jnewbigin:
Why qmail? Why not take everything learned from other MTA's and web servers and create something better then the rest? Look at Dan Kegel's site for inspiration. Send me mail at jeff at virtualbuilder dot com if you want to chat some more.

What do the words "async i/o" mean to you?

• Disk i/o
• Net i/o
• both

What type of i/o do you think of if someone told you a smtp server does async i/o?

It's been a while since I've written. For those trying to reduce Spam, check out the company Habeas. It uses copyright law to fight spam. Good stuff. Basically it adds a copyrighted haiku header to your messages if you say you are not a spammer. Others can use those headers to filter good mail into one pile. Basically a white list. A different approach than those trying to identify spam, it simply identifies good mail instead.

Fun
groom checked out my site migratus and tried to email me about it, but I had blocked .fr along with a bunch of other domains one day when I was getting to much spam. Anyhow, being a clever fellow he was able to send me mail from another domain. I've removed the block on .fr.

This weekend I wrote a device driver for linux. It's very simple and doesn't actually talk to any devices. It simply increments a global variable by one every time it is read from. The device returns 2 integers. One integer is a generation, the other a sequence. The generation part should be incremented every time the module is loaded, while the sequence integer is incremented every time the device is read from. There are 2 devices one can read from. One device is meant for C programs that read the data into an integer. It will never return an 'EOF'. Therefore if you want 10 sequences, just read 10 x (2 * sizeof(int)). Then close it. The other device is meant for scripts and returns and ascii string in the form generation:sequence. It returns 'EOF' when just one sequence is read. Writing to the device sets the device to whatever value you write to it.

With axehind's prodding, I've been looking into openMosix. It's is an extremely simple system to setup. He wants to update the userland tools. I didn't want to start that till I understood the oMFS file system. Now that I do (after many questions to the list) I should be able to start some work on it. First thing is to get the kernel-headers RPM working properly.

Work
After much research, I've decided not to use Apache 2.0 as the basis for my next SMTP server. I'm convinced that async i/o is the way to go. Thanks raph for mentioning that topic in your diary. My SMTP server system will use ReiserFS for a filesystem and perhaps /dev/epoll for event notification. I'm not worried about portability yet. I more interested in raw performance and /dev/epoll seems the best way to go. I've requested that this be open source so others can join in the developement. I'll be posting snippets either way.

raph: Here's an idea. When someone uses a person tag, write a recent-log into the person's directory with the content being the author's name. Then add a 'recent citations' to the home page that key's off the authenicated user.

If any Advogato users are bird watchers, I have a bird watching site based on Advogato code. It's at www.migratus.com. There are some user interface issues that I need to work on, but any feedback would be nice.