Shortly before moving, Friday took a crap again. So then we moved. Move went fine, bbb, whatever. After moving, I poked at Friday and it was bizarre. Press "on" and she, well, you know, didn't turn on. The LEDs on the various components would flicker on briefly and then nothing would come up.
Naturally at this point I assumed my PSU was the source of all my problems. This is the third batch of core components that have gone to shit. In this case, the mainboard manufacturer did recommend a bigger PSU then I was using anyhow (I was at 350W and DFI said to use at least a 400W). So pop out the old and in with a new one (485W). Same problem.
Well, during all this, pulling the video card would let the system power on so I figure, maybe it's the video card that got cooked off. I don't have any extra PCI-E video cards (do you?) and the board doesn't have an AGP slot but I do have PCI video cards. In goes an old ATI 64b MAXXX (or whatever that thing is called) and she works fine. Woo! What this doesn't tell me is whether it's the PCI-E bus or just the card.
Check my papers and I had bought the video card less the 30 days ago so into the shop we go. I give it to The Guy who comes hither when I shout "RMA!" and he checks it out. Sure enough, video card is fuxxored. Vendor will replace it. Woo! Now I just have to wait for the replacement card. Theoretically it is possible the mobo is damaged as well. We shall see, we shall see...
In other news, since I haven't really been updating anything interesting lately, I've been playing with a lot of fun packages. Specifically clamav, TLS support in postgres, and snort.
CalmAV is an anti-virus for the mail server. I haven't seen it bounce any virus infected emails. Then again, I don't get that many. At any rate, installation was easy in Debian. apt-get install clamav. I think that was it. I was prompted for mail domain and such, or maybe not. Whatever, it wasn't a big deal to install but it doesn't seem to do anything. Hard to say.
TLS support in postgres is totaly sweet! The trick was making proper self-signed certificates. Well, google was a big help there. With a couple pokes at the config file, I now have TLS supported but not required. In my email client, Thunderbird, I just went to the Outgoing mail section and selected "use StartTLS" and that was it. I can use a secure channel to deliver mail. Hella sweet. The setup was easy but I wouldn't say trivial. Definately cool though.
Snort, ah, you gotta love the pig. I have to admit, the debian package gives you a tight setup. Just apt-get that bad-boy and away you go. I started getting daily snort reports and naturally there were some alarms that weren't useful (someone accessed a PHP page!) but it was easy to tune snort. Under /etc/snort there's a rules directory with one file per group. There were about three alerts coming from the web-php section that I didn't need flagged so I commented those out, HUP'd snort and that was it. Now I get reports on attempted hacks, directory traversals and such, in nice tidy daily reports. Installing snort is definately hella sweet.
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