Techie :: Techno ::: January 2006 Archives

Matt has announced the release of Wordpress 2.0.1 ie. the first point release of the 2.* series of my favourite blogging tool. According to the announcement all the major issues have been resolved and 114 bugs have been fixed. Not bad in 30 days! Some of the highlights:

• You can now specify an upload directory, and whether to use date-based storage or not.
• Caching has been fixed under certain PHP enviroments.
• Permalinks have been fixed for weird enviroments as well.
• XML-RPC uploading works.
• Compatibility with older versions of PHP.
• Several WYSIWYG fixes and cleanups.
• Imports now use much less memory.
• Now works with MySQL 5.0 in strict mode.

I'd expect their download servers will be hammered for the next few days :) Well done to all involved!

I mentioned a handy little tool I came across for installing a variety of useful apps on my ubuntu laptop recently. Paul O'Malley has pointed me in the direction of an alternative called (strangely enough) Easy Ubuntu It doesn't offer as wide a selection of applications, but it probably does more than enough for most people:

Easy Ubuntu allows you to:

• Add extra repositories for installing a lot of additional software.
• Install multimedia codecs for reading all videos, musics and DVDs.
• Activate the "audio preview" feature in Nautilus.
• Install the most needed Firefox plugins: Flash, Java, Real, videos. Adds Microsoft fonts, GNOME's Firefox buttons, officials Firefox icons.
• Install archiving support for RAR and ACE.
• Install the most used peer-to-peer softwares: aMule (a clone of eMule) and Azureus (for Bittorent).
• Install the Skype voice-over-IP software. (Warning: at this time Skype is not packaged for Breezy so install don't work)
• Num lock: Active the num lock at system startup.
• Replace the GNOME foot logo with Ubuntu's logo.
• Install the NVIDIA or ATI driver for 3D support.

More information on its creator's site

I was chatting to an entrepeneur early this evening who has some really interesting ideas. He knows his business area very well. He's familiar with his target market and he has managed to win recognition at various levels for his business acumen and marketing skills.

According to a post on Jason's blog (welcome to the blogosphere by the way!) Irish ISP Smart Telecom have decided to block port 25. It seems that the new policy affects all customers unless they have a static IP and specifically request that the restriction be lifted. It's an interesting and quite brave move for an Irish ISP to make and probably won't be the last one. From the point of view of hosting providers this could hail a "sea change" with regard to SMTP usage and access, as clients will be forced to use their ISP's outbound mail server. While this may cause issues for "domestic" subscribers it probably won't have any serious long-term effects on business users. EDIT: Wrong link! Well spotted

If you are tired of waiting for books on "bleeding edge" technology to be published then the new service from O'Reilly and Safari should be of interest.

John Collins linked to a report of a German court which has ordered a German ISP to destroy all non-invoice related data. Full story here  What does this mean in the context of the recent data retention debacle?

Last year the spamassasin project ran a competition to design a new logo. Justin posted a link to a number of very nice versions of the logo this evening I hadn't realised that there were so many variants available for immediate use:

Are you bored with your laptop's colour? Maybe you'd like to spruce it up a bit or brand it with your corporate identity? A new Irish venture is offering bespoke laptop "skins" Interesting idea, but will it catch on? I'm almost tempted to get one with the Blacknight logo :)

We've just added asp.net 2.0 support to our windows 2003 hosting plans

I mentioned Microsoft / MSN / Hotmail's recent initiative SNDS a few days ago. At the time I hadn't really had the opportunity to explore it and was finding the navigation around it quite annoying (ie. I couldn't find what I was looking for easily, so I got bored and left). I've since has some time to explore the interface a bit more and, while I do believe it could be improved on, I would have to detract my previous comments (at least to some degree). Once you have successfully added your IP blocks to the system you can access some very interesting reports. Choose any day in the past 90 days to see activity on your blocks. If there hasn't been any noteworthy activity on a block no data will appear:

Please note that days where it sent less than 100 messages will be indistinguishable from days where it sent no messages at all, because neither will show up below.

