Day: January 2, 2015

Some updates
Some updates that I could download in the beginning of December weren’t installed yet; but the next update is said to be available. It might be – but I have no longer access to the patch management site..So this was all I could do: install what still had to be done. Plus the latest OpenSSL one – which is available at no cost because it’s open source 🙂
No problems here.
Since this type of updates require a reboot, I also wanted to see whether I could now use PHP 5.3.14 – which gave severe trouble last year. I might need that for yet another update: WordPress to version 4.1. Installation is no problem, though some files have dots in their names and any by the first will be replaced by an underscore. This is common when using unzip – but I found that gunzim and VMSTAR doe the same. I know I can force the system to allow them but a simple script does the trick as well:

$A:
$ f = f$search("[...]*.*_*")
$ if f .eqs. "" then exit
$ f = f$element(0,";",f)
$ s = 0
$A1:
$! Find the last "_" before end of stting. This needs to be replaced
$ f2 = f1
$ f1 = f$element (s,"_", f)
$ if f1 .eqs. "_" then goto A2
$ s = s+1
$ goto A1
$A2:
$! Now F1 = "_" and F2 holds the extension.
$! so the target name will be f, minus "_(F2)" , and extended with ".(F2)"
$ f1 = f - "_''f2'" + ".''f2'
$ copy/log 'f' 'f1' !! or rename. COPY because it's safer.
$ goto A

This worked for previous versions as well, though I previously looked for _PHP only at first but soon found that there are _CC and )JS as well. This one takes care of all…
Next I created a database for this version but the installation script fails because the glob() function in found undefined. So upgrading to 5.3 might do the trick; I tested that last year but found it not well working. But that was VMS 8.3, and now I’m on 8.4, it may make a difference….
So I booted the system with PHP version 5.3.14, but for some reason, none of the blogs reacted. Even WATCH didn’t show much: just that the server returned error status 500 plus some extra data that (I think) shouldn’t be there. This is something to be investigated with Mark Berryman, once more. The problem is that I cannot get the lastest version – his site does no longer respond. Even email may be impossible…
So I reversed to 5.2.6 – because that does work.
Maintenance
The usual stuff – a bit more work this time since the 2014 logs are to be archived and stored. No surprises in mail – though the number of messages is a bit higher:

PMAS statistics for December
Total messages    :   2866 = 100.0 o/o
DNS Blacklisted   :      0 =    .0 o/o (Files:  0)
Relay attempts    :   1495 =  52.1 o/o (Files: 31)
Accepted by PMAS  :   1371 =  47.8 o/o (Files: 31)
  Handled by explicit rule
         Rejected :    782 =  57.0 o/o (processed),  27.2 o/o (all)
         Accepted :    234 =  17.0 o/o (processed),   8.1 o/o (all)
  Handled by content
        Discarded :    178 =  12.9 o/o (processed),   6.2 o/o (all)
     Quarantained :    144 =  10.5 o/o (processed), 
  5.0 o/o (all)
        Delivered :     33 =   2.4 o/o (processed),   1.1 o/o (all)

This larger number is also reflected in the anti-relay logs: especially 10-Dec there have been many attempts (1250) from one address: 58.251.146.185, which is 163.com – a Chinese site I knw for spam and intrusion attempts.
All files of 2014 that are now closed (some are still in use : Web, FTP …) have been consolidated.