Debug Postfix Tip

Published on Thursday, May 20, 2010

One thing I love about open source stuff is that the developers usually take great care to allow awesome debug messages. There's a catch-22, however: how much logging to enable? Today I was creating a Postfix/Dovecot/Postgresql install and I kept getting an error message in mail.log, but it wasn't very helpful.

Luckily you can turn up the verbosity in Postfix for error messages. You'll need to find out what component is in error, e.g. "postfix/virtual[4467]: warning:", and then open master.cf. Add a -v to the end of the daemon that's faulting, and you'll get more logging than you know what to do with.

virtual   unix  -       n       n       -       -       virtual -v


I hope this helps somebody. You can read more debugging tips on the Postfix DEBUG readme.

Retiring Old Websites

Published on Sunday, May 16, 2010

Sometimes all good things come to an end. There aren't too many links going into either of these sites, but I'd like to redirect all of them to a page on my blog saying the website doesn't exist anymore. I've already created simple screendumps for nostalgic purposes with the Firefox plugin Screengrab!, so the remaining simple server-side steps are:

  • 1) Edit the DNS records from the live server to the server with the notice page is on.
  • 2) Create a new vhost on the server the notice exists on, add old websites as ServerAlias.
  • 3) Add a redirect in the vhost to the notice about the retired sites.
  • 4) Reload apache config.


The below vhost entry will redirect any link to the retired sites to the notice page.


ServerName ducktracker.com
ServerAlias www.ducktracker.com blogmozaic.com www.blogmozaic.com

RedirectMatch permanent (.*)$ http://www.kelvinism.com/tech-blog/rip-old-sites/



Retiring Another Site

Published on

After much consideration, I've decided to retire yet another website: Colddirt. This site was created as an example of how to use the different parts of Django, mostly in just one afternoon. I've decided it is time to just take a few screenshots and retire the site - the domain is expiring, and honestly, I don't want to spend $10 to renew the domain. So, here are the screenshots.








RIP Old Sites

Published on

Over the years I've created several websites, some with the hope of becoming big and popular. Naturally, I'm still waiting to create a site that becomes big and popular. In the meantime, it seems appropriate to retire some of the older sites and ideas. The truth is, I'm moving all my little sites from MySQL on a mediocre VPS to Postgresql on EC2.

Because I put some sweat and blood into these sites, I thought it would be only appropriate to record how the sites looked for future sentimental value. I downloaded a small plug-in for Firefox to take full-length pictures, and I thus post them here.

Back in Taiwan I created a site to demo blogs. The idea certainly wasn't revolutionary, but I thought that somebody would find it useful. Nope.

The second idea was to send a bunch of little ducks around the world and track their progress. My friend Jamie took one to Europe, but besides that, I don't think most people really understood that they were supposed to hand the duck off to somebody else. The main reason I created the site was because my partner was out of town. I'll re-brand and launch it again if I can find a little twitter logo to send around, because hopefully people on twitter will understand to pass the duck onwards.

So photos for nostalgic sake.

















It is always a bit rough retiring old sites, but looking back I learned a little, had some hope, and that's all I can ask for.