Fire Hose

As part of a project I am working on, I wanted to have a method for unsubscribing users from a mailing list without having to log in — just click and unsubscribe. I wanted to keep the URLs opaque and unguessable while not requiring a database hit to guarantee authenticity or a full table scan before going about the main work of unsubscribing the user. Encrypting a unique key, in my case the email address, for the user will accomplish these goals.

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Today at work I decided to set up an irc server on our tiny little ubuntu 9.10 intranet server. Having played with a few different ircd implementations before, I decided to go with one which was available as an ubuntu package (so not unrealircd or ircd-seven) and looked supported — I chose ircd-hybrid along with the apparently related hybserv.

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