Author: Dave Shevett

Well, it’s hit that point. With the astronomical increase in spam lately, it’s getting quite obvious the problem will not abate on it’s own. The open-ended ‘we trust each other’ process of mail delivery is now in it’s death throes, it’s time to look at other solutions.

According to my spam report, my personal inbox is getting 450-650 caught spams a day. Unfortunately, that is only my Stage One filter. I also use Thunderbird as my email client, which has excellent spam filters of it’s own, and that catches another 100-150 messages there. I have monitors showing me the total mail I receive daily, and it’s in the 1500 messages range, of which 500 or so are mailing list messages. That means one out of every 100 messages I receive is legit. And lately, the filters have occasionally gotten things wrong. Mail intended for me is marked as spam, and I never hear about it.

In 12 hours of operation on our only mail server, here is an account of the volume we move:

Grand Totals
------------
messages
4801   received
5413   delivered
173   forwarded
79   deferred  (434  deferrals)
230   bounced
484   rejected (8%)
0   reject warnings
0   held
0   discarded (0%)
45428k  bytes received
49843k  bytes delivered
1416   senders
1092   sending hosts/domains
334   recipients
148   recipient hosts/domains

In the past, it was okay to occasionally go through your spam box and see if there’s anything legitimate in there. That is simply not possible in todays climate. It may take an hour to go through a days worth of spam, and is mind numbingly tedious. There’s a good chance you’ll miss something just because it -looks- like spam.

So what are the options? This is where I’m asking for help. I’m speaking not only for myself, but also for the greater Homeport community. I maintain user accounts for 20-30 people, and they’re all under the same attack as I am, maybe to somewhat of a lesser degree, but it’s still hurting.

I’ll note for the record that we are currently running Amavisd, with Spamassassin, all through Postfix. Amavis is happily removing -all- virii from our mail, so that is not an issue. SA with some filter tweaking is doing an admirable job considering the masssive load it is contending with.

• Option A – A commercial filtering service
  There are several vendors that offer commercial filtering. Many of them are simple ‘mail accounts’ that you can POP your mail off of, letting them handle the filtering. Others will forward a specific mail address in and out of their system. Are there services that will filter an entire domain? I’d be willing to pay for a service that maintains its filters, rulesets and RBLs in a respectable fashion.

• Option B – Fiddling my own configuration
  I’ve been doing this for quite a while. It’s tedious, it’s time consuming, and it’s never ‘quite right’. It’ll work perhaps for a few, but how do you really know if it’s working correctly? I’m probably going to do one major wash-through to enable the various Postfix standard rules, but in reality, unless someone wants to take over being Spam Master for Homeport’s servers, this is not a task I’m keen on doing much longer.

• Option C – Massively restrict received email
  I like the idea of using some form of sender authentication. I’d be willing to say “If you PGP sign your message, I will accept it”. This is something that’s available to most mail users, and is easy to enable. It makes tracking easier, and I can rank accepted mail by if I’ve accepted their PGP key onto my keyring. The drawback to this is that not everyone I communicate with will have PGP set up, and while it will help with authenticating known users (everyone I bludgeon into using PGP), I still run the risk of missing important mail from people I have not corresponded with.

• Option D – Whitelisting
  This is probably the easiest to implement, but gets the most grief as a poor solution. I know the list of people who I correspond with regularly, I know they are not spammers. There is a slight risk a spammer may forge their email address in a From line, and therefore get through my filters, but in reality, I have seen NO spam of this type ever in my mailbox. Ever.

• Option E – Give up on email altogether
  No, not give up in this whole concept. But give up trying to run my own server. Gmail and Yahoo both have excellent mail clients, and they are available to remote clients. Why fight this anymore? Everyone should just get their own accounts on gmail, and be done with it.

So that’s where I am. I invite folks to chime in with ideas or suggestions on where to go from here. I know this discussion is happening all over the net right now, but wading through that is tedious and rarely productive. I also invite the members of the Homeport community to chime in with their suggestions, observations, or thoughts on how the systems are running now, and where things should go.

