Breaking the Law (of Hostname Canonicalization)
Mailman is a great little program written in Python that lets you manage mailing lists. I was tasked with installing it on a new machine last week, and I got to learn about canonicalization the hard way. All of the emails sent by our server out to the mailing lists were using the host name instead of the DNS A record for the Mailman VirtualHost. I tried for days to fix this and eventually got the feeling that it was DNS related. However, I still couldn’t see why Sendmail would force the To-header back to the canonical name when Mailman was setting it correctly.
Eventually, I happened across this email on Mailman’s dev list that solved the problem by removing one of sendmail.cf’s canonicalization rules. I’m sure this violates some RFC. Although, the hack does indeed solve the problem. The actual wizardry was to comment out the following line in sendmail.cf.
# pass to name server to make hostname canonical # R$* $| $* < @ $* > $* $: $2 < @ $[ $3 $] > $4
It’s absolutely wrong to do this because if you edit sendmail.mc, and restart sendmail, the cf file gets regenerated automatically which obliterates the change. Is there a better way to fix this without violating RFCs and changing sendmail rulesets? Note: I don’t have access to the DNS server.
This volume does not support symlinks
Hmmm, suudsu was raising quite a ruckus about “This volume does not support symlinks” when I tried to install Fink today. Then, I wasn’t able to find much on teh google about this one. So, I broke out some mad OS X command-line foo to solve this problem.
sudo Installer -pkg /Users/jperrie/Desktop/Fink\ 0.8.0\ Installer.pkg -target /
Now, I’m just assuming Fink software should go into /sw…
I’m really liking this reddit site. I yelled at them one time to fix their RSS feed, and, *GASP*, they listened! Usually, when I go off on one of my tirades people just laugh at me.
Ruby on Rails
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I’ve been spending a lot of time recently learning the newest, shiny, whizbang/neato intraweb framework around, Ruby on Rails. Now, mind you, my entire site is running on PHP, and I’ve been programming in it since 1999, however, there’s some big problems with using it. It is possible to use it correctly, however, the path-of-least-resistance is to use it incorrectly. The big thing that didn’t even realize was a drawback is that all of the SQL is buried in the PHP code itself. The Ruby on Rails MVC model makes it easy to separate the SQL from the Ruby. So, development is very agile and adaptable. This allows you to make changing the database by adding tables or fields to an existing table very quick and painless. I’m currently using WordPress and Gallery, however, there’s all kinds of naughty braindead code that I hate in these CMS systems. I really want to roll my own system because I’m stubborn and idiotic like that. Add to the fact that I’m severely unimpressed with Gallery2. Google freaking released an RSS plugin in their summer of code jamboree, and the gallery folks haven’t put it in the release yet. I looked at adding it myself, but the Gallery2 tables don’t have a “LastUpdated” field in the album title, and guess what it’s coded in? You got it, PHP. So, good luck finding every freaking query that refers to an album in all the core Gallery2 PHP and all of the plugins. The other thing that I’m really digging is the script.aculo.us stuff and the Prototype Javascript library. It makes it ridiculously easy to make it look like you know what your doing with Javascript. I have a test page up and running now using some of this stuff, however, it’s mostly useless, but keep your eyes peeled as I’ll probably be making Involution.com 7.0 completely run on Rails in the near future. |
