29-May-2014

At last
we’ve been on a short holiday: left April 30th, and returned May 18th. Some things did happen in the hardware arena within that timeframe. No problems at the server side, though. Not even a power outage and just the ordinary things. However, it seems that either my access-filters in the router are tightened enough or ISPs block notorious spammers: but the amount of emails has indeed decreased:
PMAS statistics for April
Total messages    :   3360 = 100.0 o/o
DNS Blacklisted   :      0 =    .0 o/o (Files:  0)
Relay attempts    :   1310 =  38.9 o/o (Files: 30)
Accepted by PMAS  :   2050 =  61.0 o/o (Files: 30)
  Handled by explicit rule
         Rejected :    925 =  45.1 o/o (processed),  27.5 o/o (all)
         Accepted :    232 =  11.3 o/o (processed),   6.9 o/o (all)
  Handled by content
        Discarded :    265 =  12.9 o/o (processed),   7.8 o/o (all)
     Quarantained :    381 =  18.5 o/o (processed),  11.3 o/o (all)
        Delivered :    247 =  12.0 o/o (processed),   7.3 o/o (all)
There are three logs on relay attempts to be searched: on April 20th, 21st and 22nd the amount of attempts cause large files…
Blacklisting has been switched off some time ago. For some reason, after stopping and restarting PMAS all mail was blacklisted – regardless it’s origin and what server was questioned. But given the remained: the rules in PMAS seem strict enough to cause a problem.
On other hardware – not exactly to do with IT, but smartphones tend to lean into that direction: my HTC Desire S kept failing during the holidays: spontanious reboots; the logs showed crash of ARM9 due to “radio failure”. I had similar problems before but these wer gone at some point. On return, the phone was fine for a few days but then went bazurk: Switching it on, it rebooted even before the screen to unlock the SIM card appeared. No way to get into the phone….So I bought myself a new one – the more sophisticated (and more expensive) than the old one (well, that was a present of my former employer so I dodn’t have any cost) and state-of-the-art HTC one (M8).
A new toy!
Preparing upgrade of VMS
It’s been on the shelf fro quite some time now, but I just completed the backup of the system disk in preparation of an upgrade to VMS 8.4. Finally. It is triggered by the fact that the CRTL-issue I have run into some time ago has been solved for 8.4, so to get around it, I have to do the upgrade. Got all the latest patches so this will be done soon. Very soon. Hopefully I won’t run into nasty issues; one thing that has changed (as I became aware of) is the configuration of the mail server: now completely in the configuration file – the Unix way of doing things…. But given earlier updates (7.3-2 -> 8.1 -> 8.2 -> 8.3) without a glitch, I expect no real big problems.