Brett Sheffield . com

I was asked today if there were any books on Nagios monitoring. There are a few technical books out there, and they’re usually out of date. The book I’ve found most useful to date was “Building a Monitoring Infrastructure with Nagios” by David Josephsen. It explains far more about the what and the why, rather than the how. Nagios has an excellent online manual, and I’ve found very few technical books that add much to that. This book, however, is worth a read:

Once again, the Scottish Open Source Awards were held as part of the Scottish Software Awards dinner at the Radission SAS in Glasgow. Thanks to Sales Agility for organizing the Awards again for the second year.

My company, Gladserv was shortlisted for the Open Source Business Excellence Award, which went to Wolfson Microelectronics. Fair enough - amongst other things they have a full time Linux kernel developer on staff!

What I found interesting was that none of the shortlisted entries for the Open Source Business Excellence Award were software companies. Two are IC companies: National Semiconductor and Wolfson. And then there’s Gladserv, a Hosted Services and Infrastructure company. We all use and develop software in our business, but software is not our business.

This got me thinking. Gladserv doesn’t publish a lot of code, which isn’t itself a problem. However, we publish a lot less code than we write. Our arrangements with our clients mean that everything we write is available under the GPL, but that’s not a lot of good if it never makes it onto an ftp server. We need to do better, and in 2009 I plan to make sure we do. Along with testing and documentation, publishing needs to become a standard part of our development process.

I’ve added individual country zones to georbl.info. If you’re only interested in one zone, or are using it with something that doesn’t support TXT lookups (postfix without patching?) you can perform lookups with less hassle.

If anyone has some config examples for other MTA’s, or knows if postfix will support TXT lookups, please let me know. Otherwise, I’ll write something up later myself.

We’ve had a couple of customers who want to be aggressive on spam, *but* don’t want to risk losing any business emails, however broken the mailserver that it originates from.

The oil industry seem to be particularly bad, and having two marketing companies using our service and a chain of casinos also make for fun times when using various filters.

A couple of months ago I implemented some tighter spam controls. Basically, enforcing the RFCs a bit more tightly because we know spammers take short-cuts. Most of these controls are still in place, but I’ve had to exempt several of our customers due to complaints that email wasn’t getting through. It seems it’s not just spammers that take short-cuts - there are a lot of amateur mail admins out there, and we’re not just talking cowboys who’ve thrown an M$ Exchange server in without taking it out of its cellophane. We’re talking BIG companies (lots in the oil industry), technical companies, all sorts.

You’d think being strict with enforcing RFCs would be reasonably safe, but I’ve lost count of the number of mailservers that don’t have a postmaster address set up, that send from invalid addresses, don’t have reverse IP resolution set up etc. etc. etc. These are really good ways to catch out spammers at smtp time, but from time to time it catches a real email and I’m tired of explaining to customers that it’s the other guy’s mailserver that’s broken.

Many email RFCs have been broken, bent and ignored for so long that suddenly enforcing them breaks things.

Rejecting mail at SMTP time is the “right” way to do things. It reduces bandwidth, memory, cpu and disk usage and eliminates backscatter. In a large ISP the two main costs are power and bandwidth, and so there are real cost savings to be made by enforcing RFCs at SMTP time. It’s even good for the environment. By ruthlessly checking for a postmaster address I know that while I sit at my keyboard here, I’m doing my bit for the polar ice caps.

By fortunate coincidence, the most problematic of our clients *only* receive email from UK companies + a couple of known addresses that we can whitelist individually. So, if we could whitelist *everything* from the UK as well, we’d be pretty sure of not missing and valuable emails.

I’ve taken an old script of Dan Shearer’s (thanks Dan) for grabbing the IP ranges from RIPE, APNIC, AFRINIC, ARIN & LACNIC, updated it and hacked it around so it spits out zone files suitable for use with rbldnsd. If anyone else wants to make use of it, feel free. http://georbl.info/

The Scottish Open Source Awards opened today, 1st August 2007 at 9AM, for nominations and entries. The awards are open to business, government, education, not-for-profit, charities and students, who contribute to or use Open Source Software or services.

Press Release

Scottish Open Source Awards website.

