Code, Tools, etc

Filtering Spam with Procmail

I use Procmail to filter my incoming mail into folders. Mail lists get filtered into separate folders unless they are very low volume or are of a more timely nature, such as relating to current events. I also use it to attempt to deal with spam. There is no way to block it all, and there are other ways to minimize it, but this works for most of the spam that I get.

Originally I started with "dougmc's spam catcher", to which I have lost the original source. The first 8 rules are unchanged (I think). I have added 20+ more rules however, some of which are still being perfected. My .procmailrc includes this from $HOME/.procmail/rc.spam.

NB: I cannot guarantee that, by using these rules, you will not lose email or even delete your whole mailbox! Caveat emptor!

Filtering Pop-Up Ads with IPCHAINS

Pop-up ads have become a growing annoyance. At home, behind my Linux NAT firewall, I can block out whole swaths of IP territory from which such pop-up ads originate, using the Linux ipchains tool. I have a large set of rules defined in /etc/rc.d/rc.firewall. Since my NAT box is running a 2.2 kernel, I use ipchains for this.

NB: I cannot guarantee that, by using these rules, you will not completely fubar your whole network configuration. Beware that the layout of this file is not logical - there is stuff commented out in there from various sources, each of which use different ways of going about this. The uncommented stuff however, does make sense. I just keep the other in there for reference. Caveat emptor!

(I have removed the link to this for now, as I'm not sure I'm comfortable with how much it reveals about my home LAN.. contact me if you are interested in the nitty gritty of it.)

Area Codes

This is a script I use to look up areacodes on the command line. It has a long history as documented in the comments, but I gratuitously converted it to Perl in 1997, making it also able to accept city/state names, and more than one at a time. It needs to be updated with the area code additions/changes of the last year or two.

TkClassmail

TkClassmail was a tcl/tk tool I wrote as a CS junior at the University of Minnesota. Simple GUI for adding/deleting oneself from course mailing lists, with a self-sufficient backend system for maintaining the list files. The GUI designed its layout dynamically, based on the list files present. See examples #1 and #2. It was used for many years by the Institute of Technology.

locatefile: Exact Matching for GNU locate

locatefile is a Perl wrapper around GNU locate which returns only files that match exactly. You can also soft link "locatebin" or "locatedir" to this for exact matching on executable files or directories only.

ScanAssassin

I got tired of seeing almost daily ssh brute force attempts on my webserver. So I wrote ScanAssassin. I need to update it to work with ProFTPD also.

It might also be a good idea to use SpeakEasy.

Collection of Quotes

I have a large collection of quotes, originally just those from the BSD Unix fortune(6) program, but I have collected more from various sources and added some of my own. The original fortune "quotes" generally are silly or geeky jokes, dating back to the early early days of the Internet. However, many of them are quite apropos and good. I wrote a Perl script called sigsetup that I use to put a new random quote in my .signature every time it is accessed. I'll make that available here sometime too.

filecnt

This is a quickie script I wrote to produce a count of the number of files in a given directory. With no argument, it defaults to the current directory but can accept any number of directories on the command line.

NetHack

Empire

Led Zeppelin

mget

rpmupdate

sa-edit

My LiveJournal (such as it is)

including notes on replacing a cable for my Sony KV-32XBR100 television.

Upgrading Linux in-line with Yum

I have been upgrading Fedora Core in-line using yum since RedHat 8.0 - I have not had to do an absolutely fresh install of Linux since then. However in this method, absolutely new packages that are not dependencies of existing packages do not get installed.

So in an effort to make sure I have a Full Install, I developed this command to run post-install:

yum grouplist | grep '^ ' | perl -ne 'foreach (<>) { chomp; $_ =~ s/^\s+//; print "yum -y groupinstall \"$_\"\n" }' | sudo sh -x

igal

I have been using igal to generate some random image galleries. There is a bug in how it calculates image heights for animated gifs, such that it isalways wrong (and far too large). Fixing it was going to take more than five minutes so I use this Perl command line to fix the index.html whenever I generate a gallery:

perl -pi -e 's/height=\d\d\S+/height=75/' index.html

fedora legacy rpm's

Eric D. Hendrickson
Last modified: Fri Feb 23 14:56:49 CST 2007