll200@aol.com" - sure, I've been using AOL all my life; I've just been hiding it from my friends. [sob] I'll go kill myself with a plastic fork now!

Best of all, though, is what happens when you load it up in a browser (I'll include the HTML just so those who are interested can play with it):

[Jimmy] Warning! Certain browsers try to render this!

See attached phishing-source.txt

Take a careful look at that "Submit" button link:

<A title=http://contact.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?M2MContact&amp;item=4589070441&amp;
requested=yamama_r6&amp;qid=1470018712&amp;redirect=0&amp;sspagename=ADME:B:AAQ:UK:2
onclick="return ShowLinkWarning()" href="http://www.varzavarzarau.go.ro/ws/ws/arribada/issapidll/
SignIncopartnerId2pUserIdsiteidpageTypepa1i1bshowgifUsingSSLruwwwebaycomppp2errmsgrunameruparam
sruproductsidfavoritenavmigrateVisitor/SignIn.html" target=_blank onfiltered="return ShowLinkWarning()">

So, the button is going to pop up a little label saying it's from 'ebay.co.uk'... but it will link to (and your bottom bar will show it as) the 'www.varzavarzarau.go.ro' address. Clicking on it takes you to a look-alike eBay login page... except that there are a couple of those minor quirks, much like the page above, in it.

Naivete costs money - and these days, it happens at Internet speeds.

Oh, to expand on the "XSS" bit: what made it crude is that it was missing one of the critical components of XSS. If you look at the URL in the address bar when the ostensible "eBay loging page" shows up, it's that "www.varzavarzarau.go.ro" one, with a very long tail on it. In an actual XSS attack, once you get that far in the process, there's almost no way to tell - since you're actually at the page where you think you are, but you're "piped through" someone else's machine.

---

Talkback: Discuss this article with The Answer Gang

Published in Issue 124 of Linux Gazette, March 2006