So in the previous post, I debunked the draft rumor going around. I figured I’d do a little more poking and find out who was running Congress.org, the origin of the rumor. They do pretty shoddy research, whoever they are. No big dramatic reveal here, alas. Congress.org is owned by a company by the name of Issue Dynamics Inc.. They’re a political consulting company that focuses on liberal causes; they’re big on grassroots, which explains why they’re running Congress.org. It’s presumably an effective means of encouraging people to generate letters to Congressmen. ...

The talk on the Dean campaign wasn’t all that interesting — Keri Carpenter talked about how the Dean campaign was shaped by the people, and Tom Limoncelli talked about how it was a great experience and touched on the technology some. Nothing deep. Keri Carpenter did say, at the end, that clearly great netroots wasn’t enough but she didn’t really volunteer any ideas on what would have helped. Tom Limoncelli said he thought Dean lost because he was anointed the front-runner early and everyone teamed up to bring him down. That latter seems kind of self-defeating to me, since netroots takes some time to build. You wouldn’t want to use a strategy that puts you ahead early if being the front-runner leads to failure. ...

Sideways is a good movie, but not exactly transcendent. Touching and human and delicate, yes, definitely. But I couldn’t avoid a certain detachment from the characters. Or, no, that’s not right. I couldn’t avoid a certain detachment from the world they inhabit. The characters themselves are sympathetic and interesting, even Thomas Church Hayden’s womanizer, Jack. He is not a particularly good person, but he’s our not particularly good person, and Paul Giamatti is a skilled enough actor to show us why his Miles might be fond of such a man. Even better: when something bad occurs, consequences exist and are not softened. And that makes the characters more believable and brings me closer to them. ...

MUSIC: “3 AM, I’m awakened by a sweet summer rain Distant howling of a passing southbound coal train…” OPEN on ROGER PARKER FOR NEW JERSEY STATE SENATE HEADQUARTERS. MUSIC continues. It is very late at night. It is raining, mildly, not enough to make a statement. The headquarters is in a strip mall plaza, with a big plate glass window opening onto the nearly empty parking lot. Inside, lights are going out one by one. ...

So here’s the thing. I’m sitting in a talk about spam, and the guy giving the talk is running over various HTML tricks spammers use to get spam past mail filters. A guy stands up and says “So obviously the trick is to block all email with HTML in it!” That’s just stupid. First off, it ignores reality. I don’t live in a world in which I can block all HTML email for all my users; neither do most sysadmins. Second, this is very clearly a talk for people who live in that world. If the context of the talk allowed for blocking all HTML email, then there would be an obvious solution and the talk would take about five minutes. ...

Yeah, I pretty much want all of this. Thanks!

cfengine is cool. I dug it. The tutorial was introductory and I was pretty sold on the concepts. If you already know about cfengine there is nothing useful for you in this post. Cheap summary: a host is classified into a number of groups. Lots of classifications are automatic; there’s a linux group (any machine running linux), there’s a 129_120_10 group (any host on the 129.120.10 subnet), there’s a Hr02 group (any host running cfengine between the hours of 2 AM and 3 AM), etc. Why would you want that last? Maybe you only want to do some checks during that hour. Yes, this is yet another way to schedule periodic jobs in a manner that future sysadmins will be unable to find… but I digress. ...

Our VoIP/Asterisk tutorial is going much more quickly than the presenter expected. This is not unusual for first-time presenters. Asterisk is pretty interesting, but shows signs of being an open source project. Hm — OK, some sample configuration file stuff: exten => s,73,Playback(thank-you-for-calling) exten => s,74,GotoIfTime(6:01-18:00|mon-sun|*|*?s,76) exten => s,75,Goto(s,78) exten => s,76,Playback(have-a-great-day-goodbye) In theory, the template is something like exten => ,,(), but it’s been brutally extended into something that looks alarmingly like BASIC. See the line numbers masquerading as priorities? It looks like it was originally just a simple method of specifying extensions, but grew like kudzu. Soon there’ll be m4 macros for building these scripts which masquerade as configuration files.

Speaking of which, the squidguard blacklists might make really good input for MT-Blacklist. Remember this and try it.

My Monday LISA tutorial was on system log aggregation, analysis, and statistics. mjr taught it, and he’s as good a public speaker as ever. Also the topic was pretty damned fascinating. I’ll be dumping a pile of links into del.icio.us sometime soonish now. Highlights, some of which are significant and some of which are just cool: You can set up an invisible loghost. What you do is you specify a non-existent host as the loghost on all your DMZ servers. You’re gonna need to manually stuff an entry into the arp table so that your DMZ servers will blithely send syslog packets off into thin air. Then you hook the real loghost up to the DMZ with no IP address in promiscuous mode. Run tcpdump on it to capture all the packets, and write some cheap perl to strip syslog payloads out of the captured packets. ...