Al’s WebLog

Morgins is moving at 11am today, Oct 12th. Korpora is kindly moving the box from Mesh Internet to NorthernColo (not to far away). Hopefully the box will be back on-line sometime after 3pm.

It was Colin and Amy’s engagement party this weekend, so SO and I headed up to Warrington. Strangely enough it isn’t at all grim up north, in fact it was an excellent weekend Particular highlights included chocolate chili, a tidy (and I mean tidy!) study and great company. The M6 tried to spoil the weekend by being a parking lot on the route south, buy the sun came out and the M6 lost

In other news, Morgins is likely going to have to move… more when I know.

I finally got bothered enough to configure “friendly URLs” on my Gallery2 install, which I really should have done properly to start with when I migrated from G1 to G1. Looks much nicer now

Plus, it looked like today’s Hungarian GP will be a wet one. Is this a good thing? I can’t remember, its been so long since there has been a wet GP.

Okay, how do I make it so mail for which my Exim is a relay (high MX) is not scanned by spamd? Whilst I don’t mind filtering spam out of ’s and others mail, I’d like the option in case they do. Thanks.

I have given spamassassin a thorough going over on Morgins. Configs tweaked, razor2 added, RBL stuff added though no SPF for an odd reason I have yet to work out. Several thousand spam mails stuck through sa-learn too. Hopefully this will help stop mailboxes filling up with junk and ham mail ending up in spam folders (which really annoys me).

In the old days I would move the Apache logs to one side, renaming them as I went, then restart the Apache. When I could use a ‘graceful’ restart this wasn’t to bad, but now I need to use a ‘restart’ (’cos graceful seems to bork with PHP) I feel uncomfortable about kicking out connections. So I was looking for options I came across something I should have known about before, but didn’t, “rotatelogs - Piped logging program to rotate Apache logs“. This seems like a nice solution, but I worry about reliability etc. Has anyone any experience of doing things this way? I would be interested to hear about them

Well, I now have ADSL Max at home. 8MBit down, 446Kbps up. This should make Avoriaz a bit nippier for those with things still on it. No bandwidth cap either, well, not that I’ll hit. I have 30GB a month between 18:00 and 24:00, unlimited outside those hours. I will run some speedtests over the weekend. Apparently over the next 10days my ISP will run tests to ensure my line is okay… these tests may cut my ADSL for 1 minute and I’ll need to reconnect afterwards. Great.

Up at 4am this morning, to watch the Australian F1 GP. It was a good race overall, thought sadly for Button there were to many safety cars. I spent a bit the the early hours taking a look at the a look at the external site interface API for Gallery, used it to stick a random image on my homepage but I could not quite work out how to add a list of newest galleries; I only managed to make it say “Array” I upgraded the Gallery software to version 2.1 whilst I was about it too. I should hack about with PHP iCalendar to make it generate the calendars down the right hand side next.

I spent a little time this morning sorting out some issues with mail on Morgins. Filtering now works (#Exim Filter does anyway), so you can create a .forward file in $home and send your spam elsewhere…

---
al@morgins ~ $ cat .forward
# Exim filter

if
  $h_X-Spam_bar: CONTAINS "+++++"
then
  save $home/.maildir/.Spam/
  finish
endif
---

in this case mail with a spam score of 5 or more will get saves into a maildir folder called Spam. I have also edited Exim to allow ‘foo+bar’ users to work (like they used to with Sendmail on Avoriaz), so ‘al+test’ will be delivered to ‘al’… I wondered why I had not been receiving some mail! D’oh!

Still not quite happy though. I wanted to add headers for spam based on conditions, but when I tried it thinks didn’t work. What I tried was:

---
  warn     message    = X-Spam-Score: $spam_score ($spam_bar)n
           condition  = ${if <{$spam_score_int}{50}{1}{0}}
           spam       = nobody:true

  warn     message    = X-Spam-Flag: YESn
                        X-Spam-Score: $spam_score ($spam_bar)n
                        X-Spam-Report: $spam_reportn
           condition  = ${if >{$spam_score_int}{50}{1}{0}}
           spam       = nobody:true
---

but this did not do what I expected. What I wanted was just an X-Spam_Score header for a $spam_score_int of less than 50, and then additional X-Spam-Flag and X-Spam-Report if $spam_score_int is more than 50 (hmm, what happens if it /is/ 50?). Ideas?

Although its not nice to see someone get frustrated, this made me happy that and I were right to move out of Mailbox. Morgins is happily running in Manchester, I need to fix email tagging with spamd, its working, then not and I can’t figure it out. I also need to work out how to filter to Courier IMAP type folders and have Pine use them too (I have the inbox working). Pondering what do do with my old mail which is in mbox format also. I have webmail working, need to https it, and also switch mail to using sasl based passwords, rather than shadow - why did I ever thing shadow passwords were better to use? I am a muppet! Avoriaz is still up in my flat and I need to switch and over onto Morgins still. Need to put the new ADSL router into my flat too… much to do!