i summon one kim

After 10 years of NNTP access to mailing lists through news.gw.com, I have decided to discontinue the service. The HTTP access was consuming a lot of resources and not working reliably. Some people were abusing the NNTP access with constant polling for new messages. The basic gateway functionality didn’t handle cross-posting. I would need to migrate the gateway to a new server this year.

Given that I don’t see any opportunities for me to fix any of these problems, and that there are public services already at a much grander scale that do everything but just much better, there don’t seem to be any good reasons to keep news.gw.com running.

Personally I think I’ll be doing casual browsing of mailing lists via gmane.org. I recommend taking a look at it. They offer two different HTTP interfaces as well as NNTP (including posting, if I understand correctly).

Another long-standing nuisance resolved: the files in the Mailman package end up with incorrect permissions, resulting in a non-functional installation. Running check_perms -f will report the problem and fix the permissions. (See PR pkg/24041 for details.)

After some more learning about the bsd.pkg.install.mk machinery, I’ve committed a fix that makes sure files are installed correctly.

I’ve been getting segmentation violation deaths in the Postfix smtp client for quite some time. I don’t remember which upgrade introduced them — especially because the problem only exhibited itself on the busiest mail server I have, relay.gw.com. It handles between 50,000 and 100,000 transactions daily.

Yesterday I dug into the topic with the help of Google. Many of the threads discussing the “killed by signal 11” problem suggested removing TLS or SASL or both from Postfix, which was not an option for me. I also didn’t think they would be the problem, because both have been deployed before the errors started. (more…)

Half a year ago I mentioned greylisting as an option to fight spam. A few months ago NetBSD.org enabled greylisting and it made a huge difference in the amount of spam and viruses being forwarded to me. Now I finally got around to deploying postgrey on the Global Wire mail infrastructure.

Greylisting is so simple that it seems strange that it is as effective as it is. I’m certainly going to enjoy it as long as it keeps working. Unfortunately I don’t expect that to be more than a year…

For implementations of greylisting on different platforms, have a look at greylisting.org.

I’ve been wanting to change the colors on this site a bit, and I finally got started by adding the header background. The photo is courtesy of Laura Selonen, a very good friend of mine. Looking at her pictures from her walks around the neighborhood has made me want to use my camera more.

Aaarrrggghh!

I ended up writing the bottom half of the previous article three times, thanks to not having been careful enough when upgrading WordPress. I had lost my fixes that send out the necessary headers to prevent the admin pages from being cached. I guess others don’t get bit by this because they don’t have ExpiresActive enabled on their web server.

Anyway, I’ve saved the changes in a patch file now, for future reference…

I wanted to see if I could have my WordPress links in the Firefox Bookmarks menu. I thought this should be possible, since it knows about RSS. From using reBlog I had learned about FeedCreator, which is a great package for quickly creating feeds. So I enhanced wp-links to support feeds.

However, I was to be disappointed — the links are in Firefox now, but they are all piled up together in a single huge menu. In the WordPress database the links are categorized, as can be seen on my links page. I was hoping Firefox would use the categories to create more subfolders.

I thought about another approach: XBEL. The format is simple enough to follow, so I added XBEL support to FeedCreator 1.7.2. This works perfectly with the Bookmarks Synchronizer plugin for Firefox. I’ve configured it to download a single subdirectory inside Bookmarks, and all my WordPress link categories show up as subdirectories inside it.

I’ve made some sample code available to show how I’m calling wp-links. The code won’t run as-is, as it calls some other libraries I’m using. It should be simple enough, though, to remove (or ignore) the “extra” stuff.

After 2 days of compiling, we have no more vulnerable packages installed once again. However, I was unable to recompile XFCE, due to xscreensaver not compiling due to the gle library not compiling: it thinks it cannot find the GLU library… (yet the pkgsrc framework says it is there…)

I was supposed to build a mail server this weekend, but that did not happen as I was spending time with the upgrades. However, I will try hard to get it done next weekend, as it would help with the stupidity (a DoS attack?) going on against our combined firewall and SMTP server. I think it keeps running out of memory at times, and dropping connections. By this I don’t mean just SMTP connections, but apparently IP flow states get lost if there is not enough memory, and suddenly I just see a “read error” from my ssh client on a remote network and lose the connection.