When testing routing behavior in Exim, remember to flush the callout cache. If an address callout has failed, that failure will be cached to speed up routing should another email arrive for that address. This is normally a good thing, but a pain if you’re testing configs because you’ll keep getting the address rejected even if you’ve fixed the routing problem.

rejected RCPT <joe@bloggs.com>: Previous (cached) callout verification failure

There are two solutions.

The first is to turn off callout caching using the no_cache option in exim.conf. eg:

verify = recipient/callout=no_cache

or you can flush the callout cache. Simply -HUPing or restarting exim won’t do. You need to delete the cache manually:

cd /var/spool/exim/db
mv callout callout.deleted  # or just delete it

When my grandfather was a boy, back in the days when everything was black and white, he waited up all night so he could witness the release of Debian Sarge. Now I, too, can say I’ve witnessed the release of that Halley’s Comet of distros, a new Debian Stable…

Debian 4.0 (Etch) became the stable version of Debian yesterday. If you’ve been using Etch prior to this, you will need to add security updates to your sources.list:

#
#  /etc/apt/sources.list
#

#
# etch
#
deb     http://ftp.uk.debian.org/debian/     etch main contrib non-free
deb-src http://ftp.uk.debian.org/debian/     etch main contrib non-free

#
#  Security updates
#
deb     http://security.debian.org/ etch/updates  main contrib non-free
deb-src http://security.debian.org/ etch/updates  main contrib non-free

Running apt-get update you may run into these errors:

W: Conflicting distribution: http://security.debian.org stable/updates Release
     (expected stable but got etch)
W: You may want to run apt-get update to correct these problems

Check your sources.list file again, and explicity use “etch” instead of stable as on some mirrors they don’t seem to be the same thing, yet. Then re-run apt-get update.

Welcome to Debian 4.0!

What’s New
Release Notes
Upgrading from Sarge to Etch

The deadline for registration as a system builder under the WEEE(EEY) legislation is today. ie. If you’re building and selling your own systems or rebranded hardware, you’re meant to join a scheme and then pay wodges of cash to ensure environmentally friendly disposal of your systems when they end of life. This doesn’t apply if you’re reselling someone else’s branded systems.

The legal stuff:
http://www.dti.gov.uk/files/file35992.pdf

http://www.dti.gov.uk/innovation/sustainability/weee/page30269.html

Now our penguins are safe.

Anyone looking for amusement should head to their nearest computer shop and ask if they’ve “registered for WEEE”. Photos of the resultant facial expressions should be sent to me. Prizes awarded.

Google “freeserve spam” or “wanadoo spam” and you’ll see these guys get themselves blacklisted frequently by dns blacklists for backscatter spam and for spammers using their network. Spamhaus, Spamcop and Sorbs all pick up some of their servers regularly. Their mails get bounced by any email provider using dns blacklists. Unfortunately, people keep using them. Why?

I’d write more on this, but so many have already.

If you’re attached to your Freeserve/Wanadoo/Orange account, but are sick of having your emails bounced, I suggest reading Andrew West’s Gmail workaround for Orange/Freeserve/Wanadoo customers with email problems.

One of the domains I host has recently attracted a lot of backscatter spam. What is backscatter? Let me explain.

If a spammer fakes an email address on someone else’s domain, some incorrectly configured mailservers receiving the spam will bounce the message back to the (apparent) sender. Meaning whichever poor schmuck has had their domain faked will get a huge pile of bounce messages. Thousands. Some misguided email administrators will even ban email from the domain and/or mailserver that appears to send the message.

Despite the abundance of information available on backscatter spam, there are still loads of mail servers that will happily bounce mail in this manner. Exim, Postfix and Sendmail, configured correctly, are all capable of dealing with this problem. If you’re looking for a reason to avoid using qmail, backscatter spam would be a good place to start.

The only time a mailserver should reject a message is at SMTP time. ie. when it is still connected to the sending machine. Once a mailserver has accepted an email for delivery it has made a commitment to deliver the email. Therefore a mailserver should never accept email that it isn’t able to deliver. Bounce messages should only be sent to local clients to indicate that their message did not get through.