A taste of Linux.

When computers work well, they're great! But when they decided to play silly beggars, then they really get your goat and wind you up something terrible!

Yesterday I decided to upgrade my Fedora Core 2 box to Fedora Core 3 [testing]. I'd already downloaded the 4 cd's and the rescue disk, and burnt them. So I backed everything up, closed it all down and started using the upgrade menu of the new install. All went well and eventually I was able to reboot, and again things seemed to be booting okay ..... until ................ it got to the point of KDE starting, and it couldn't find KDE!

Well! I knew it was there, but the machine didn't. And neither could I get into gnome neither. I was stuck! The only way out was to reboot and to reinstall Fedora Core 2, thank the gods for having good backups.

One thing that I really like about this blogging program [nanoblogger] is that if you know how to write html, then you can customise this program very easily. An example is staring you right here :) If you look on the tab of your browser where this page is showing you'll see a little picture of 'Tux', its called in technical terms a favicon. That little 'Tux' is little, he's only 16 pixels by 16 pixels! I added one line to the main_index.html page, and this was it {link rel="shortcut icon" href="favicon.ico"}, and thats all thats required. Neat eh?

NB. I've had to use { and } in place of < and > otherwise you can't see what the html code is.

My all-time favourite computer magazine has to be 'Linux Format', and I can easily remember taking PCPlus, PC Format and even a ZX Spectrum one (or the many hours of fun typing in a program into the dear old speccy, running it and then debugging spelling mistakes I'd made!]. But 'LInux Format' is easily the one that I most use and keep referring back to, getting ideas or looking for solutions to problems.

And I've recently found their website at Linux Format, and its got forums with interesting discussions, and a wiki at Linux Format wiki which is still growing and not much known about. So thats why I'm mentioning it here, to try and raise its profile a bit more.

I've just been trying out a useful little program to analyse my mail log files for the amount of spam that I've received. We all hear how much spam is taking over the web and consuming vast amounts of time and money unnecessarily, so i was interested in its results. Yesterday I'd had a total of 88 emails, of which 61.36% were spam, which was I thought fairly reasonable and accurate. Todays total is [so far at least] 54 emails, of which 72.22% are spam. So I then thought that I'd look at the totals for the week so far, 722 emails, of which 35.32% are spam. So, over a third of my incoming mail is spam, and a total waste of time.

If you're interested the programme is called 'SpamAssassin logfile analyser 1.1.5' and can be obtained from SpamAssassin logfile analyser, under the heading of 'sa-stats.pl'. Its a nice little program and quite easy to run from the commandline, as root, but depending on your system you may have to alter the commandline parameters, i.e. on Fedora Core 2 the mail log is not 'mail.info' but rather 'maillog'. It would be nice too if it could output its results to a text file as then it could be run overnight as a cron job.

Since that last sentence was written I've had a reply back from David giving me details of how to make it run as a cron job. So here are the relevant lines from my root crontab;-
==============================
0 0 * * 0-5 /home/$user/programs/spam-logfile/sa-stats.pl -y < /var/log/maillog >>/opt/logwatch/spam-stats.txt
0 0 * * 6 /home/$user/programs/spam-logfile/sa-stats.pl -y < /var/log/maillog >>/opt/logwatch/spam-stats-week.txt
==============================
Which should run okay, but we'll see tomorrow.