So rather than being overwhelmed with data you can drill down to the important bits ie. the ones where the vast majority of mail was sent from. To make it easier to decipher they've colour coded it as follows:

• Green - less than 10% spam
• Yellow - between 10% and 90% spam
• Red - more than 90% spam

You also get information on the sending address, although in cases of a security hole (eg. a php script) the sender address may not provide a lot of useful information (dependant on your configuration) If you need to analyse the information or share it with others you can easily export data to CSV. Hopefully they'll add more information, such as sample emails, to the system in the future .........

For a variety of reasons I've been trying to find a simple way of converting plain HTML pages into RSS. Does anyone know of a script that can do this? It doesn't matter which platform the script runs on, as long as it isn't Apple Mac (as I dont' have access to any) Obviously I'd prefer if the script was linux based ie. php, perl or python, but I'm not adverse to using ASP if it does the job

Wordpress 2.0 is really getting on my nerves. I'm seriously regretting upgrading.

Blogh An Seanchai provides an email disclaimer in the Irish language (Gaelic - gaeilge)

Bret Fausett posts a very enlightening and scary tale about a domain suspension caused by phishers abusing a host which led to the suspension of their domain (including their nameservers)

In a perfect world everybody would have their own domain name and hosting account (with us of course :) ), but the reality is that for many people free email services like the one provided by Microsoft's Hotmail service are here to stay.

This howto was written in order to help users of DirectAdmin install and correctly configure MailScanner with Exim.

 It is based on several years experience working with MailScanner and has been used in the installation of production servers running a variety of rpm based linux distributions including:
 RedHat 9
Fedora
Centos
WhiteBox

While every effort has been made to make this howto as comprehensive and easy to follow as possible the author welcomes feedback.

Before you start you should install vim.

On most Red Hat Enterprise clones, such as Centos, the following command should work:

yum install vim-enhanced

I would recommend creating a directory such as /home/installstuff or similar for any files / packages related to your MailScanner setup.

The next step is to install SpamAssassin.

There are a number of ways of doing this, however the developer of MailScanner has put together an easy to use package that will install all the required perl Modules for you. It can be downloaded here.

NB: As of SA 3.1 the licensing has changed for some of the plugins. You will need to enable razor etc., in the *.pre files in the /etc/mail/spamassassin directory

Now to install MailScanner.

First download the MailScanner rpm tarball from the website.

There are usually two versions available – stable and beta.
wget location of file tar -zxvf MailScanner file cd MailScanner directory ./install.sh

For example, to download and install the current beta version at time of writing the command would be:

wget http://www.sng.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailscanner/files/4/rpm/MailScanner-4.50.8-1.rpm.tar.gz tar -zxvf MailScanner-4.50.8-1.rpm.tar.gz cd MailScanner-4.50.8-1 ./install.sh

Relax and have a cup of coffee.

Once the install is finished you can proceed with the setup of MailScanner to work with exim.

You need to change the permissions on the MailScanner spool directory:

chown -R mail.mail /var/spool/MailScanner

MailScanner works by running two processes of the MTA.
One listens for SMTP connections (inbound mail) while the other processes outbound mail. If you think of it like this:

mail > exim > MailScanner > exim

Mail is passed from one exim process to the other via MailScanner, where all the content checks are conducted. For this reason you need to have two .conf files for exim. One for each exim process.

Always create backups!

cp /etc/exim.conf /etc/exim.back

Make a copy to handle outbound mail:
 
cp /etc/exim.conf /etc/exim_send.conf

Edit the exim.conf file:
 
vim /etc/exim.conf

and add the following lines in the main part of the configuration:
#Added for MailScanner mail queues and logging
spool_directory = /var/spool/exim.in queue_only = true
queue_only_override = false
log_file_path = /var/spool/exim/msglog/%slog

 MailScanner comes with its own startup script, so you can safely get rid of the original one:

 #cd /etc/init.d/ cp exim exim.orig;chmod -x exim.orig rm exim

However, DirectAdmin will check for the exim file, so we create a symlink to fool it:

ln -s MailScanner exim

NB: You may need to do this again if a DirectAdmin update installs a new exim init script

