(So it's been a while since I've blogged, you can blame this latest post on the movie Julie & Julia) Yesterday after getting the umpteenth email offering me cheap Viagra prescriptions, I decided to put some sort of anti spam solution such as Spamassassin. After a bit of research (READ: checking the Ubuntu Postfix guide and running from there), I decided on DSPAM.

The major configuration issues I ran into were when I was trying to set DSPAM up as a filter in Postfix. Eventually I settled on having Postfix deliver mail to DSPAM, which would then deliver to Procmail. The relevant line of Postfix's main.cf is:

mailbox_command = /usr/bin/dspam --deliver=innocent,spam --user $USER

The DSPAM configuration is pretty straightforward, with the Trusted/Untrusted Delivery Agents set to procmail. I may have skipped some details, but there was a lot of changing going on and many changes were made, but it all seems fairly common sense once you figure out where DSPAM is in relation to Postfix and Procmail.

And then in mutt, I borrowed several macros from here.

# DSpam management
macro index "\cx" "<enter-command>set wait_key=no\n<pipe-message>dspam --user landon --class=spam --source=error\n<delete-message><enter-command>set wait_key=yes\n" 'Spam Message'
macro pager "\cx" "<enter-command>set wait_key=no\n<pipe-message>dspam --user landon --class=spam --source=error\n<delete-message><enter-command>set wait_key=yes\n" 'Spam Message'
macro index "\ca" "<enter-command>set wait_key=no\n<pipe-message>dspam --user landon --class=innocent --source=error\n<enter-command>set wait_key=yes\n<save-message>=" 'Non-Spam Message'
macro pager "\ca" "<enter-command>set wait_key=no\n<pipe-message>dspam --user landon --class=innocent --source=error\n<enter-command>set wait_key=yes\n<save-message>=" 'Non-Spam Message'

In addition to this, I have mutt set up to flag spam messages in bright red with this line:

color index brightred default '~h "X-DSPAM-Result:.*Spam"'

And that's it! Now I just need to train it, so for once I'm eagerly awaiting some spam.

EDIT: After tagging 5 or 6 spam messages as false negatives, I've started getting spam sent straight to the spam folder and flagged with bright red in mutt! Success!

Over the past year I've put off replacing some dying drives (2*750gb) I have. Lately they've started to have a lot of problems so I went ahead and bought some replacements. For future reference, if you don't plan on using dd to copy over the drive then rsync -avP -H --numeric-ids /mnt/src /mnt/dst should work just as well. (I need the hard links especially for my backups drive, which is where Dirvish dumps everything to. Without the hard link copying, rsync would try to copy many many many more terabytes of backups than I can reasonably hold!

Today while reading the latest tweets of my VPS provider, I noticed that they had some problems with one of their DNS servers. This led me on a strange train of thought about why the login prompt for my server would take so long to show up when I was using SSH. Could it have been their slow DNS server? Nah, that''d be silly! After a bit more research though, I found a blog post detailing two reasons for SSH slowdown. Turns out the culprit really was the nameserver, so I popped open /etc/resolv.conf and added in the 3 nameservers suggested by Grokthis and now it takes a mere second to show the prompt!

Just goes to show that the impossible is merely improbably.... is likely the case.

Getting particle systems hammered down is finicky, case in point:

Torpedo Whoops!