August 2008 Archives

I just shut down my qmail server, which has been serving my email flawlessly for the last 10 years. It's outlived four houses, three servers and two operating systems.

qmail has been just great, I have no complaints whatsoever. I've never had to patch it, change it, worry about it - it just works. I recommend it wholeheartedly. I've only stopped using it because I've moved my stuff to Google Apps (which is also great) for reasons that aren't relevant here. If I switched my service back home, I'd be using qmail again.

Thank you, DJB. Thank you.

I used to use the queueing feature of OpenBSD's PF a lot. It worked pretty well, but it made a monstrous mess of my firewall configuration. Not really PF's fault - I had a lot of rules and adding the queue statement to each one made it hard to read.

Since being easy to read is a pretty important quality for a firewall rulebase, I disabled all my queueing stuff. That's a bit of a shame, but I needed to be able to understand how my firewall worked.

I have recently set up an offsite store for my most valuable data, and I'm using Duplicity to securely back it up. That's nice, but since it's a huge upload, that kind of traffic really screws with the performance of my ADSL line. For the uninitiated, filling the upstream bandwidth with data leaves no room for TCP ACK traffic, which stalls pretty much all TCP traffic.

Anyway, I set up a simple priority queue for ACK traffic. I expected an increase in (e.g.) browser responsiveness while doing the upload, and for sure I got that. What I didn't expect was an enormous increase in the upload speed! It pretty much doubled it. I'll buy that for a dollar.

While I may not go back to my old, CBQ-based scheme with all its confusion, the ACK priority queue is a winner.

Just back from Rome, good and tired.

My new Blackberry was amazing. It did exactly what I needed it to do, pretty much whenever I needed it. It also did a load of other stuff too.

I got my email all the time, really quickly. My calendar was spot on, and Google Apps got updated from the handset changes. Opera Mini worked like a charm. The Notes app was useful for keeping a diary. I could navigate around the city using GPS and Google Maps, and this was accurate enough that I could use it whilst running to find my way around the massive Villa Borghese.

I love phones again. My Nokia N73 was an unmitigated disaster, but my Blackberry Curve is a thing of beauty.

It's such a pain in the arse getting anything done here in Rome.

All I'm trying to do is book a bus service to the airport. It's not going to happen. I've called their Rome numbers, which don't work. I've called their UK numbers, and I got a woman who didn't speak much English telling me there was a bus when I needed it, but that she didn't know the time and that I should call a different Rome number. Ok, fine - I called that number and they didn't answer.

Twats. Lazy Meditteranean could-give-a-shit wankers.

It looks like I'm going to have to get a cab, which is an expensive nonsense.