I used a self programmed system to publish on this page for years now, but at the end it was too unflexible. I did’nt want to do a research for alternatives and I didn’t want to spend time on coding. But I remembered Gui Bonsiepe asking me something about »WordPress«. So I visited http://www.wordpress.org and just tried it.
I imported all my messages from the old system (I know SQL so that part was no problem) and did a template-redesign for my site (this was another long planned task…). Now my site is not even XHTML 1.0 compliant but also based on WordPress! So far I’m really happy with :wp:!
New tutorial how to remove a TYPO3 installation
I wrote a little how-to (currently German only) on how to remove a TYPO3 installation on a Mac OS X system. This should help to remove all files installed by the TYPO3 Quickstart 3.6.0 installer package.
IconSurf
Browsing my webserver access statistics I found an interesting bot entry and followed it to the website http://iconsurf.com/. IconSurf seems to be a nice project to gather favicons. It creates unique hashes of all this little images to compare them with hashes already stored in the database. This feature allows to check if a favicon is used twice or even more.
Besides that it’s of course a hard way to visually compare all these icons.
»This website is intended as a resource for webmasters, consumers, and surfers. The icons displayed here are the favicon.ico files from a variety of websites. By clicking on any one icon you will be directed to the website which hosts the icon.«
SuSE Linux 9.1 vs. Debian Sarge (updated)
We use Linux for a long time as an operating system for our servers. In the last eight years we always used SuSE Linux, since the 5.1 release. Even my desktop runs on SuSE Linux 9. Yesterday I decided to install Debian for no particular reason, maybe just out of curiosity.
I removed SuSE Linux 9.1 and installed Debian Sarge on our latest server (a dual Xeon) using the netinstall CD-ROM image. Of course it’s a testing release but the Debian team is testing for a long time now and I think it’s quite good.
My first impression on Sarge (compared to my bad Debian Woody experience) is very positive. The installation of the base system was easy and only took about 10 Minutes including re-partitioning of the disk array. The further installation process was easy, too. I will set up the system (as a server) the next days and compare this to the SuSE distribution. So far Debian Sarge seems to be very promising.
Update 1: So far everything worked very well. I set up the core mail services, SMTP / POP / IMAP with LDAP and SSL support, in about the same time as I did on SuSE Linux. There are at least as much helpful websites for mail service setup on Debian as I found for SuSE Linux. I noticed that the Debian core system in my configuration needs fewer space than SuSE Linux did.
Update 2: Things went very well! Our first Debian server (Sarge) has been very stable in all tests – and is now a production system and our mail exchanger. Migration will go on.
Update 3: Adding anti-virus and anti-SPAM services took some time but now all is up and running. There are good tutorials out there that provide all the information you need. Try this or this or this.
Postfix vs. sendmail (updated)
Currently I’m stuck installing the Postfix MTA (full featured with TLS / SSL, SASL and so on) on a mail server. I could do this job using sendmail in no time (I’m used to sendmail) but I decided to give Postfix a chance.
Of course I have books and a lot of links to manuals, how-to-, readme- and whatever helpful documents, but: it doesnt work. Maybe it’s the SuSE 9.1 Linux distribution I use, maybe it’s the CyrusSASL version (2.1.18) I have. I don’t know.
If you ever had success in getting Postfix 2.0.19 with CyrusSASL, SSL / TLS, PAM and so on running on a SuSE Linux 9.1 and you know a good source of information – drop me a note.
Update 1: It seems that in SuSE Linux Postfix is always searching for the saslauthd socket in the root-jail path – which is /var/spool/postfix/var/run/sasl2/ – even if you do NOT start Postfix chrooted. Hmm. What to say, took me quite some time to figure that out.
Update 2: Do not test your setup using Microsoft Entourage 10.x (Entourage 2004 works fine)! I finally resolved all problems. It seems to be a bug in Entourage that does not try to authenticate if the connections has been established via TLS / SSL. So you will always get a »relaying denied« message.
Update 3: Read »7.39 Why doesn’t Entourage work at all?« to learn that Entourage also has some known problems with the IMAP protocoll.
TYPO3 QuickStart for Mac OS X
For all Mac-users interested in TYPO3 I built an installer [tar gzipped DiskImage, 57 MB]. You can use it on Apple Mac OS X 10.2 and 10.3. It will install PHP, MySQL, ImageMagick, phpMyAdmin and of course TYPO3. Also visit http://typo3.org/1274.html.
New training videos released on Typo3.org
The TYPO3 video team has released more than 7 hours of TYPO3 training videos. There are more than 100 how-to movies and many more covering various techniques and issues. See http://typo3.org/1497.html.
Activated the »stuff« section (updated)
Today I put my first tutorial only. It’s a simple one about »How to install TYPO3 on Mac OS X«. Check it out, feedback welcome! It’s now also on the typo3.org website.
Microsoft acquires »Virtual PC«
Microsoft has acquired Connectix’s »Virtual PC« products, including Virtual PC for Mac. Hmm, seems as if they want to earn money two times ;-) Read the story at Yahoo!
Quark 6 to support Mac OS X?
Wow! More than 2 years after Apple initially released OS X Quark catches the ball and begins to talk about a new version which will run natively on OS X. I remember their previous releases (3.x and 4.x) and all the bugs – we’ll have to wait until Quark 6.5 is out to get a reliable application. More info at http://www.quark.com/products/xpress/60_series1.html.