Uppity-Negro.com

Dotfiles can really help with mystery configurations. I'm lucky to have fairly run of the mill hardware in both desktops and the laptop so I don't have to dig quite as much. One thing that did astonish me lately was getting the sound card of my laptop to work. Turns out that the Sound Blaster module works but the ESS doesn't. Go figure and be amazed that someone fiddled around enough to figure that out.

You had the right idea about the MT upgrade though. Barely twenty four hours after its release there's already a security patch. Early adoption can be fun but in the same sense as filling a go-cart with airplane gas. Ok, so I did that with a snowmobile but you get the point. There is something very rewarding about two foot flames shooting out of the tailpipe though.

fetchmail? Yeuch! Try getmail, if you've got python or don't mind
installing it. http://www.qcc.sk.ca/~charlesc/software/getmail-2.0/

Try not to be such a snob -- whatever works, works!

Oh, fair enough, Malcolm. I gave up on fetchmail when it couldn't
handle a 12-digit all-numeric user-id, which didn't such an outré
thing to me. It dumped core, for Christ's sake! I tried to figure
out what to change in the source, but failed -- which is probably
more a reflection on my poor comprehension of C than anything else,
but still... why precisely does a program that retrieves e-mails
using a handful of simple protocols (read the RFC for POP3, for
instance) have to be so complicated? getmail is far more in the Unix
tradition, even though it is written in that horrid Python thing.
I was thinking of writing a really bare-bones POP3 mail "getter"
in /bin/sh or maybe expect, but don't hold your breath. A "checker"
is really simple, and can be done in the shell:

#!/bin/sh
#chkpop: check for mail in a pop3 mailbox
NAME=${1:-secret}
PASS=${2:-secrettoo}
SERVER=${3:-alsotopsecret}
(echo user $NAME;echo pass $PASS;echo list;echo quit) |
nc $SERVER 110 |
grep '+OK .* [0-9][0-9]* message' |
awk '{if ($4 > 0) { print "you have new mail on '$SERVER'"; exit 0 } else exit 1}'

But mail retrieval is a bit more problematic.

P.S.

More techie posts, Aaron! It makes me feel good to know I'm not
the only one using lynx.

But the replies to my techie posts always leave me feeling like a moron, because everyone else seems to know so much more about this stuff. . .

Case in point, I still haven't messed about creating a config file for getmail, even though I installed the thing (by running 'apt-get install getmail' rather than trying to compile anything on this machine) a few days ago.

I also tried using pop3browser to remove some of the more obvious spam without having to download the junk, but the lack of command history gets real old real fast. Assuming it doesn't actually have such, and this isn't just a matter of me not mapping the keyboard correctly (again) or failing to read yet another fine manual.

And of course I'm in Win95/IE now anyway, because I still haven't got posting with a text-only browser working. And w3m hates my missing-shared-library guts, not that I'm sure it would work either.

Coffee. I think I shall have more coffee.

Aaron writes:
> But the replies to my techie posts always leave me feeling like a
> moron, because everyone else seems to know so much more about this
> stuff. . .

Don't be so selfish! Think how good this makes *me* feel!
Seriously, there's hardly any writing about Unix stuff at the
hands-on level in the weblog world, which is a shame.

As for the getmail config. file, here's mine. Replace the all-caps
stuff with your own, and maybe postmaster needs to change if you
don't have procmail. You can point it at a mailbox file instead.

[default]
verbose = 0
readall = 0
delete = 1
message_log = /dev/null
timeout = 60

[SERVER mailbox]
server = SERVER
port = 110
readall = 0
username = EMAIL
password = PASSWORD
postmaster = |/usr/local/bin/procmail
message_log = "~/.getmail/log"
recipient_header = received
recipient_header = x-envelope-to
use_apop = 0
no_delivered_to = 1
no_received = 1

Ya'll are just too geeky for words over here.

As far as 12 character usernames, you have to remember fetchmail was from the days of 8 character usernames (as in, why would anyone want any usernames longer than 8 characters a la UNIX sysadmin heaven in ivory towers?). I'd be surprised if it worked at all with 12 character usernames.

Ah, Malcolm, I don't think fetchmail is quite that old! I may be
mistaken, but I think I remember the old popclient, from 1995, just
before it was metamorphosed into fetchmail. There's no good reason
why an 8-character user name limit should be built in to fetchmail
-- certainly there's nothing about any such limit in the POP3 RFC
-- and I don't think there is in fact. I think it was the userid
being all numeric that broke it. Whatever, that's water under the
bridge now. I've long been using a replacement that works!

nice article, keep up the good work. lookup zip code

This zip code bastard spammed my comments last night. The IP traces back to Indonesia.

They spammed mine as well.

And me not able to delete comments using Lynx. Still. Blah.

On the other hand, apparently you can actually read and post the things again, so that's a plus.

For expansive definitions of "plus."

hello how are you i love you and bye