Zein’s place on the net

I have been spending a few extra hours at work and my eyes are getting real dry which made me start thinking that starting at a 17″ CRT is not the best way to keep my eyes in good shape.

My friend and fellow gawaberian, Mahmoud got me thinking about getting an LCD. And guess what? I did a beautiful 19″ NEC LCD.

I am not thinking of getting one for when I am at home I am thinking of a Samsung. Mahmoud got a Samsung 190N I am hoping to get something like it.

Woe be uppon any who do not take extra care of their teeth! (or visit a bad dentist)! You will pay the price of your negligence (or your nieveness) in pain, pure pain!!

To cut a long story short, I am getting a root canal done becuase of a filling leakage! And I am in soo much pain! I took a pain killer (I never take any medicine if I can help it) and I am not feeling any better

So remember, take good care of your teeth and they will take good care of you!

I have always have setup the MTA on my local server to do local delivereies only (it only listens on 127.0.0.1)! I have never realy needed to send mail from it.

I was browseing debian packages when I found esmpt; a relay only MTA. I thought that it would be perfect for me. It is sendmail command line compatible and it would give me the ability of sending email from my server without the hassle of setting it up to recive email.

apt-get install esmtp-run installs a package that provides MTA. debconf sets it all up but you can edit your setting in /etc/esmtprc.

Lets take it for a test drive, shall we?

echo -e "To: zein@domain.com\nFrom: zein@otherdomain.com\nSubject:Test\n\nTesting... 123\n" | /usr/sbin/sendmail zein@domain.com -f zein@otherdomain.com

Perfect! notice that the -f must match the smtp user that you have configured esmtp with.

I am connected to the super highway via a speedtouch 510 ADSL modem. I used the DNS and DCHP features of the modem.

The problem? well the modem doesn’t support MX type DNS queries. so I can’t send email from by server becuase I can never look up the recipents mail server

Now bind9 may be the most used DNS server but it is an overkill for me. I consulted the oracle (yes I mean google) and came up with DNSmasq! The installation is as easy as:

apt-get install dnsmasq

and all is setup via the /etc/hosts and /rtc/recolv.conf files.

All I had to do was download my router configuration (it defaults to a file called user.ini) and run the following script:

cat user.ini | grep "add hostname=" | sed 's/add hostname=//g' | sed 's/addr=//g' | awk {' print $2 "\t\t" $1'}

and I copied that into my /etc/hosts file.

The last step was to modify the /etc/resolv.conf on the server to lookup my ISP’s DNS server instead of the router’s so DNSmasq will forward queries to link.net instead of the router.