[photo] Mark Jeftovic

easyDNS CEO, Career Contrarian & AntiGuru

Category Archives: Hacking tech

Enabling SASL authentication on postifx for outbound email

There are a lot of articles about how to enable your postfix server to accept inbound SASL connections for authenticated mail. Sometimes you want to do the opposite: get postfix to route all outbound mail via an upstream mail relay with SASL authentication.

Case in point: Last night I grabbed a new VPS via Slicehost, and there are a few wobbles, but so far the support seems responsive and I loved the lighning fast activation. Who knows what the last occupant of my IP there did though, cause it’s listed in the spamhaus xbl-sbl:

Nov 4 00:43:25 thirteen postfix/smtp[12557]:

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iPhone unlocked on the Fido network using Turbo Sim card

I bought a turbo Sim card on the aftermarket (at a pretty inflated price), from PDAPlaza, it arrived pretty quickly.

I was going to wait for a software unlock but I broke down before the weekend and grabbed a couple turbo SIMs.

There are a lot of docs out there on what to do, I thought I’d post a quick summary of what you need to do to get iphone unlocked on a Canadian network like Fido or Rogers (I guess the point is this works on pretty well any GSM network)… Read the rest

easySPF: an ajax enabled SPF wizard

Creating Sender Policy Framework (SPF) data is a task that naturally lends itself to ajax. As you tweak the parameters of your policies, the spf record changes on the fly. This was a good opportunity for me to learn jquery and I was pretty impressed with how fast jquery enabled me to get a basic framework up and running.

What took me the longest was figuring out how to get the contents of my form processing via an external php script before being rendered into my inline <div>, after awhile I gave up and asked one of my programmers. Turns … Read the rest

Migrating your feed subscribers to Feedburner

I spent a few hours friday working on a blog widget that would parse the number of subscribers out of the HTTP_USER_AGENT strings of the various feedreaders so I could easily see the aggregate number of subscribers I have. It only took me a few hours to realize that what I was trying to do, wasn’t gonna work.

My plan to use remote javascript may have worked fine for human readers to the main index, a la MyBlogLog (which I use), but of course, duh, the feedreaders won’t load the main index and they likely won’t interpolate the javascript. I … Read the rest

Useless mash-up between pdns pipe backend and md5

I’ve had the idea to do some tinkering with powerdns’ pipe backend for awhile and had decided to rig up a quick and dirty MD5 encoder/decoder database on a domain I’ve had for awhile MD5.ORG

So it was pretty easy. Now anybody can quickly get an MD5 hash on any string that’ll fit inside a DNS query packet by doing something like:

host -t txt <string>.to.md5.org

or the slightly less readable

dig -t txt <string>.to.md5.org

Then for completeness you can try and see if we already know what string creates a given MD5 hash and retrieve it using

host -t
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