Bitwise Gamgee

Google launched its experimental Public DNS service, acclaiming that it is faster, more secure and powerful than most of other DNS services available in most cases. To me, as it is a good alternative, it is just another way of tracking site usage, and publishing directed ads more precisely. It is ironic that I feel the hands of Google more everyday, and like the services they offer. Anyway, I think I will use this experimental service, as unfortunately the people managing communications related stuff in my country are banning sites for simple reasons everyday. Shame on you!

Google Public DNS

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Here is the command that you can use to find files larger than 2G (quite usefult for application with 2G filesize limit, like INN2 compiled without large file support.)

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find / -type f -size +2G -exec ls -lh {} \; | awk '{ print $8 ": " $5 }'

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Internet, Linux large file, Linux

If your INN distribution is not compiled with large file support (and your file system does not support files over 2GB) innd can die unexpectedly whenever your history file gets over 2GB. You can locate your history file under pathdb (/var/lib/news for me). If it is over 2GB you can change remember settings to a lower value to decrease the size of the history file.

To do so, edit your expire.ctl and change the remember setting to a lower value (5 days for me) and run makehistory and makedbz to rebuilt the files. Now, check your history file size and verify that it is below 2GB. You can run your innd properly now.

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Internet innd, nntp

Been busy configuring an INN 2.5 setup to get header feeds for Newzbox.com, I have a small list of tips to configure INN.

It seems that CNFS is ideal for storing large numbers of posts. Looking at the man page, it can be configured by editing cycbuff.conf file in /etc/news. You need to add lines to configure CNFS files and metadata like this.

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cycbuff:CYC01:/home/news/cycbuff1:2097151
metacycbuff:HEADERS:CYC01

This enables using a file at /home/news/cycbuff1, sized 2097151 Kbytes (2GB is the limit on some systems, and 2GB would be quite sufficient for me now). And by creating a metadata definition named HEADERS, we enable this CNFS file (CYC01) to be used in storage.conf.

We should now edit the storage.conf file to use this HEADERS CNFS files. The lines below tells INN to use it for binaries groups. For all other groups you should add another CNFS file,or maybe a timehash file to store that groups.

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method cnfs {
    class: 1
    newsgroups: *.binaries.*
    options: HEADERS
}

After finishing all configuring stuff, you can reload the server via;

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/usr/lib/news/bin/ctlinnd reload all reason

But after editing inn.conf and storage.conf files you need to restart innd by the command below.

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/usr/lib/news/bin/ctlinnd xexec innd

To configure the feed host you need to edit incoming.conf file, and add the lines below.

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peer <myfeed> {
  hostname: feedhost.com
  streaming: true
  max-connections: 10
}

And to add groups to capture, you need to first throttle the server, add the group and start the server again.

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/usr/lib/news/bin/ctlinnd throttle reason
/usr/lib/news/bin/ctlinnd newgroup alt.binaries.boneless
/usr/lib/news/bin/ctlinnd go reason

You can use the command below to get the status of CNFS files.

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/usr/lib/news/bin/cnfsstat

And the command below to get an overall status of the INN.

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/usr/lib/news/bin/innstat

For more information you can read man pages.

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Internet configuration, inn, nntp, ubuntu

After a field research process I made a list of new ideas and tweaks that I should complete before starting any actions that make the site reach to the masses. Without giving up many details I can say that the list includes more Youtube integration,
more user interaction and user generated content. I would like to hear your opinions about the site, feel free to contact me.

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Internet, Music free sheets, music sheets

My latest project, the easy-to-use sheet music trading site, supporting multiple instruments has launched this week. I tried to make it as easy as possible to use and enabled users to upload their sheets to the site to gain access to downloadable sheets that are uploaded by other members. First reactions are good, with no advertisement and a little word of mouth effect, people started signed up and share their sheets. I hope all will be okay through next months and sheet count will get higher as site gains popularity over the next months.

You can check it out by clicking on the link below.

http://www.sheetmusictrade.com

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Internet, Music free sheets, sheet music

In a few days Microsoft will make Bing online, which they call a decision engine. It looks good and I hope that it will give precise results to make you decide on which thousand dollar camera to buy. I am very comfortable with Google and though I use it everyday and find the right thing in a few clicks it is great to see some other people looking at different points of view. I believe that there is still much to be done about search engine tech, let’s see what happens next.

http://www.bing.com

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Internet microsoft, search engine