purg.atory

As mentioned previously, I had a sleep study. The results, which took two weeks to come in, showed that I have moderately severe sleep apnea. The doctor wanted to do a second sleep study and evaluate what air pressure is required. The alternative is an auto-titrating CPAP machine, which figures out the right air pressure automatically.

The sleep study is very expensive, so I wanted to find out what it would cost after insurance. After looking at the costs and the bank account, I decided to just go with the machine and skip the second study.

In the few days between getting the results and making the decision, the sleep doctor left the country, and would not be back for two weeks. I couldn’t get the ball rolling because he had not written a CPAP prescription before he left. He arrived back in town on Monday of this week, and finally got the prescription written yesterday.

Today the home medical supplier called me and we set up an appointment. On Monday morning at 10:00 AM, I will pick up an auto-titrating CPAP machine. In theory, it’ll be the best night of sleep I’ve had in several years. It’s oddly appropriate that I may finally be fully awake on election day.

Today there was a lively discussion in the daily chatroom. It started with election issues because I linked Tim O’Reilly’s blog post about why he supports Barack Obama. Someone mentioned the death penalty and the discussion REALLY took off. Here’s my take on the death penalty.

In the Old West, they had public hangings. In biblical times, they had public stoning. In many places, but the deep South in particular, there were lynch mobs. These events were visceral messages to others about what society will not tolerate. If you’ve got that image in your head, you’re less likely to break the law, be it an actual legal document or society’s unwritten rules. Today’s death penalty is not public, so it has very little power as a deterrent.

The other purpose that the death penalty serves is to eliminate individuals who commit unspeakable crimes and demonstrate that they will continue to do so. The example that comes most readily to mind for this is Ted Bundy. The system accomplishes this, but at an enormous financial cost. A death row inmate gets many years and many chances for appeal before they are actually executed, all at taxpayer expense. Unless they live for a REALLY long time, currently it costs less to keep a prisoner for their entire life in regular maximum security prison than it does to execute them.

If we greatly reduce the number of appeals and the amount of time given to a death row inmate, then it would be economically viable. Innocent people do end up on death row occasionally, but the likelihood is low. There should be no reason to let them have so many chances to prove their innocence. If someone is executed and later exonerated, then there is a reason to spend all that public money that would have gone to appeals - as restitution for their family. I’m sure it’ll cost much less than paying it for all of them regardless of actual guilt. Our legal system is based on the principle that true guilt or innocence is impossible to determine, that we have to accept the less perfect opinion of a jury.

The other idea I’ve got for the death penalty is to bring back public executions. Invite the public to watch all executions in large numbers. I’m inclined to say that it should be free, but if you sold tickets, it’s a public revenue opportunity. Either way I think it should be untelevised and personal recording devices banned.

If we as a society are unwilling to implement one or both of these ideas, then the death penalty serves no real purpose and we should eliminate it. If we can’t quickly or publicly eliminate the serial killers, then we should just keep them locked up.

I invite comments. I do not plan to edit or delete them unless they include personal attacks.

Any modern UNIX or UNIX-like OS can do internet mail out of the box. Just give it a domain while setting up the mail software, set up an MX record in the DNS for that domain, and you’re well on your way to sending and receiving mail.

Normally with the basic setup just mentioned, incoming mail gets delivered to standard UNIX accounts. At the most basic level, mail will not be delivered to joe@example.com unless you add a user to the server with the username joe. You can also set up aliases, so that email to joseph@example.com also gets delivered to the user joe. Typically you get many pre-defined aliases that deliver email like postmaster, hostmaster, root, and a bunch of the other system accounts to the first user created during OS installation. More complicated aliases are possible, allowing you to deliver email to a completely different domain, or to send the email to a program for serious application processing.

If you’ve only got one or two domains and your needs are not very complicated, that’s all you’ll probably ever need. The difficulty with this arrangement appears when you start adding domains, particularly if the domains belong to different people and those people want to have the same prefix on their addresses - like sales@example.com and sales@frodo.com. You can tackle the problem by setting up aliases and creating UNIX users like frodo-sales, frodo-marketing, example-sales, example-marketing, and so on, but this becomes extremely cumbersome for the system administrator, the individual domain administrators, and end users. It also requires every user to have a UNIX account, opening up a potentially large attack surface for people with malicious intent.

For many years I have been running all my domain services on my own server, which has spent most if its life in my basement. The software suite that handles this for me has evolved over those years. At the heart of this are two major programs. One is called postfix, which is an MTA, or mail transport agent. This program sends and receives email using the SMTP protocol, speaking to other MTAs around the Internet. The other is dovecot, which is an IMAP and POP3 server. A mail client like Thunderbird uses IMAP or POP3 to log in and retrieve mail for reading, and uses SMTP to send mail.

Both of these major programs talk to a MySQL database back-end that stores the actual user email addresses, passwords, and preferences. A variety of other software provides ancillary services like spam and virus detection, webmail, etc. What I am running now is a more capable system than what I had built when I was actually running an ISP several years ago, and many times easier to maintain.

There is one real problem I face, and that’s a lack of documentation. I have never written down the steps taken and configuration changes required to get a fully functional server. I aim to change that, and will maintain it on this static blog page. This will make it much easier to recreate the work, as I’ve had to do a few times in a professional capacity.

EDIT: The blog software is not well-suited to documenting commands and config files, so I have moved the documentation to my wiki.