05-Mar-2017

Maintenance
Apart from what happened last month, there is not much to look at. PMAS does its work:
PMAS statistics for February
Total messages    :   2534 = 100.0 o/o
DNS Blacklisted   :      0 =    .0 o/o (Files:  0)
Relay attempts    :     73 =   2.8 o/o (Files: 28)
Accepted by PMAS  :   2461 =  97.1 o/o (Files: 28)
  Handled by explicit rule
         Rejected :   1682 =  68.3 o/o (processed),  66.3 o/o (all)
         Accepted :    200 =   8.1 o/o (processed),   7.8 o/o (all)
  Handled by content
        Discarded :    278 =  11.2 o/o (processed),  10.9 o/o (all)
     Quarantained :    264 =  10.7 o/o (processed),  10.4 o/o (all)
        Delivered :     37 =   1.5 o/o (processed),   1.4 o/o (all)

Just the number of rejected messages is larger than normal, I’ve seen them coming in in the last week only; 26-Feb-2017 being most: Looking at the size of operator.log, it was over 1200 blocks on that day; the others that week were over 400, except for one, where less than 100 should be normal. The number of relay attempts was little; only on 08-Feb the attempts resulted in a log that was over 4 blocks in size, and mainly from one source – trying to relay. It could have been a test, sending from address 208.100.26.229 as “antispam@nmap.scanme.org”, “antispam@diana.intra.grootersnet.nl” or “antispam@[82.161.236.244]” to a number of addresses all related to the same organization. I checked this address and it is listed in a number of blacklists, so it might as well be an attempt to see if there is a way to abuse the mailserver. But that checks the IP address of the sending server and if it not from my own address, and the recipient is outside my domain, it will fail.
As simple as that.

Installation
I had some trouble installing OpenVMS on the Itanium servers – one at least. It would find the DVD, start reading it but then halt. First, I thought it could have been a bad DVD, so I tried to read it on my old PWS, and I could access the files (not run the executables because these at I64 images, not AXP…). The DVD wasn’t as bad as I thought it was….
So first I could try to make it accessible over the network: meaning I would have to start Infoserver on the PWS (which should be possible since that runs VMS 8.4). At last, found the documentation on the Internet to set it up, but the docs were a bit limited but with the examples, I think I had it all right, but in the end, I couldn’t start Infoserver on that box – still have to find out what caused it to fail.
Second, I found out that I need to enable the iLO unit first – meaning I had to connect it the the network (it will be set up using DHCP to begin with), see what address was assigned to it – with dhcpdbdump, the MAC address is recognizable as from the Itanium server) and access MP on the iLO using telnet (it’s on the local network so why bother about security?). Now I could boot from internal DVD and installation did start and finish. The only thing yet to do is to install the licenses and do the TCPIP configuration (and give the iLO its own. fixed address (and name)). BTW: The first Itanium is now named Iris.

No news on the PHP front
There are a few things to consider.
First, in the WASD global configuration I have a line:

[DclScriptRunTime]

.PHP $PHPWASD

causing PHPWASD to run whenever there is an extension .PHP found. I’m pretty sure it will run the executable the logical PHPWASD refers to, because otherwise there would have a version conflict with PHPSHR.EXE: Each version I have on the system resides in its own directory, referred to by logical PHP_ROOT:. This is the item that is used when I run PHP_INFO.PHP, there is no other reference elsewhere to this script; And it shows all the correct data – with the correct version at that time.

However, in the mapping, the blogs have their own reference:

redirect /sysblog /sysblog/index.php
map /sysblog**/ /sysblog*/index.php
exec+ /sysblog/**.php* (phpwasd:)/sysblog/*.php* ods=5
pass /sysblog/000000/* /sysblog/* ods=5 search=none dir=noaccess
pass /sysblog/* /sysblog/* ods=5 search=none dir=noaccess

which runs PHPWASD (the logical – explicitly via the logical) by it’s own rule.
Now what happens if BOTH start running? It might mean that the one that I expect to run (the one in the mapping) will run into an I/o error, or it might not be able to access a sourcefile; or it may finbd it’s access to the database is blocked, causing a timeout in database access (as is shown in the PUP error log file).

Another possibility that has crossed my mind: In the past I noted that PHP 5.3 and up will run a larger number of sub-processes. It might be that I have run out of process slots, or that the parsing, translating and execution of PHP code takes a far larger amount of system resources, causing the script not finishing in time (that is noted too, so I doubled the maximum execution time), but it might be the time to finish database transactions may have to be increased too. Another (and perhaps, better) solution is to increase the working set of the PHPWASD: processes: It hasn’t been changed since I started running PHP on a 256Mb system….Now I’ve seen that the peak working set can be increased – given the number of pagefaults…

So these are paths to consider. I didn’t get an answer of Mark Berryman yet.