MadBlog
Saturday 28 May 2005

war against the noise and the heat ...

In Paris, we got a Huge HEAT attack (today is the temperature at least 10°C higher than 3 days ago ...), so i just put my file/mail/http/... server in my basement. The room is now breathable, and another gain, is that the silence now lives here.

The most unbelievable part, is that the only network cable long enough I had is cross-over cat5 cable ... but thank to the hardware god, either my switch or my nice 3c59x ethernet card un-crossed it alone... (Looking at my kernel logs, it appears that it's the 3Com card that does the job.)

Though, 2 problems have to be solved :

  1. my nice laserjet works on lpt1, but only my server has a parrallel port ... and going to the basement each time I want to print a thing is not very nice ;p
    so I guess I'll go for an eth<->lpt converter. those are not very cheap, but ...
  2. the other point is that my girlfriend will kill me when she'll discover the network cable in the stairs ... maybe she won't notice ? (hum)
Friday 20 May 2005

whitelister 0.3

I begin to be happy with whitelister ... I just added :

* daemonization
* support for pidilfes.

and the deb package has now : startup script, and logcheck ignore rules.

The only bit I'd like to do, but that is really less important IMHO, is to use threads (threadpool ?) instead of the current forking model.

Another cool thing would be to support SPF. but SPF looks like complicated to me (a lot more that rbls at least) and I've not found alread implemented SPF libraries in caml. I guess I should use libspf2 and the ocaml C bindings, but I'm currently too lazy for that.

Wednesday 18 May 2005

whitelister 0.2

I released a new version, that now features :

* privileges drop (runs as nobody:nogroup by default)
* logging facilities (you know which r[h]bl was positive when a mail is flagged as Dirty)

I simlpified the code a bit, and made a debian packages on :
deb http://opensource.polytechnique.org/debian ./

I use it on my mail server since yesterday, and it works like a charm

For those that like the sources, go to my hacks page.
To build it, you need ocaml and the syslog lib (libsyslog-ocaml-dev in debian).

Tuesday 17 May 2005

postfix whitelister

I don't like r(h)bls because they create a *lot* of false positives.
I hate greylist because it creates a *lot* of mail delivery slow downs.

But you can be smarter, and use greylist *only* on mails that are flagged by some rbl/rhbls.

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