Monthly Archives: February 2021

Service testing redux

My previous post on Service Testing has become a favourite of mine. I often find myself looking up details of how to check a particular service (and particularly how to use OpenSSL’s s_client). That post is now 7½ years old and I thought it due for a refresh. HTTP It’s still possible to type raw […]

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Saving space in large git repositories

In mid-2017 I set up an automated scrape of a frequently-updated website. Every day my script would crawl the website, download its contents, and commit these to GitHub. This allowed me to back up not just the site contents but the complete history of changes. This scrape did its thing for nearly 4 years until […]

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Mail blacklists and third-party dependencies

Mail blacklists are a sad fact of life. They exist because of spam and work like this: I send an email from my computer my computer connects to the server that hosts my email my server connects to the server that hosts the recipient’s mail the recipient server looks up my server’s details in some […]

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