CFCL motd

Spam Assassin snafu and upgrade

The version of SA we were running was over a year old and it was doing some inappropriate things (eg, blocking valid domains). So, we upgraded it. Continue reading "Spam Assassin snafu and upgrade"

cfcl.com upgraded to Leopard

On March 15-16, 2008, we began upgrading cfcl.com to a PowerMac G5, running Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard).

Web and Email services were offline for approximately 4 and 12 hours, respectively. MySQL access was offline until late 3/18. Movable Type came up successfully about an hour ago.

We apologize for that. Moving to Leopard was more problematic than we had previously anticipated.

At this time, we believe everything is finally back and running correctly. If you see something odd, please let us know asap.

We are now running

• Apache 2
• Movable Type 4.1
• MySQL 5
• PHP 5

DNS Mayhem

Our DNS server for the world at large responds to a different IP address than the one that serves our local network. On the mini, the two addresses shared the (only) Ethernet interface. We didn't notice that the world was finding it harder and harder to find us until we stopped getting incoming email, some time on 3/24. Even then, it took a couple of telephone calls to put us on the right track.

Although Rich is as yet unable to get Leopard to share an Ethernet interface across multiple IP addresses, the fact that we're now using a Power Mac allowed him to plug in a PCI-based Ethernet card. As Ken Thompson said, "When in doubt, use brute force."

Changes to Spam Processing

Occasionally, cfcl is hit with a higher-than-usual amount of spam. Combined with everything else we do, that slows the performance to unacceptable levels. We've recently made some changes to try to prevent this problem in the future.

Henceforth, spam checking will be done on our "email toaster" box. This is the system that already does a lot of email pre-processing, rejecting mail addressed to non-existent addresses on our system. (These false addresses account for about 99% of our incoming traffic.)

This machine will now handle running SpamAssassin on (properly addressed) mail. It works like this:

• Mail with a score of 15 or higher will be deleted. According to the SpamAssassin docs, mail with a score of 15 or higher is almost certainly spam (with 0.05% false positives) according to rules/STATISTICS.txt).
• Messages scoring between 10 and 15 will be diverted to a shared, dated "spam" box in /usr/local/mail/spam on the toaster. If you think you've lost something because "the spam checker ate it", ask.
• Messages scoring between 8 and 10 will be diverted to your personal "spam" box (a named subdirectory of /usr/local/mail/spam) on cfcl. Again, If you think you've lost something because "the spam checker ate it", ask.
• Messages scoring less than 8 will be delivered. If you would like to lower this threshold, please ask.

Updated to TWiki 4.12

We are now running TWiki 4.12. We have also rearranged a few webs into sub-webs. If you can't find something, look at the Site Map in the Main web. If you have questions, ask Vicki.

SpamAssassin 3.23

We are now running SpamAssassin 3.23. You should see a bit less spam in your Inbox.