Tracy Phillips

Sendmail X-Authentication-Warning

Have you ever looked at your email headers to see that sendmail was attaching an X-Authentication-Warning warning because Apache se the sender of an email as a different user other than the system user “apache”?

This is what the email header would look like

X-Authentication-Warning: mail.domain.com: apache set sender to sales@domain.com using -f

To keep sendmail from adding the warning, you need to setup your apache user as a trusted sender. In my case my apache user is “apache”. Sometimes the user might be called httpd.

You will need to add your apache user to /etc/mail/trusted-users

[root@server ~]# vi /etc/mail/trusted-users

sendmail.cf should be ready for that

[root@server ~]# grep trusted /etc/mail/sendmail.cf
Ft/etc/mail/trusted-users

Otherwise force the trusted user with a line like

Tusername

If you build your sendmail.com from .mc, use:

FEATURE(use_ct_file)dnl

Tags: apache, linux, sendmail

Twitter in Plain English

After my visit to BarCamp in San Diego earlier today, I was talking to my wife about networking with people and how it works on the web. This led me to talking about Twitter and how it folds into the social networking scene.

I came across this video from the Common Craft folk

Tags: BarCamp, Networking, Social, Twitter

BarCamp San Diego 3

I just got back from day 1 at BarCamp San Diego. This was my first BarCamp experience and I have to say, that it will not be my last. Barcamps put the full meaning behind the word “unconference“.

The most interesting talk that I attended today was on the subject of Hot Trends & Search given by Michael Dorausch a prolific blogger and Los Angeles Chiropractor. He and some interesting ideas on driving traffic to your website and am going to get started implementing some of them right away.

Looking forward to next year.

Tags: BarCamp, Conference 2.0, Michael Dorausch, San Diego

Identity 2.0

I just finished watching Dick Hardt’s entertaining presentation on Identity 2.0 at OSCON 2005. There is not a lot of meat into what his company Sxip (pronounced skip) is doing with Identity 2.0, but it does get you to thinking about what Identity actually means and with web apps there needs to be a method for presenting your identity to the Internet in a trusted fashion.

Currently we have authentication but that really doesn’t tell who we are as individuals. Hopefully real identity will come together as part of Web 2.0 3.0.

Tags: Dick Hardt, Identity, OSCON

10 Rules for Web Startups

Evan Williams former CEO of Pyra Labs/Blogger and more recently founder of Obvious Corp who is responsible for a little site you may have heard of, has a nice little list: 10 Rules For Web Startups.

#9 from the list is my favorite:

#9: Be Agile

You know that old saw about a plane flying from California to Hawaii being off course 99% of the time, but constantly correcting? The same is true of successful startups except they may start out heading toward Alaska. Many dot-com bubble companies that died could have eventually been successful had they been able to adjust and change their plans instead of running as fast as they could until they burned out, based on their initial assumptions. Pyra was started to build a project-management app, not Blogger. Flickr’s company was building a game. Ebay was going to sell auction software. Initial assumptions are almost always wrong. That’s why the waterfall approach to building software is obsolete in favor agile techniques. The same philosophy should be applied to building a company.

Sounds like a good plan to me :-)

Tags: Agile, Evan Williams