Just When I Thought I Was In... They Pulled Me Back Out
After enjoying a brief moment of satisfaction about finally getting at least part of this place open to the public, disaster strikes. Several times.
If you had spoken to me recently after I first opened this place, then you'll probably have had the misfortune of having to endure me blabber on about how excited I was that I could finally get things going and start playing around with more of the client side stuff. (Something I haven't had the chance to do much of for a long time and could do with brushing up on.) If you're one of these unfortunate people, then you're probably wondering why, after all my blabbering and excitement, has practically nothing happened to the site in about 4 months.
To cut a long story short(ish), I had a nightmare of a time setting up and configuring email for my domain and then an even bigger nightmare trying to get my computer hooked up to a wireless internet connection (which for a while was my only option) because my laptop died on me.
Setting up the mail software for this place was rather difficult, convincing the world you're not a spammer — it would seem — is impossible. I had such a bad time installing my mail software that I was going to write up a how-to based on what I did in the hopes that it might save some other poor soul from going through the same thing and serve as a reference if I ever needed to do it again. I did start writing it up, but it had been such a horrible experience that by the time I could bring myself to look at my computer again, I'd forgotten most of the detail. All that's left now is a horrible hazy memory of a nightmarish mixture of having to use Debian's apt, some manual editing of certain config files with VIM and being forced to do some of the configuration with what might well be the offspring of cPanel (which I rather dislike) and a torture device.
Once I'd got the software in place, I then found out that much of the mail sent from my domain was being rejected. What's really annoying is that the mail is being rejected through no fault of my own. I can do almost nothing to remedy the problem. The first of two major reasons is that the folks I registered my domain name through (NetworkSolutions.com) are totally crap and have no intention of changing — other than to replace their existing UI with a cool
new Web 2.0
UI that completely falls to pieces without Javascript enabled. A big reason for my mail being rejected is because I can not implement SPF. In order to implement SPF, you need to be able to create a certain type of DNS record; unfortunately, because NetworkSolutions.com want to squeeze every penny they can out of you and seem to be under the mistaken impression that they still have the monopoly, they refuse to allow you to create such records in an effort to force you into purchasing e-mail services from them. Luckily for me, there's plenty of healthy competition in the domain name market these days and so I'll be seeking services from somewhere else.
The second of my two mail delivery problems, however, appears to be completely out of my control. I've found that there is indeed one thing worse than spammers; those that try to stop spammers. In particular, those evil, evil people at Spamhaus.org. They claim to automatically protect anyone from spam that will avail themselves of their services. It would appear that they do this by randomly blocking as much mail as possible. I can't see any reason for them to brand me a spammer whenever they feel like it (which is about 80% of the time), but then from what I've heard from other people experiencing the same frustrations, it doesn't look like they need one.
Not long after my ordeal with my mail system my only point of access to the internet (my ancient laptop) became unusable. The CPU fan died so I had to take it to a repair shop where it has now been for many weeks (which reminds me that I'd better check up on it soon). I decided to grab my PC and try to set that up to use the same wireless connection my old laptop used to use. Despite the fact that I was using the same version of the same operating system and the wireless card for the PC was using the same chip-set (the rt61 chip-set), I just couldn't get it working properly. The best I managed to get was a connection with moderate speed, but caused the entire operating system to crash. I found out the proper driver for it has been merged into the 2.6.24 version of the Linux kernel, but that's no good to me when most distributions seem to be using 2.6.22 kernels and any distributions that do use a a Kernel greater than version 2.6.20 or so seems unable to properly see all of my HDDs.
There is, of course, the option to compile my own kernel, but I don't really fancy that option much at the moment. Maybe if I had time to learn how to do the job properly I might consider it, but this place is now priority number one. Thankfully I've finally managed to get a wired connection to my PC and I'm trying to stay well away from any major operating system upgrades until the new distributions work as well as the old ones. With any luck, I might even get the chance to actually make something of this place.
Updates coming soon — I hope.
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