English: February 2008 Archives

Boot Process

Ubuntu has abandoned inittab in favour of their homegrown upstart, not in itself a bad thing, but as shipped it is not configured in such a way that some very useful behaviour of inittab is replicated.

I have a MediaWiki wiki (the same software as Wikipedia) running on polacksbacken.net. I want other people in the University to be able to create accounts on the wiki and use it, but not those outside.

So, I enabled email confirmation in MediaWiki, but after a while, I found that spammers had created accounts but, because they never confirmed them via email, never spammed any pages. Still, it was irritating and MediaWiki provides no way of stopping it, so I resolved to ensure that an email address in a particular domain is specified at signup-time.