Mummy, can we run Linux at home?

While I would generally prefer Linux as a home server, I have to hand it to the folks at Microsoft, with their promotional book Mommy, Why Is There A Server In The House? (download the 24 MB PDF here) - it's funny.

No, I'm still not going to get a Windows Home Server, but it is amusing.

Webalizer: Microsoft Internet Exploder, tee hee

Looking at some web stats for our company's website, I see the most popular UA (user agent) is... "Microsoft Internet Exploder"?? I'm no great fan of Microsoft's browser, but even I haven't called it that for a while... puts me in mind of Bud Uglly's brilliant Alvin's Internot Exploder - if you're not familiar with Bud Uglly, check 'em out. When I used to work in web development, this site would make me laugh until I was almost sick.

Anyhow, I did a bit of digging, and found our webalizer.conf - it's from 2000. I think our site has been hosted there for a while!

Squirrelmail LDAP address book filtering

I recently did some hackery to exclude email accounts that aren't "real people" (things like admin mailboxes) from our mailing lists. That was easy enough, just meant modifying the script that pulls entries out of LDAP and pokes them into the mailman's sync_members script. Cool!

Now to do the same with SquirrelMail. Ran squirrelmail_configure... hmm, no option to set up a filter. That's okay, I'm happy to edit config.php... filter, filter... nope, nothing. Hmmm... yet the doco says you can do it, with a config item called, astonishingly, filter. Reading the doco more carefully, oh noes! The filter config item wasn't added till version 1.5.1, and that's a development version. Bugger! Do I want this functionality more than I want to stay on a stable release? Hmmmm...

Taming netstat with awk

Specifically, I want to see all network connections on a Solaris host which aren't localhost or from the local LAN. Let's start with netstat:

netstat -a -n -f inet -P tcp

Which gives me *everything*. Now let's filter out localhost connections:

netstat -a -n -f inet -P tcp | awk '$2 !~ /^127\.0\./'

Sweet! Now let's get rid of stuff on our local LAN (192.168.1.0/24) and stuff that's in a LISTEN state:

bash-3.00$ netstat -a -n -f inet -P tcp | \
awk '$2 !~ /^127\.0\./ && $2 !~ /^192\.168\.1\./ && $7 !~ /LISTEN/'

TCP: IPv4
   Local Address        Remote Address    Swind Send-Q Rwind Recv-Q    State
-------------------- -------------------- ----- ------ ----- ------ -----------
      *.*                  *.*                0      0 49152      0 IDLE
      *.*                  *.*                0      0 49152      0 IDLE
      *.1017               *.*                0      0 49152      0 BOUND
      *.32832              *.*                0      0 49152      0 BOUND
192.168.1.29.22      10.88.0.90.54670     64128      0 49232      0 ESTABLISHED

Getting closer... let's also remove those idle and bound lines:

bash-3.00$ netstat -a -n -f inet -P tcp | \
awk '$2 !~ /^127\.0\./ && $2 !~ /^192\.168\.1\./ && $7 !~ /LISTEN/ && $7 !~ /BOUND/ && $7 !~ /IDLE/'

TCP: IPv4
   Local Address        Remote Address    Swind Send-Q Rwind Recv-Q    State
-------------------- -------------------- ----- ------ ----- ------ -----------
192.168.1.29.22      10.88.0.90.54670     64128      0 49232      0 ESTABLISHED

Yay. Now I can see my SSH login, and more to the point, see that there are no other connections to this host from outside our LAN, which is what I wanted to check.