Thursday December 11, 2008 Too Big to Fail = Too Big
In light of all the bailouts of various companies deemed "too big to fail", maybe it is time to start thinking about stopping a merger if the resulting company falls into that category, or breaking up companies that are already at that point? If a company becomes soo big that they just "assume" the government will bail them out in case of failure, then it seems natural that their CEOs will take dramatic risks in search of ever increasing profits, knowing that the american tax payer will be their safety net in case of failure.
I personally don't like the idea of interfering with the market in general, but I do believe that monopolies, cartels, trusts, etc. are bad for the market, and maybe we just need to add "too big to fail" to that list as well.
Thoughts (as if anyone reads this blog)?
Posted by rickg ( Dec 11 2008, 07:33:33 AM PST ) Permalink Comments [0]
Friday November 14, 2008 Eudora 554 Relay access denied with Postfix and SASL
I ran "apt-get upgrade" on my server recently, and didn't pay too much attention to what it fixed until my Eudora users starting calling me saying they could no longer send email. The were getting the dreaded "554 Relay access denied" error.
Looking at /var/log/maillog I saw the following errors for a user I will call "billyjoejimbob":
Nov 14 17:06:28 myhost postfix/smtpd[15680]: warning: SASL authentication problem: unable to open Berkeley db /etc/sasldb2: No such file or directory
Nov 14 17:06:28 myhost postfix/smtpd[15680]: warning: SASL authentication problem: unable to open Berkeley db /etc/sasldb2: No such file or directory
Nov 14 17:06:28 myhost postfix/smtpd[15680]: warning: SASL authentication failure: no secret in database
Nov 14 17:06:28 myhost postfix/smtpd[15680]: warning: unknown[XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX]: SASL CRAM-MD5 authentication failed
Funny, it was working fine before. Here is what the logs looked like before the upgrade:
Nov 9 09:16:11 myhost postfix/smtpd[19975]: BLAHBLAH: client=blahblah[XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX], sasl_method=LOGIN, sasl_username=billyjoejimbob
Note that the sasl_method is LOGIN. Looks like my SASL settings got trashed. So I scooted over to /usr/lib/sasl2/smptd.conf and took a peak.
pwcheck_method: saslauthd
Yep. looks like it reverted to defaults. I changed it to the following:
pwcheck_method: saslauthd
mech_list: PLAIN LOGIN
Rebooted postfix, and now it seems to be working.