I’m sure this will end up turning into a nice long list, but lets start with this particular rant. If you have a Windows XP installation, and you’re trying to enable or disable something from starting when the machine boots, where do you go?
Well, naturally, you right click on Start, go to Explore, look at Programs->Start menu->Startup and… hm, your app is not there. Ah, must be on the global settings. Explore all users, programs, start menu, startup… hm, not there either.
At this point, the spectre of editing up the Registry comes in, where you have to navigate ridiculously long lists of keys to possibly find the switch that may actually fix your problem.
Today I found a new one. Microsoft has decreed (jedi hand-wave here), that all Windows XP computers must start MSN Messenger when they boot. You don’t have a choice, it’s enabled by default. Sorry if you don’t actually want to use it, or you’re using some other IM system.
Microsoft, by the way, doesn’t -tell- you it’s running. It’s not in the tool tray, it has no startup screen, it’s just ‘there’. The only reason I knew messenger was running was that when I logged in via Jabber, a little popup window told me, nicely, that I had been forcibly logged out of MSN messenger because I had logged in elswhere. Afterwhich, the popup disappeared, and again I had no access to Messenger. Thanks guys.
Today I decided to finally rid myself ot this behaviour. There may be occasion to use the Messenger service, but I want to determine when I run it, and when I don’t. It would be easy to go to Control Panel->Add/Remove software, and evict the application entirely, but that’s not what I wanted to do.
Apparently there’s an alternative to this mayhem. I dug through various google results and came up with this gem:

Simply mention the word “registry” and some folks cringe! There’s a much easier way to stop Windows Messenger from starting and running in the background in Windows XP. And this can easily be done without doing any registry editing. All it takes is a few clicks of your mouse.
Go to Start>Run and type in gpedit.msc which will take you to the Group Policy and Local Computer Policy settings. Now click on User Configuration>Administrative Templates>Windows Components>Windows Messenger. Set both settings to “ENABLEDâ€? and reboot. That’s it! This will allow you to disable Windows Messenger, which will stop it from loading at start-up.
This is by far the most straight forward and easiest way to disable Windows Messenger. And should you decide to use Messenger in the future, just simply reverse the changes you made and turn it back on anytime you like!

Sounds good, and after a few clicks, lo, there’s the policy. To me this seems like yet another interface that applications under Windows may or may not adhere to, but it seems like it’s worth a shot.

By now everyone has heard about Apple’s latest contribution to the War on Available Cash, the iPhone. What’s been amusing to me is watching the impact this has had on the Palm world. It would be foolish to assume the introduction of an OSX embedded device with more features than ANYTHING on the market won’t have an impact on what has up until now been about the best in handheld general purpose telephone devices – the Treo. As a steadfast Treo owner myself (not without my share of gripes admittedly), I found myself, like most of the geek populace, seriously lusting after the new iPhone.
But don’t take my word for it. Lets take a look around the net a bit.
PalmAddicts led off this morning with an article ‘I’m getting that nagging sensation again:

Don’t get me wrong: the iTunes compatibility is a non-issue in an era of 4GB SD cards and PTunes, and my cellphone needs are very modest. What really intrigues me, though, is that the iPhone is a real computer in a PDA format, but one that runs on gestures instead of a thumbboard. In essence, I’m seeing the iPhone as the logical successor to the T|X.

I’d also recommend taking a look at this whimsical conversatin between an owner and his Treo.
There’s also the impact of the announcement on the stock market in general, including Palm. Apple’s stock soars, all the other manufacturers tank. Granted, this is a short-term plot, but it’s telling. Apple’s stock is trading higher than ever (as of this posting, at around 95).
The excellent Treonauts.com does a side by side comparison of the iPhone vs the Treo 680. They make the comment:

the iPhone is primarily a consumer multimedia phone and not a business smartphone.

I have to disagree. The undercurrent is that the Treo is a ‘business smartphone’, and, frankly, it isn’t. The Bluetooth is so crippled as to be unuseable, the software suite is slow and painful, Wifi is a bulky and unwieldy bolt-on, and corporate network interraction is almost non-existent. It’s also hard to say that PalmOS is considered a business OS, when the alternative on the iPhone is… OSX – a fully featured, multithreaded, portable operating system.
Will the iPhone be a success? Undoubtedly. Palm has nothing in the wings to compete with it, and no other vendor has the design moxy that Apple has. I predict there will be a raft of new product announcements in the next 6 months until the iPhone is officially available as other vendors scramble to “Me Too!” their product lines, but in the end, the Treo will slide down into the also-ran territory, and the iPhone will take top slot as the preferred mobile platform for geeks and tinkerers.

