SAUDI NET pool cup

The place:

Our guest of honor Misfer Almaymouni who left SAUDI NET recently:

And the winner is: (this is my photo in case you don't know me)



Panoramic view of the place
Some of the guys
All Photos

FreeRADIUS version 1 released

RADIUS is the protocol used for authenticating users, it is used mainly by routers and NASes.
FreeRADIUS is the best open source RADIUS server available, it support many external databases, LDAP, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle.

Cost of living in Riyadh

According to this link from CNN the cost of living in Riyadh is ranked #77 out of 144 cities.
I wonder with the current oil price where are we heading and the worst part that we aren't getting a dime from it!

More spam prevention using Spamhaus

Today I started using Spamhaus to help prevent spam, I use it now in addition to Spamcop.
It was triggered by many spam emails coming from the same range of IPs, so I tested it with Spamhaus and it blocked it.

Here is the code to add in Postfix main.cf file:
smtpd_client_restrictions =
permit_mynetworks
check_client_access hash:/usr/local/etc/postfix/client_access
reject_rbl_client sbl.spamhaus.org
reject_rbl_client bl.spamcop.net
permit


Serious Security Hole In PuTTY

Putty is my favorite SSH client for windows.
Upgrade to 0.55, for more info check Slashdot

SMPP client rewritten in PHP

Today I ported my Python SMPP client library to PHP, I had to redesign the whole library because the old design was very bad, and with the new design it became very small, and trivial library.
Most of my work was on a library to convert bettwen window-1256 charset used by most Arabic computers, to UTF-16 (big endian) used by GSM phones.
The new SMPP library supports long and flash messages, you can try it from SAUDI NET Portal.

Supporting long, and flash SMS

Today Abdullah Aldosari my coworker insisted on working on long SMSs, he kept dreaming of them the last couple of days, so we sat together today, and we figured out how to do it.
It was fairly simple, in fact I found an old code that I wrote for sending operator logos which use this feature! Abdullah also searched for the way to send flash SMS, it was even simpler, all you need is to set a flag when sending the SMS and that's it.
These new features will be introduced to SAUDI NET portal after proper testing (i.e. tomorrow :)
We are using a protocol called SMPP it is used to communicate with the SMS Center, the SMPP client library we are using is currently written in Python language, I am thinking of rewriting it in PHP as soon as I find a good way to convert between character sets.