27-Feb-2014

Mail failure
Very remarkable and unexpected: After last start of the spam filter all seemed well. It did mention status in the logfile on 25-feb-2014, but with no activity on any of the worker processes. But for the whole next day no activity was logged, as it usually does verey two hours. However, I did receive some messages. But this morniong none was received. Not even in the spam boxes. So I started an investigation and I found that all messages that I received since I restarted the service, had been blaclisted on the first entry in the list: rbl.map.vix.com. Even gmail messages – that server blocks gmail as I found out early in the process – that I had explicitly allowed, didn’t come through. So I edited the PMAS configuration, found an error in the gmail address (so it should pass now) and disabled both vox.com blacklists. After restarting the anti-spam filter, messages from gmail are now accepted, but any other is marked as blacklisted address – by the now first entry. Something is definietly wrong here…

25-Feb-2014

Freed memory
Last reboot has been over 4 month ago:
$ sho sys/noproc
OpenVMS V8.3 on node DIANA 27-FEB-2014 07:09:48.67 Uptime 132 13:58:08

and during that time. allocatied virtual memory increased to over 50%. Main users are probably the spam filter (the recommendation is to have 1Gb of memory, but I have only half, so it pages out what is not required) and teh MySQL server, mainly caches, I am told.
Both have been restarted this evening, it took just a few minutes (no reboot, of course) and that brought it back to about 10%.

03-Feb-2014

NTP issue – update
From several sides I got information on the NTP problems; John Santos (via OpenVMS SIG) suggested a test for checking whether time was updated, using ntpq (it did) , and Stephen Hoffman showed me where NTPDC is located; but I found that already, and disabled monlist as was suggested – by editing TCPIP$NTP.CONF. Now monlist doesn’t work anymore – not even on localhost (directly), nor does ntpq – runs into a timeout. The router log doesn’t show any more incoming NTP traffic either – what used to be the case when monlist was not disabled. time to dig into the manuals – if available….Enabling monlist – just to be able to do some synchronization – might be a possibility – now incoming traffic to port 123 is disabled….We’ll see.
For the rest, no real surprises:
PMAS statistics for January
Total messages    :   1414 = 100.0 o/o
DNS Blacklisted   :      0 =    .0 o/o (Files:  0)
Relay attempts    :    338 =  23.9 o/o (Files: 31)
Accepted by PMAS  :   1076 =  76.0 o/o (Files: 31)
  Handled by explicit rule
         Rejected :    445 =  41.3 o/o (processed),  31.4 o/o (all)
         Accepted :    288 =  26.7 o/o (processed),  20.3 o/o (all)
  Handled by content
        Discarded :    137 =  12.7 o/o (processed),   9.6 o/o (all)
     Quarantained :    163 =  15.1 o/o (processed),  11.5 o/o (all)
        Delivered :     43 =   3.9 o/o (processed),   3.0 o/o (all)

There have been relay attempts on a few days- on 13-Jan-2014 there were about 100 from one address. Of course these failed.