hekevintran's questions

I am running a lightweight SMTP server for processing incoming emails. I am using https://github.com/kennethreitz/inbox.py. I opened port 25 in my firewall and am running the server at 0.0.0.0:25.

Everything is functioning as I expect. When I send email to [email protected] the server receives the message.

The thing that is strange to me is that when I telnet to port 25 from outside the VPS, it does not connect and times out:

$ telnet mydomain.com 25
Trying <IP address removed>...
telnet: connect to address <IP address removed>: Operation timed out
telnet: Unable to connect to remote host

When I telnet from inside the VPS, it works as it should:

$ telnet localhost 25
Trying ::1...
Trying 127.0.0.1...
Connected to localhost.
Escape character is '^]'.
220 hobnob Python SMTP proxy version 0.2

I cannot think of any reason why this happening. What could it be?

UPDATE:

I was able to establish a connection using a Python shell:

from smtplib import SMTP
conn = SMTP('mydomain.com')

I confirmed that this will fail if the server is not running. It seems maybe that telnet cannot make the connection correctly? I'm not sure, but it is clear that connections can be made to the server by email software which is what I was really trying to test.

I have a Web site where I want all requests to be done with HTTPS except for requests to urls with paths that start with /foo/. How do I configure this in Nginx?

Right now I run all requests with SSL:

server {
    listen 443;

    ssl on;
    ssl_certificate /home/admin/ssl/ssl.crt;
    ssl_certificate_key /home/admin/ssl/ssl.key;

    server_name www.mydomain.com;

    location / {
        proxy_pass http://localhost:8000;
        ...
    }
}

I want to secure a part of my site served by Apache with an HTML form. Apache 2.3 has a module name mod_auth_form for this purpose. How do I do it on Apache 2.0?

I do not want to use HTTP authentication.

I want to make nginx serve an HTML file for /foobar/. I tried 2 configurations and neither worked.

In Apache you do it like this:

AliasMatch ^/foobar/$ /home/admin/foobar/foobar.html

My first attempt:

location /foobar/ {
    alias /home/admin/foobar/foobar.html;
}

Going to /foobar/ shows a 500 error page. The error log says:

2011/08/05 04:12:35 [alert] 32465#0: *1 "/home/admin/foobar/foobar.htmlindex.html" is not a directory, ...

This is weird. Why did it append "index.html" to the end of the file path?

My next attempt:

location ~ ^/foobar$ {
    alias /home/admin/foobar/foobar.html;
}

Going to /foobar makes my browser download the file. This is weird. Why did that happen?

I was able to get it to work with this:

location /foobar.html {
    alias /home/admin/foobar/foobar.html;
}

This works, but it has the wrong URL. It has /foobar.html instead of /foobar/.

How do I do this?

How can I set the modification time of a file on Mac OS X from the command line?

I have a machine running Ubuntu Server. It has only a command-line interface. How can I make the system login with a specific user automatically (I don't want to type the username/password). I know that this is insecure and I don't care.

How do I make apt-get install from Debian's unstable repository?

I am running Ubuntu Server on VirtualBox. I am not using X Windows, only the command line. It looks like it is redrawing the screen for every line that causes the screen to shift down. In other words if there is empty space on the screen below the current line, it works normally, but if the current line is at the bottom of the screen, when the system moves to the next line it refreshes the whole screen line by line. This causes the system to run very slowly because I have to wait for the whole screen to refresh for every line and it hits the CPU at 90%.

I installed Debian Lenny in VirtualBox and it didn't do this.

Why does Ubuntu Server redraw the screen for each line? Is there a way to make this behaviour go away?

Update:

I am running Ubuntu Server 10.04.

I found another solution to disable the framebuffer. I added blacklist vga16fb to /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-framebuffer.conf.

ls -l /boot:

total 14268
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  640617 2010-04-16 06:01 abi-2.6.32-21-generic
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  115847 2010-04-16 06:01 config-2.6.32-21-generic
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root    4096 2010-06-07 17:38 grub
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 7957975 2010-06-07 17:36 initrd.img-2.6.32-21-generic
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  160280 2010-03-23 02:37 memtest86+.bin
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1687378 2010-04-16 06:01 System.map-2.6.32-21-generic
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root    1196 2010-04-16 06:03 vmcoreinfo-2.6.32-21-generic
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 4029792 2010-04-16 06:01 vmlinuz-2.6.32-21-generic