Κόλαση

Δυο Θεσσαλονικείς έχουν πάει στη Κόλαση και λέει ο ένας στον άλλο:

– Φιλαράκι, καλή η Κόλαση δε λέω, αλλά Χαλκιδική δεν είναι

(Προσαρμοσμένο από ανέκδοτο που είχε πει ο Σταρόβας πριν ένα μήνα στην ΕΡΑ ΣΠΟΡ: “Φιλαράκι, καλός ο Παράδεισος δε λέω, αλλά Χαλκιδική δεν είναι”)

Mulberry is back!

Κάποτε ήταν ο μόνος λόγος για να χρησιμοποιώ Windows:

Hi folks,
Finally, after much effort, I have regained the rights to Mulberry and am making it available for free as of today. See:

<http://www.mulberrymail.com>

Some things to note:

1) It is free to anyone – no registration codes needed.

2) A new v4.0.5 version is available on the website. This simply removes the registration requirement and updates copyright notices etc.

3) There is no formal support for the product as there was before. Instead ‘community’ support via mailing lists and other resources will be used. I will make a best effort to respond in a timely fashion to issues, but see note (4) below.

4) This effort is purely a personal one on my part – all the work I do on this is being done in my (limited) spare time.

5) It is free but not open source. That’s an issue that we can discuss moving forward…

6) Also, major new features/revisions etc are out of the question right now (though I have a few pet projects that were being worked on before and which I will likely continue). Fixes to existing problems will be done as time allows. Hopefully if we find a way of dealing with issue (5) that may change – but that’s really going to depend on the level of interest from people willing to commit their own time to this as opposed to one of the other open source equivalents.

Hopefully those of you still using Mulberry and hoping to continue to do so for a while at least will find this good news.


Cyrus Daboo

Ίσως ο καλύτερος IMAP client που υπάρχει.-

Debian Sarge and php4-mysql

I was bitten by this lately, so I post it here as a hint (it may bite you too):

You use apt on your Debian/Sarge to install apache2, mysql, php4 and of course you also install php4-mysql. One should expect that after:

apt-get install php4-mysql

you can connect immediately from your php script to a MySQL database. Calling simply phpinfo() will prove you wrong because of a minor detail: You must add the following line

extension=mysql.so

at /etc/php4/apache2/php.ini and then issue an apache2ctl graceful .

Now you are OK.

bogusmx.rfc-ignorant.org

RFCI publishes a number of usefull lists that can be used to effectively filter incoming email. One of the most usefull is bogusmx.rfc-ignorant.org which essentialy is a DNSBL that contains domain names with bogus MX servers (like localhost, 0.0.0.0 and so on):

” If any publicly listed MX record for domain contains a hostname which points to bogus IP address space, such as those documented in RFC 3330, or if the domain contains an MX RR that points to an IP address, in violation of RFC 1035 or if the domain has MX RRs which point to hostnames which themselves do not have an associated A record (including MXs which return an NXDOMAIN, or which are CNAMEs)”.

If you are a sendmail user,the trouble with bogusmx.rfc-ignorant.org is that you cannot use it with FEATURE(dnsbl). So you may need to write your own sendmail ruleset. Like this:

LOCAL_CONFIG
# Normally these should not be defined, since Kdnsbl does exactly what
# Kbmx_check does, and Kmacro does what Kbmx_macro does.
Kbmx_check dns -R A -a.FOUND -T.TMP
Kbmx_macro macro

LOCAL_RULESETS
SLocal_check_mail
R$*			$: $>canonify $1
R$* < @ $+ . > $*	$1 < @ $2 > $3
R$* < @ $+ > $*		$: $2
R$*			$: $(bmx_macro {Bmx} $@ $1 $) $1
# The next line is broken in two for readability
R$*			$: $(bmx_check $&{Bmx}.bogusmx.rfc-ignorant.org. $: $1.NOTFOUND $)
# The next line is broken in two for readability
R$* . FOUND		$#error $@ 5.7.1 $: Mail from $&{Bmx} refused.It is listed in bogusmx.rfc-ignorant.org.

You can grab the above sendmail code fragment from here. Always be careful if copy-pasting because sendmail uses tabs and not spaces to distinguish between LHS and RHS.

An alternative on how to use domain based blacklist zones is shown by RFCI here (and also has pointers for mail servers other than sendmail).

Αντίο

Σήμερα που όλοι αποχαιρετούν τον Μπόμπαν Γιάνκοβιτς, εγώ θα χαιρετήσω εσένα.

Πρέπει να ήσουν ο τρίτος άνθρωπος που γνώρισα στη σχολή. Φίλοι γίναμε αμέσως, άσχετα αν δεν βγαίναμε βόλτες μαζί. Άλλωστε η λέξη φίλος είναι δύσκολη (και δε συνδέεται πάντα με τη διασκέδαση). Για δέκα χρόνια ήμασταν σε διπλανά εργαστήρια (και ταυτόχρονα δουλεύαμε μαζί είτε στο NOC, είτε στο ΤΕΕ). Δεν υπήρξε ποτέ περίπτωση να αφήσεις κάτι ημιτελές, γιατί έφυγες λοιπόν;

Τελευταία φορά που σε είδα ήταν στο γάμο μου. Τελευταία φορά μιλήσαμε στη γιορτή σου. Τώρα το μόνο που έχει μείνει είναι το SMS που μου έστειλες πριν μια εβδομάδα.

Συγνώμη που δεν ήρθα να σε δω.

Αντίο φίλε Δημήτρη.

virbl.tee.gr

Actually my previous post, together with me using virbl.dnsbl.bit.nl made me think how one can share such data between many email servers under the same administrative domain. Well the answer is fairly easy:

Publish them using rbldnsd. Rbldnsd reads text files, so all you have to do is dump the B-Tree data to a text file of type ip4tset (read rbldnsd(8)):

makemap -u btree /var/cache/local/virbl/virbl.db | awk '{print $1}'

Then instruct sendmail / postfix / whatever email server you are using to use the zone you publish with rbldnsd as a DNSBL.

At this time we have a rate of blocking ~3500 connections daily from infected machines with no complaints by any user (ours or remote).

You may use virbl.tee.gr at your own risk. Machines are listed in and delisted from it automatically. Any machine that gets listed is delisted within an hour. Sending viral email to our mail servers results in relisting it. It’s governing policy is described at http://www.postmaster.tee.gr/ in Greek.

An interesting observation I have made is that (infected) machines that target one set of mail servers do not necessarily target another set (eg. your servers) within the hour. So instead of using virbl.tee.gr (if you find it a good idea) it might suit you better to implement a similar scheme for your servers.