newswall/news

Rebooted

Obelisk went a bit odd (load average at 17 but not doing much) so it was rebooted.

Seems okay now. A dependancy issue between postfix-relay and the domain keys filter has been identified. A task force is being assembled.

Change to Spam Checking Policy

I've changed the spam checking script so it checks all inbound mail even if they already have 'X-Spam-Status' headers. It strips all exising X-Spam-Level, and X-Spam-Status headers before the mail is sent to SpamAssassin.

Hopefully this will prevent some spam that has been getting through.

Removed headers are available in "X-Newswall-Removed-Header" if you're interested.

clamav updated

clamav 0.88.3 -> 0.88.7

http://security.gentoo.org/glsa/glsa-200612-18.xml

gzip updated

gzip 1.3.5-r6 -> 1.3.5-r10

http://security.gentoo.org/glsa/glsa-200609-13.xml

Bind updated

Bind 9.2.2-r2 -> 9.3.2-r4

http://security.gentoo.org/glsa/glsa-200609-11.xml

I have also made .com and .net delegation only.

Mail FS

I've just added an extra gig of space to the mail filesystem.

Outbound mail

It seems outbound mail for some domains was not working following the reboot test. This has been fixed, all queued mail should be sent shortly.

Reboot Test Complete

Reboot test has been completed sucsessfully. 300 days since the last one, nice.

Hopefully should be ok whilst I'm on holiday now.

Reboot Test

I will be performing a couple of reboot tests on Obelisk today and possibly tomorrow, to ensure that the server can survive a power outage whilst I'm on holiday.

Perl Updated

Perl has been updated to 5.8.8. This means all relevent perl modules and applications linked to Perl have been rebuilt.

Notably SpamAssassin has been updated to 3.1.3

PyMSNt

The Jabber MSN transport has been a bit odd today so I've updated it to 0.11.1. Details here if you're interested: http://delx.cjb.net/pymsnt/?page=news

Shell command logging

In order to improve the security of Obelisk I have enabled logging for bash. Please note this means all of your commands are logged, however I don't expect to review them unless I think the box is having problems.

Climate Change Exp Ended

I've killed off the climate change experiment. Need the resources for other stuff.

Backups

A new backup policy has been implemented for Obelisk. It goes like this:

/var/mail - Every night at 4:30 am
/home - Mon, Web, Fri at 2am
/var/www - Tues, Thurs, Sat at 2am
/ (excluding the above) - Sun at 2am

I've just taken a full backup of all of these, however there will be no further backups until broadband has been provisioned at my new address.

If this is likelly to be ages I'll take the backup device to work and backup to there until the broadband is online.

BOINC: BBC Climate Change Exp

I've started to run the BOINC based BBC Climate Change experiment on Obelisk, I'll keep an eye on how it's going regarding taking up resources, I know there's not a huge amount of RAM to spare as it is. I may cron it so it only runs overnight when nobody is using it interactively anyway.

If you're interested in how Obelisk is getting along you can view its stats here: http://bbc.cpdn.org/show_host_detail.php?hostid=176734 (don't expect to see any results for at least a few days).