Jon’s Diary

Thanks to this brilliant guide, I have just upgraded my 15″ MacBook Pro (2nd Gen Core Duo) hard drive from 100GB to 500GB.

The major benefit from this is that my 50GB iTunes library, and my 65GB iPhoto library can now reside on my local disk, rather than an external firewire drive.

If you’re doing any maintenance on your mac, i’d definitely recommend the ifixit guides!

For some reason, I was once silly enough to create an mdadm RAID array using physical disks rather than creating a primary partition on each disk and creating the array from those. Because of this, when one of my servers boots, LVM cannot find it’s partitions since the array hasn’t been assembled at that point in the boot process. Or something. I’m not entirely sure, since it was never important enough to spend too much time worrying about.

Anyway, when the machine eventually boots (I’ve removed the mounts from /etc/fstab for the logical volumes on this misbehaving array) I’m left with the issue of finding the missing logical volumes and mounting them.
(continue reading…)

Thanks to my good friend Benji for letting me know … but there is a fixed version of the GrowlMail plug-in available here:

http://www.elusive.cx/2009/02/26/safari-4-and-growl-a-fix/

Thanks BK!

As above …

To fix, simply remove the plug-in. Depending on how you installed it, the plug-in will either be in /Library/Mail/GrowlMail.mailbundle or in ~/Library/Mail/GrowlMail.mailbundle.

Open terminal and delete the folder above (depending on your installation) and all will be fixed. Re-install the plug-in when Apple have fixed the conflict, and remind yourself that it’s not called “beta” software for no reason!

Recently, the volume of spam I was receiving has massively increased. In the past almost all of my spam was detected correctly by SpamAssassin and filtered out. However, this recent increase of spam has had the added issue of being sent to me with a spoofed ‘from’ address being the same as the ‘to’ address. Since SpamAssassin assumes I’m not going to spam myself, it doesn’t detect these mails quite so effectively.

I also wasn’t alone. A number of other people with mail hosted on my server complained of the same issue. So, I set about finding a solution.

After a few googles, I stumbled upon the Sender Policy Framework, or SPF.
It’s very simple in the way it works, is quick to set up, and best of all it costs nothing!

First you need to add a new DNS entry to the domain you want to protect. The following TXT entry tells the world that the only host authorised to send email from the domain jonpascoe.co.uk is the A record that it resolves to. All other sending hosts should be ignored.

jonpascoe.co.uk. 86400 IN TXT "v=spf1 a mx -all"

Once you’ve added your DNS TXT entry, it’s just a simple matter of configuring your MTA to look for the Received-Spf email header and filter your mail accordingly.

In the last couple of days, I haven’t sent myself a single spam email!
As an added bonus, if spam is sent “from me” to somebody else on the internet, and their MTA is configured to use SPF, they should block the mail too.