Now this is a GM product I might actually buy. And I ain’t talkin Genetically Modified.
At the Detroit Auto Show, GM has unvailed the ‘Chevy Volt’. It’s somewhere between a concept car and production, in that they’ve hired a line manager for the vehicle, but they’re having problems finding a supplier for the 100,000 mile Lithium Ion battery.
GM is calling it a ‘Plugin Hybrid’, but to me that’s a terrible misnomer. It’s an EV car with an onboard generator. It’ll run about 40 miles on full battery power, at which time the engine kicks on and starts recharging the batteries. It can plug into wall outlets and recharge in about 6 hours. The onboard gasoline / ethanol engine isn’t even mechanically connected to the wheels, it simply runs a generator.
And, it doesn’t look so bad either!

Well, a few days ago I mentioned a problem I had with ‘yawl’ involving a blown hard drive. Fun this wasn’t, and unfortunately I was so swamped with work, I didn’t really have a chance to work on the machine, so it sadly sat, turned off, while I wrestled with the vagaries of Java and EJB3.0.
With some slack time this weekend, I set about seeing what I could recover from the smoking ruin that was the 20gig drive in the machine. Booting the machine revealed only ‘Grub loading’ then ‘Error 17’. Many folks on the net have said this is a blown bootloader, usually happening after a failed upgrade. I know I hadn’t done any upgrade, this was something more serious.
But what to do about it? I couldn’t boot it, it was time to go for a repair CD. Fortunately, I had some experience using the Sys Rescue CD, an opensource toolset that fits on a CD (in fact it’ll fit on a flash drive), and contains most tools an admin will need to repair or maintain a system that has had Something Bad happen to it.
One burned CD later, I had the machine booted. cfdisk happily reported “You have a nice 20gig partition that’s empty! Want to install anything to it?” Not an auspicious start.
I could not mount the faulty partition, so really the only thing to do was to hand it over to fsck and mutter a few incantations.
fsck had a grand old time with the filesystem repair. First indications were good – it actually found the partition, and said there were files on it, though one of the two superblocks was completely missing (linux filesystems have a primary and a backup superblock – sort of the ‘master directory’ for the partition – for just this reason). Without the backup superblock, the entire filesystem would have been gone. Phew.
A good 20 minutes later, after much gnashing, queries about whether I wanted to fix the deallocated blocks and other fun filesystem issues, I had a mounted, readable filesystem. The SysrescueCD is a fully functional single user Linux environment, so I could mount, manipulate, and archive the newly repaired filesystem. I don’t trust it to run on its own – the damage touched just about every open file on the machine (including things like kernel modules), so I doubt the machine is stable. But, I could bring up the network interface and copy off my ~/docs/ directory – where I keep all my business documents. I had a backup of it, but it was quite old.
I feel a lot better now that I’ve gotten my important documents off the machine. The next step will be determining what to do with the box. I’ve already received a replacement 160gig drive I’ll be installing (nothing like an 8x space increase!), and I’d like to archive some ‘less critical, but still nice to have copies of’ files, but for now, I just barely ducked that bullet.
NB -interestingly, this is the only mildly catastrophic hard disk failure I’ve -ever- had. The only other recent failure I can think of was dropping poor hunter while at band practice. It twitched the drive, which I replaced. But I consider laptops to be ‘volatile’ environments, and everything was backed up – no loss. I suppose I should be knocking wood everywhere, but I prefer to think I’m careful enough and don’t do Stupid Things with my machines.
Or maybe this is pure hubris. I gotta go run my backups.

Well there’s truly no great way to celebrate the post-consumerist-feeding-frenzy joy that is Boxing day than waking up and settling down to get some work done, and finding out that at some time during the night yawl seems to have blown it’s drive.
As things stand now, yawl is not my primary work machine (clipper is), so I’m not horribly inconvenienced. But I did have things archived on there I’d like to back up, and yawl was also the host to the external drive that is the backup for boomer, our big colocated server. But most importantly, yawl also acts as my music streamer from Radio Paradise. This, of course, ups the priority quite a bit.
Ah well, time to download a new System Rescue CD and see if I can at least copy some files off the drive.