Archive for April, 2010

Missing 3rd Tuesday of April

Site Maintenance | Posted by attriel April 27th, 2010

So, you’ve probably noticed that last week’s post never appeared …

Partially that’s because I lost track of the date, and partially that’s because I was going to do an update from ubuntu 9.10 to 10.04 on my secondary server, so I figured I’d review the process.

The idea being that I ran Slackware for like 8 years, and loved it, but quit having time for the hand-compiling management that I wanted with that system.  But there wasn’t (AFAICR) any good base system version upgrading.  There might have been, but by the time the first update would have gone, i had so many customized compiles that it would have caused more problems than help.  And my system was more up to date with latest versions, because I didn’t have to go through package testing.

Then I went to gentoo, to keep that compiled “for your use”, and it was good, except some of the things I wanted to do I had to customize too much for, and so I couldn’t do upgrades again.

So now I’m moving to ubuntu.  Most of the things I’ve looked for i can find prebuilt packages for; and the VM management seems a little cleaner than the last try through gentoo, in that I don’t need to install X-Windows on my server to install the VM servers; it’s partially because ubuntu has good docs on Xen and KVM; I think gentoo had these options too now, but not positive.

Except 10.04 is still only in RC, not yet released.  I’m figuring on sometime this week, maybe, but figured I’d post since I was already a full week off.

I’ll probably write up that post when it happens and queue it up.  Trying to get some of these queued up, but I never get a chance to take all the screenshots I want for a few of them :o

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Of Mail Servers and Usages

From The Lines | Posted by attriel April 6th, 2010

So, one thing I’m working on is rebuilding my home server.  And one of the big bits last time was I finally figured out how to virtualize email so I could run all the domains with different users, and not have to give everyone shell accounts.

Well, that system had a number of problems setting it up, and I decided to use a new one on the new box.  And I’m ~80% through that setup process, and getting into the complicated bits and spam and virus filters etc … and it occurs to me …

I went back and pulled up qmailanalog, which after a few tweaks to make it work (as an aside, djb writes some very solid systems, because instead of one program that does 10 things, he writes 10 programs that each do one specific thing.  usually limited options, frequently chosen at compile time, so there’s very little to exploit; otoh, it doesn’t get updated very often) let me see the send/receive stats for the server.

Almost all of the send is to junk addresses, bots guessing at addresses.  Most of the incoming is also to junk addresses.  I’m guessing a bunch of the former is bounces of the latter :o

Then I flipped through some of the inboxes for the users receiving mail.  It’s almost exclusively spam and virus mail (obviously the spam filters quit keeping up at some point).

So now I’m wondering … if I’m the only user receiving mail, and I can just change the few lists that still point there … maybe I should just shut the whole thing off on the new box.  Gets rid of the spam problem and any relaying/etc concerns :o  And simplifies the configuration overall :o

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