To install Skype on an AMD64 system, you’ll need the 32-bit libraries (if you’re distro is 32-bit, skip this),

sudo apt-get install ia32-libs

Then download the appropriate package from…

• Skype Linux

Firefox should download it to your desktop so…

cd Desktop
sudo dpkg --install --force-architecture --force-depends skype-debian_2.0.0.68-1_i386.deb

And you’re done, with the Webcam driver installed and enabled you should now be able to make video calls too.

• Ubuntu Webcam Install

An annoying thing about building an email system is the fear of your server’s IP getting accidentally logged on one of the many Anti-Spam blacklisting sites.

These site’s basically record who they think is sending spam emails, so if they think you’re one of the bad guys you go in their book; which as you can imagine services like GMail, YahooMail and Hotmail reference these to gauge bad senders.

To check if you’ve been unintentionally listed;

• First use SamSpade.org to get your site’s IP Address
• Then type that IP in EmailStuff.Org to check if you’ve been blacklisted.

Most site’s will allow you to request removal from their black-lists without too much of a problem.

Hotmail’s SpamBox

Another thing i’m trying to figure out is how to stop emails my webapp sends from going into into Hotmail’s spam box, it’s ok with Gmail and everyone else, but bad with MS Hotmail.

‘Hotmail have a propietry spam filter which is prone to false positives from some senders for no aparent reason. Hotmail wont tell you why it is classed as spam.’

Thankfully Thomas Glasgow has suggested that if you should first send an email from YahooMail to your site, then reply back to YahooMail; YahooMail should then interpret that as a good site and stop doing this.

Not sure whether it works for Hotmail but worth a shot.

Using the Firebug addon YSlow from Yahoo I managed to tune site performance a little more by adding ‘expires’ to the nginx.conf file

location ~* ^.+\.(jpg|jpeg|gif|js)$ {
  root   /var/www/apps/myapp/public;
  access_log   off;
  expires      30d;
}

What this basically does is tell NGINX that any files of type jpg, jpeg, gif, and js with the root dir specified shouldn’t be logged for access and have an expires value set to 30 days.

As most of the images I use on-site don’t change that much this works perfect for me.

Updated my NGINX example files in the [CODE DOWNLOADS] area so you can grab a copy.

More tips located at…

• Zhesto Nginx notes
• Nginx Full Example 1
• Nginx Full Example 2

One of the beauty’s about the Slingbox is it’s ability to stream video around your WIFI network, and more potentially accessing it remotely via some router changes.

Router Settings

So, first off log into your router with your internet browser…

http://192.168.1.1

Enter your admin username + password and get into the system.

Now first off you need to put the Slingbox into the DMZ (demilitarized zone), basically in front of the firewall so that you can connect to it remotely in cyberspace.

So with a belkin router, click [firewall], then [dmz]

Now add a static ip entry for your slingbox, like…

public ip : 82.23.44.92
static ip : 192.168.1.237

So in the first line of the DMZ screen it will show your router’s currently assigned IP address, on the right it will list static ip’s assigned to devices within your network that you want out in the open.

Because the Slingbox uses the default IP of 192.168.1.237, we set the first line to : 192.168.1.237 or 237

Hit save, now you need to setup a port for the slingbox.

So click [firewall], then [virtual servers]

Now add an entry for your slingbox’s internal port.

lan ip address: 192.168.1.237
protocol type: TCP
lan port: 5001
public port: 5001
enable: tick this

make sure the entries are correct and you’ve ticked [enable], click [set] and you’re done!

Your Slingbox is now available online.

So open your slingbox software, click [get info] and tick [access remotely], enter your router’s ip address (from the DMZ screen, public ip or in this case 82.23.44.92) and the port 5001, click [save] and sit back and watch TV from your slingbox anywhere in the world.

Further Note

You can also apply this to other devices such as if you are like me and buy an ICYBOX NAS enclosure with a BitTorrent tool in it, by putting it in the DMZ it then has free access to the internet and you can load up torrent files into it and leave it to download them for you.

Nothing illegal mind, for me it’s Fedora 9.

;-)

Take care,

Note to self…

You don’t need an MX entry in your DNS records if your only sending mail. An MX record is only used to broadcast to others about where mail should go when it’s sent to you.