The blog of Steve Root

  • Outlook Web Access – missing options

    Missing options in outlook web access? I was. I wanted to forward email from a service using Outlook Web Access but I didn’t have the option. It was simply missing. A friend had told me where to find it. I googled it and saw instructions on how to set it, but it wasn’t there. I could not see the ‘rules’ option. It was as if this account had restricted privileges.

    328-outlook web access in google-thumb-300x132-327.png

    Then I noticed, all the instructions on the internet had different colours and layouts. Was this service using a very old version of OWA? Probably… (It’s on an MOD server used for the Air Training Corps) but also… this is Microsoft Outlook Web Access and I’m using Chrome on Mac…. you wouldn’t think… surely not… Microsoft would write the web interface to only work on Internet Explorer…..

    So, I fire up parallels and Windows 7 on my Mac, open Internet Explorer, log in and the world changes. All of a sudden I have every option I’ve been reading about. Suddenly the crippled web program becomes useful. Well, useful enough to set up forwarding – now I can action the emails through my gmail account 🙂

    331-outlook in IE-thumb-300x173-330.png

  • Block web spammers by their IP address

    Every so often someone tries to post spam to this blog using a computer program. They never manage to because even if their computer does solve the captcha I manually approve every post. It’s not like there are a lot of posts here after all.

    Anyway, I’ve been meaning for a long time to work out how to ban them from accessing web pages anywhere on my server. I always knew it wasn’t difficult, just a case of reading, testing, then making a note for the future. For future me, here’s how:

    iptables is already installed and running
    as the root user, running:

    iptables -I INPUT -s 1.2.3.4 -j DROP

    where 1.2.3.4 is the IP address to block, will block the user. If it becomes an issue, I can also block ranges and subnets and things… perhaps I’ll block the whole of China which is where most of the spam attempts seem to come from but that’s not very nice to 99% of the Chinese people, one of whom may want to find out what an English red mushroom with white spots looks like.

    To check the rule has been included:

    iptables -L -n

    the -L tells iptables to list all the current rules it’s working with
    the -n tells iptables NOT to try and work out the hosts name using DNS. Whilst my own office IP will resolve quickly, spammers generally don’t bother to setup reverse DNS and the list will take ages to display.

    Another thing, I *think* I set up iptables to save it’s configuration when the server is shutdown and reload it when it starts. It certainly remembers the important rules I setup a couple of years ago. However, I’m not really worried if it forgets these IP blocks as I don’t have to do it very often.

    While I’m here, I haven’t blogged at all lately. I’ve been very busy working on our new business web site (which will be at www.rkbb.co.uk sometime very soon). I thought it would only take 2 weeks over christmas to do but it’s turned out to be harder and more complicated. It’s been fun though, so not long and I’ll be able to write about thinks like the arduino based water flow meter I built for work (that was tough and fun too!)

  • Installing Sphinx on Mac OS X Lion

    Moving from Windows/Linux to Mac, one of my Ruby on Rails applications wasn’t working. I’d forgotten to install sphinx, and the error was a little cryptic for an amateur like me.

    Anyway, knowing the problem, installing sphinx I expected to be easy. 2 hours later and I realise it’s working. It was probably working within 5 minutes. These notes are here to remind me what I did next time I need to.

    Get the 2.0.2(beta) from http://sphinxsearch.com/
    I couldn’t work out what to do with the Mac Binaries, so I grabbed the source .tar.gz version.
    Installed ( `./configure` `make` `make install`)
    I didn’t realise it had installed fine – I should have typed “searchd” in bash to get a response like:

    Sphinx 2.0.2-beta (r3019)
    Copyright (c) 2001-2011, Andrew Aksyonoff
    Copyright (c) 2008-2011, Sphinx Technologies Inc (http://sphinxsearch.com)

    FATAL: no readable config file (looked in /usr/local/etc/sphinx.conf, ./sphinx.conf).

    Then carry on and get the config working.

    If anyone reading this knows what to do with the binary version, please share!

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  • birthday.sroot.eu – Your birthday or other celebration date based on [years on other planets] / [how many seconds/days] / [how far you’ve travelled around the sun]
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