Page 32 - Jacob Emcken

There is no silver bullet

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Mailgraph on antivirus / antispam mail relay

The last couple of days I have tinkered with a new antivirus / antispam server at work. Its foundation is a Debian Sarge running Postfix, Spamassassin, ClamAV through Amavis-ng (Amavis is installed from current unstable) and of top if it all mailgraph.

All packages was taken from the stable Debian release - Sarge, except of amavis-ng which does not exist in Sarge. This package was instead downloaded from unstable… fortunately it had no dependencies from unstable what so ever.

The documentation on the Spamassassin homepage is great which is just the opposite for amavis-ng which seems non-exsisting. The configuration file shipped with Debian makes up for the lack of documentation. It seems that amavis-ng should be a (more modular) reimplementation of amavisd-new. Even though people on the mailinglists recommend amavisd-new :-D

I have a serious problem keeping my hands off the bleeding edge stuff so I couldn’t resist installing amavis-ng. I have tried using it before, but at that time I couldn’t make it fork its process (it became a serious bottleneck). I’m not saying that it didn’t work, it might as well hav been me. Though I cannot seem to find the difference from my previous installation and my new one. Anyway it seems to fork correctly in this new installation and to test the virus filter I recommend this web site

The reason why I write this entry is because I made some changes to mailgrap to make it work the way I wanted. Read on to see what (small) changes I made.

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Samba shares on NFS mounted filesystem - bad idea

Today I implemented a strage server at a customer… the result wasn’t satisfying. I shared the files with NFS to the other servers. Samba shares of NFS mounted filesystems are NOT recommendable! It makes Outlook fuck up if you have your pst files on a samba share and the finacial system C5 can only have one user logged in because NFS make some locks on files (at least I think that is the reason).

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