Andryan’s Random Notes

avast! AntiVirus by ALWIL Software is really good if you don’t want to spend any money for antivirus protection of your computer (Home edition is free, Professional one is not). It’s not as “heavy” and “bloated” as Norton AntiVirus yet provides the same level of protection (or even better). It’s definitely better than Norman and its so-called Sandbox technology. More antivirus companies should follow what avast! is doing. Many computer users won’t bother paying for antivirus software when they can simply download the pirated version for free. I hope ALWIL Software will keep providing avast! AntiVirus Home Edition for free.

Thanks, avast!.

My VIM settings as of May 24, 2006:

set showmode
set bs=2
set ruler
set nocompatible
set ai
set laststatus=2
“set expandtab
“set tabstop=2
set term=color_xterm
syntax on

Updated on March 27, 2007.

qmail-chkuser is one of the most useful qmail patches available out there. It helps reduce bandwidth usage for spam emails directed to non-existant users by rejecting them at SMTP level. Previous versions of chkuser was named chkusr, I used to use chkuser-0.6 from Bill Shupp’s website due to its simplicity. The newer version (chkuser — notice the ‘e’) combines several other patches and provides configurable settings. Some people may like this but some (including me) may not. I use many qmail patches and prefer to keep only the patches that I use. I used chkuser for the latest qmail installation I installed and disabled other patches chkuser comes with including logging. Its logging function presented problem with stunnel. Somehow output of the log goes to stunnel instead of the log files causing problem. I looked for a fix on Google and found a similar problem including a fix. My stunnel installation doesn’t have ‘-f’ parameter as suggested by patch author, Antonio Nati, so I decided to disable logging and solved the problem.

I have been using PowerDNS plus PowerAdmin everytime I’m asked to build a web-frontend-enabled DNS system. Unfortunately the developers of PowerAdmin abandoned the project a while ago (last update was in 2004).
Wim Mostrey made an update to the 2 years old out-of-date PowerAdmin in March 2006. His patch introduces two new features for PowerAdmin.
When installing PowerAdmin, make sure that PEAR-DB and MySQL extension for PHP are installed. Otherwise it would produce an error message that’s not helpful (Oops! An error occured!). If those two are installed, then PowerAdmin should work properly.