Technology

For a while now I've been providing a secondary mail service for a friend, using my home server connected to BigPond Cable. It all works rather well, but Telstra have recently announced that they will be blocking outbound port 25 to mitigate the steaming hordes of spam monkeys they've attracted over the years. For one I applaud Telstra's action, albeit years late - at least they're making an effort now. But since it requires some reconfiguration to handle this I figured I'd throw it up here so that others in a similar situation can use this method to continue providing secondary mail services.

The site update has been done. Almost all content is now driven by Drupal, the old stuff has either been migrated across or is on the to-do list. I'm still using gallery for images, and the langame section is now more or less crippled compared to the old site. Next on the list is sorting out the langame registrations, but if you find anything wrong (like missing downloads, broken links, external links that sent you here but you didn't get what you wanted etc) please let me know via webmaster AT purple DOT dropbear DOT id DOT au.

Well, this is hardly news, but I had to seed this with something, so a summary of the machine behind this website seems in order.

Hardware

*gasp* it's a Pentium200-MMX, with 128MB of ram! It has a system drive of a whopping 1.5GB, with an additional 10GB drive for further data. It's got a stallion 8-port Brumby serial card, a modem, two NICS (one e100pro, one 3C509b), a SCSI 2x CDBurner which turned into a coaster-maker only recently, a HP-4P flatbed scanner and a few miscellaneous serial devices connected depending on what I'm playing with at the time.

Software

The following Statistics are available for this Site and network

• Webalizer - web server stats
• MRTG - Traffic Statistics for my local network(s)

Drupal (the content system driving most of this site) also has it's own statistical collections, but you would require administrative access to get to them (no, that's not a challenge :-) )

Update 24/06/03: I've just switched over to using OpenZaurus, so I won't be able to verify myself if later versions work on the Sharp ROM. However, it does mean that as soon as I get the time I'll be able to sort out the mess I made when building lirc, and provide a clean patch with config files and scripts back to the openzaurus repositories, and further up to lirc.org if they want it. I'll post here as soon as I've had the chance to do this.
LIRC on Zaurus
I have repackaged the LIRC (Linux Infra-Red Control) project to suit a Sharp Zaurus SL-5500 using the Sharp-supplied ROM (UPDATE: Jared has just informed me that it works on OZ 3.1 as well - Thanks Jared). I cannot vouch for it working on other models.
The binary packages elsewhere on the web (as at 01/01/2003) would not work on my unit. Since it took a lot of effort to set up the cross-compile environment, and then to make it work at all, I decided to put the package up here so that others need not experience the pain...