Niall's Weblog

As many readers may be aware, the venerable Sendmail has been the default mail daemon in OpenBSD for years. This is largely because it is the only reasonable BSD-licensed mail server around. Personally, I have never trusted Sendmail enough to use it on any of my hosts – despite the fact that it has been [...]

A pretty common thing to do in any program is read a file line-by-line. In other interpreted or managed languages this is trivial, the standard libraries will make it super easy for you. Just look at how simple it is to do this in Python or Perl or even Shell. In C its a little [...]

Last month I started Py Web SF, the San Francisco Python & Web Technology meet-up. The idea is 1-2 conversation-style presentations of about 30 minutes with a group of 10-20 people. My hope is to have a more intimate group than the very good Bay Piggies (which I highly recommend). With a small group, it [...]

I started using tmux today. Its a terminal multiplexer / task switcher for UNIX-likes, very much in the same vein as GNU Screen. However, its a from-scratch implementation, designed to be clean, sane and easy to configure. The more liberal 3-clause BSD license is a plus also, since it means that OpenBSD has been able [...]

Lots of people have a small home network. Usually you have a combo box which acts as a router/firewall/file server. Then you have a couple of other machines hooked up, and you share the Internet using NAT. A private DNS server is helpful in this kind of scenario for two reasons: Recursive resolver cache can [...]