Niall's Weblog

I often use Windows as a terminal to my various UNIX systems. Sometimes its helpful to run proprietary software – and I don’t have time/inclination to mess around with half-baked emulators/ports/binary blobs/whatevers under Linux. I either run a completely open system like OpenBSD or I run Windows. Anyway, I never use Windows to do any [...]

My C BitTorrent implementation, Unworkable, used to be hosted on an anonymous CVS repository I had running on my server at home. This was fine, until I reinstalled the machine from scratch and didn’t feel like setting up the whole anonymous CVS access again. Its a pretty painful process, unfortunately, although there is this guide [...]

OpenBSD 4.5 was released the other day. I upgraded one of my servers and workstations to the new release, from 4.4-current and 4.4-release respectively. Mostly, things have gone pretty smoothly, as is usually the case with OpenBSD. The new release has plenty of incremental improvements, with the developers gradually polishing and refining things such that [...]

I was converting some mod_rewrite rules from the Lighttpd webserver to Apache today. While Lighttpd and Apache both have request rewriting modules with pretty equivalent functionality, there are some significant differences nonetheless. Specifically, I was trying to rewrite a URL of the form: /script?key=123abcxyz to a file on the local disk: /abc/123/123abcxyz In Lighttpd, I [...]

I’ve used Mutt as my mail reader (aka MUA) for years. My personal mail goes through OpenBSD’s greylister, spamd(8) which cuts out a very large portion of spam. However, my work email account, and also any personal account subscribed to mailing lists, still get a fair bit of spam. So some additional filtering is needed. [...]