diehn.net/blog » kids

Bbrringg, bbbrrringgg: old phones, new ears.

Mike Diehn — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 18:48:39 +0000

Power was out this morning. It’s still out at home but I’m in the office where it’s warm and dry and happy… ok, let’s not gloat. Anyway, when the power goes out, we pull the digital, cordless phone base-station off the kitchen wall and plug in an old, analogue, single-line, business telephone. And it works. Cool.

ATT Single-line Telephone

Anyway, this morning when I called home to see how it was going there in the dark, apparently Tallis perked up and said – “what’s that funny sound?”

He’d never heard an actually ringing telephone.

What Tallis knows about feelings and hearts….

Mike Diehn — Fri, 06 Oct 2006 01:32:00 +0000

Andi sits down with a set of notes: “Wanna hear an adorable exchange between me and Tallis today?”

So, she’s taken notes on this one – it’s gotta be good, right? Just wait:

Andi and Tallis are sitting at the dinig room table, she’s swinging her feet, tapping his from time to time….

Tallis: Mommy, please don’t kick my feet. That hurts my feelings.
Andi: Tallis, what are feelings?
Tallis: They are things that protect your heart!
Andi: Oh. What is a heart?
Tallis: Oh, Mommy! You know what a heart is. It goes like this (draws half a heart in the air) and like this (draws the other half).
Andi: And everyone has one? Where do we keep them?
Tallis: (thumbs over his shoulder) Out in the road!

Hmmm…

Exim4 and routing message to /dev/null

Mike Diehn — Mon, 21 Aug 2006 18:43:00 +0000

Fairly common practice from Sendmail and even Postfix setups is to use an alias in /etc/aliases or some such file to route mail for a certain address to the “bitbucket.” Like this:

spamtrap: /dev/null

Well, put that into /etc/aliases on a Debian system running Exim4 with a stock config and it won’t work. I learned from a post to the Pkg-exim4-users list what config change should allow this to work. Then I saw the bug they’d found. Then I came up with a better way around that bug – I think.

Now, there’s a bit of going around your elbow to get to you ankle with configuring exim4 on Debian – probably so that autoupdates with the package system works well…

Start in /etc/exim4
A stock config will ignore what’s in conf.d and subdirs. It will build a config file from exim4.conf.template and update-exim4.conf.conf and put the result in /var/lib/exim4/config.autogenerated.

Edit exim4.conf.template and find this set of lines:

group = SYSTEM_ALIASES_GROUP
.endif
.ifdef SYSTEM_ALIASES_FILE_TRANSPORT
file_transport = SYSTEM_ALIASES_FILE_TRANSPORT
.endif
.ifdef SYSTEM_ALIASES_PIPE_TRANSPORT
pipe_transport = SYSTEM_ALIASES_PIPE_TRANSPORT

and change it to this:

group = SYSTEM_ALIASES_GROUP
.endif
#.ifdef SYSTEM_ALIASES_FILE_TRANSPORT
#file_transport = SYSTEM_ALIASES_FILE_TRANSPORT
#.endif
file_transport = address_file
.ifdef SYSTEM_ALIASES_PIPE_TRANSPORT
pipe_transport = SYSTEM_ALIASES_PIPE_TRANSPORT

Then run “update_exim4.conf” and restart or at least reload exim4 with “/etc/init.d/exim4 restart”

Turns out that the macro processor which assembles the config files from templates doesn’t handle names > 24 characters in length and so, what you intend setting in SYSTEM_ALIASES_FILE_TRANSPORT never gets set. So, just do it staticly and remember it.

Should you ever need to switch to the conf.d/{subdirs} mode of managing your config files – make a similar change in conf.d/router/400_exim4-config_system_aliases and you’ll be fine.

Birthday Boys.

Mike Diehn — Sun, 21 May 2006 13:33:00 +0000

Happy Sunday all.

Tallis is four today. Luca was two on the 12th. We had a party for the two of them yesterday and it was great fun: Grammy and Mada were up from Plymouth and brought Granmma Pat. Julie and Ryan from Tallis’ school came with their families. We had the Reynolds and Shinlingers as well, though the Moms from both those packs were absent.

Grammy, Mada and Grandma Pat took Luca and Tallis to the Montshire around 10:00. Andi and I read for a while and then had a nap. Wow. How deeply one can sleep without two thrashing bodies in the bed….

Okay, back to the family.

MRTG, RRDTool and One minute polling all over again…

Mike Diehn — Thu, 18 May 2006 12:39:00 +0000

SO long ago it’s lost in the fog of burnt neurons, I made MRTG do one-minute polling and now I have to do it again….. ugh…

"I Farted," he said.

Mike Diehn — Sat, 29 Oct 2005 01:34:00 +0000

My son has learned to pee in his potty. He’s sitting over there across the living room from me, happily sitting on his potty, reading a book (three and a half years old), and he looks up at me with a sly grin on his face and says – “I fahrted!” And then a minute later, “I fahrted again!” He’s still happily sitting over there, watching the Jack-o-Lantern we carved this evening, flicking his wee peenie….

Love my boys to pieces!