step 1: greylisting

Short story: I fiddled with gps for a while since it seems like it would perform better than postgrey. I've thrown in the towel for now. gps has the nice feature of whitelisting on sender, but it just seems like it has too much "other" baggage.

postgrey install:

yum install postgrey
chkconfig postgrey on

# add to /etc/sysconfig/postgrey
# OPTIONS="--unix=$SOCKET --delay=120 --auto-whitelist-clients=8 --greylist-text='Service temporarily unavailable. Please rety in %s seconds.' "

# add to /etc/postfix/main.cf:
# smtpd_recipient_restrictions =
# permit_mynetworks
# reject_unauth_destination
# check_policy_service unix:postgrey/socket

service postgrey start
service postfix restart

Long story: OMGWTFBBQ@$%^@#$!!!! You'd think using a nice database abstraction layer like libdbi would make gps a snap. But nooooo RedHat has to be a total pain in my ass. The include libdbi-dbd RPMs for MySQL and PostgreSQL but not for SQLite. And the one thing I don't want to run on my slicehost is an memory-hogging database server, so SQLite is really what I want. So after contemplating it, I just rolled my own spec file and that did it... mostly. gps and it's accompanying perl script gps-maintain.pl have different opinions on what 'dbtype' should be and what the accompanying db_dbtype_dbdir should be, but a post on the forums allowed me to hack it up so it was working. In the end, I spent a lot of time on it and if postgrey sucks the life out of my VM, I might reconsider gps. But for now, I'm tired of installing complex software.

dive! dive! dive!

Looks like my server located at Dorsai is experiencing extended downtime, reason unknown. I've cutover the key websites, but not all of them and not mail yet. I need to really get the spam filtering, etc. going first. Time to hustle that setup, on the quick. More to come shortly...

Getting back on track

After a long, LONG time, I'm finally back on the road to updating my mail server setup. I eluded to setting up a new system a while back, and I'm starting to make progress on it. A tip of my hat to "Joe" at adminspotting.net for his messaging server setup. Some bugs arose with CentOS 5 on x86_64 and dovecot, but other than that, so far so good. The nuts-n-bolts of SMTP/POP/IMAP are setup and next is the anti-virus, anti-spam, greylisting, etc. etc. gauntlet.

An Ode to memcached

When your servers are hurting
And your database needs some relief
Something small, simple and efficient
Can make your response times brief

Sometimes, you don't need anything fancy
You just need something good
My friend is lightweight and speedy
And he does exactly what he should

Keys and values
Hashes and slabs
K.I.S.S.
And viola! it all just works

So go forth, apply caching
And let your servers rest.
Because any sysadmin will tell you,
memcached is the best.