Create the following directories:
mkdir /var/spool/exim.in
mkdir /var/spool/exim.in/input
mkdir /var/spool/exim.in/data
mkdir /var/spool/exim.in/db

then fix the ownership:

chown -R mail.mail /var/spool/exim.in/

Now you need to customise your MailScanner.conf both for your particular server and to let it know that it is running exim:
Open MailScanner.conf in vim as follows:

vim /etc/MailScanner/MailScanner.conf

The file is very well documented. Please read it!

You should edit the following settings:

%org-name% = servername
%org-long-name% = Your Company Name .
%web-site% = www.yourwebaddress.tld

Now to tell it about your exim configuration.

Find the following lines in MailScanner.conf and edit as indicated:
#Run As User = mail
#Run As User = postfix
Run As User = mail # Group to run as (not normally used for sendmail)
#Run As Group = mail
#Run As Group = postfix
Run As Group = mail
Incoming Queue Dir = /var/spool/exim.in/input
Outgoing Queue Dir = /var/spool/exim/input
Sendmail = /usr/sbin/exim -C /etc/exim.conf
Sendmail2 = /usr/sbin/exim -C /etc/exim_send.conf
MTA = exim (as opposed to sendmail)

You can further tweak your MailScanner settings later on.

Some more changes are needed to finalise your setup.

MailScanner should autodetect exim, but you need to make a number of changes to /etc/sysconfig/MailScanner do the following:

mkdir /usr/local/exim/
mkdir /usr/local/exim/bin

make the following symlinks:

ln -s /etc/exim_send.conf /usr/local/exim/exim_send.conf
ln -s /etc/exim.conf /usr/local/exim/configure
ln -s /usr/sbin/exim /usr/local/exim/exim
ln -s /usr/sbin/exim /usr/local/exim/bin/exim

To test if it is working properly or not issue the following command:

/etc/init.d/MailScanner restart;tail -f /var/log/maillog

You should see something like the following:

Shutting down MailScanner daemons: MailScanner: [ OK ]
incoming exim: [ OK ]
outgoing exim: [ OK ]
Starting MailScanner daemons:
incoming exim: [ OK ]
outgoing exim: [ OK ]
MailScanner: [ OK ]

Keep an eye on the logs for a few minutes. If anything is wrong you should see an error in them.

In order to increase your setup's effectiveness against spam and viruses you can now tweak your settings.

As I already mentioned, the MailScanner.conf file is very well commented, so read what the configuration options are doing before you actually change them on a production system.

This method of setting up MailScanner has been tried and tested.

It works for us, however any feedback is always appreciated.

It's been a while since I've mentioned MailScanner, partly because it "just works" :) However, Julian (who should have a blog!) has been making quite a few changes "under the hood" over the last few weeks, which culminated in a new beta release this afternoon.

Wordpress 2.0 has been out for nearly a month, but as I mentioned previously, I did not want to upgrade until I was 100% sure that all the plugins I use worked perfectly.

I never thought I'd see the day that I'd be looking into running OS X under linux or windows, but that's the position I've found myself in.

Although I have my reservations about the merits of business blogging I was very pleasantly surprised to discover that the Infacta team have started a blog.

This month's Computers in Business (the IT supplement from the Sunday Business Post) has an interesting article by Barry McCall which covers the "marriage" of open and closed source solutions in the corporate environment. Some of his reflections are quite incisive:

Some competing Linux distributors are blindly following a pure open source path while some proprietary vendors are doggedly fighting the advancing tide of open source. It is hard to see either succeeding in the face of a growing move to mixed-source strategies

The full article is definitely worth reading: Best of Both Worlds

If you make up part of the 40% of readers viewing this blog in Internet Explorer you may have noticed a new addition to the top of this page (and all other pages on this blog) If you do not like this addition you can get rid of it very easily :) EDIT: Seems the javascript is doing odd things, so I've removed it for the moment