Profarius

Ubuntu is one of the most popular operating systems in the world. The next version of Ubuntu will be arriving in April. This release has been code named Jaunty Jackalope.

Mark Shuttleworth picked this name because he plans on focusing on speed for the release. For those of you that don't know, Mark is the founder of Canonical and the primary driver behind Ubuntu. He is known as the "Self Appointed Benevolent Dictator for Life."

I know this concept sound simple. You SSH into a server and restore a screen session running irssi. However, I wouldn't be writing about it if I didn't have a way to make it more efficient.

I'll explain the benefits as we go along.

First we need to get you into your server. I suggest setting up a shared key between you and your server. There's plenty of guides out there about shared keys.
ssh server.com

Once in your server you need to install irssi and screen.
sudo aptitude install irssi screen

Irssi has a fairly nice proxy feature. It's probably the best proxy I've ever used. Unfortunately, it has a few flaws and is very under documented.

I gave up on ever having a decent proxy and switched to the screen option but I still want to explain this feature so it's decently documented somewhere.

To setup the server you need to first install irssi and screen. Edit your configuration the same as you normally would to connect to any other server.

You want to proxy to load my default so edit ~/.irssi/startup and add the line "/LOAD PROXY".

You ever been trying to connect to a server using SSH and it takes years to connect? Maybe not years, but hours.

Yup, I've waited over an hour before just to make an SSH connection to a server.

I've never been able to figure it out until now. The issue was because of my hosts file. My server had been running on two IP's. It still is, and is still capable of utilizing both. However, I needed to give one card specific control to handle most all of the network requests.

I was first introduced to Linux by Kelly Schuerman. He was the network administrator of my high school at the time. He has since moved on to managing large campus networks.

I was using a lot of illegitimate version of Windows software. I told him that if there was something free that I could use, I would use it. Well, he happened to have an ISO of Ubuntu 5.04 Hoary Hedgehog. This version was just coming out at the time. I said I didn't want to lose what i do have in case it didn't work.

How good are your backups?

I thought mine were pretty dang good. I found out otherwise. I had the following two lines running nightly for my backups.

# Make MySQL backup
mysqldump -u root -p "$( /var/mysqldump/mysql-$(date +%F).gz
# Delete old copies
find /var/mysqldump/ -mtime +90 -exec rm {} \;

Anybody know what's wrong with that?

For 99% of Linux commands, this would be perfectly good syntax. Unfortunately, this is one of those 1% times where things aren't the way you expect them.

I was using -u root -p "$(</root/.sql.pwd)"

I think I achieved nearly the perfect Irssi + OpenBox.

There's four steps to my setup. Configuring gnome-terminal, alltray, irssi, and an image.

First of all, we need to set up irssi. If your'e reading this, I'm guessing you've already done this. I use murf. You can find themes at http://irssi.org/themes. Download one, place it in ~/.irssi/ and execute /theme inside of irssi. You can do /save to save these settings.

Topal is the "glue" between Alpine and GnuPG. Hurray - somebody did it.

How do we use this... It's not the simplest thing in the world - but hey, what is?

I have Phil Brooke to thank for this working on my system.

Step 1. We need to install components that are required to build.
Obviously you should have Alpine and GnuPG.

sudo aptitude install build-essential gnat libreadline-dev

Step 2. We need to get the source code.
Go out to http://homepage.ntlworld.com/phil.brooke/topal/
Look at the Directories and go to the newest one.
Go down to "Files available are"

I think it's come time for somebody to write a down to earth article about using IRC for advice. In short, it's best to never assume any advice on IRC is good advice. This is for a multitude of reasons.

IRC is a place for people to come and communicate with one another. Most of them do not have degrees in what you are requesting advice on. In fact, it's likely that not a single person on any network you are on has any document stating they know what they're talking about.

This is for anybody with multiple email accounts that wants to consolidate. My solution here requires and number of POP email accounts and one IMAP account.

I don't even want to begin thinking about the time it took me to come up with this solution. Hopefully it can save somebody 10 or more hours of digging and scripting.

My method works like this.
1. Synchronize IMAP account with local Maildir copy
2. Download POP emails
3. Push emails to Maildir local copy
4. Synchronize local Maildir copy with IMAP account