Monday 19 December 2005

Spam + Cacti + Wildfire = Software Sammich

It turns out that I was more then a little confused on how SMTP AUTH/SASL worked. Now I have no idea how to get that going... Ugh!

On the other hand, I did get something actually working for Spam/virus filtering. Turns out AMaVIS is a handy scanner that includes spam filtering and will run external spam filtering and virus filtering. I was able to hook AMaVIS in to the mail system to scan spam and ClamAV into AMaVIS to combine the scanning on that front too. So far, it is already tossing out spam, yay! It is supposed to be assigning a score to all mail but I'm not too sure where that is at... Anyhow, it is throwing spam out so I probably just need to do some tuning.

In other messaging news, of the instant type, Jive Messenger released version 2.4.0 including a new name: Wildfire. I've upgraded the Jabber server from Messenger 2.3.1 to Wildfire 2.4.0. Always good to see great projects remaining active. Gaim 1.5 still doesn't work with it (TLS issue of some sort still) but Gaim just announced their 2.0 beta. I haven't tried that yet but I doubt I'll get to it until the stable release what with the holidays and such.

The last interesting tidbit is that I installed Cacti from package on Siona. I just added Siona and Friday in there and so far so good. Check it out and login as username "guest" password "password". I like this tool...

For upcoming plans, I'm still sorting out some of the domain and hosting issues leftover from Nikita's passing. Not too tricky, but we just have to get some stuff cleaned up. Mmm also syndicating news. Possibly giving up on my hand-written news doodad and switching to something with features, like WordPress. Who knows? Stranger things have happened.

Tuesday 6 December 2005

Goodbye, Nikita

Nikita has officially passed on. May she find peace in Computer Heaven where all good computers go if they have led a long and happy life which Nikita certainly had. She first started out as workstation ion 1997 with few aspirations other then to run a word processor, a browser, and a couple of games.

In her life, Nikita was able to overcome this humble life of low-speed network links and buggy office applications to become a webserver on a high speed connection, eventually as high as dual-OC3's with failovers. In her last days, she served as a primary DNS server and mail host for a lucky group of friends.

It was on a quiet Sunday in December when the power went out. Her health had been failing but this was the last power failure for her. She passed quietly idling and is in a better place now.

Nikita
Rest In Peace
~1997 - December 6, 2005

Popular Posts