Maintenance
No real issues; the number of operator logs is a bit larger that you could expect for a month: you could expect 31 (one for each day) but due to instalations and subsequent reboots, the amount was 37. No big deal.
No significant spam attempts, and pretty neat figures on spam:
PMAS statistics for May
Total messages : 4341 = 100.0 o/o
DNS Blacklisted : 0 = .0 o/o (Files: 0)
Relay attempts : 715 = 16.4 o/o (Files: 29)
Accepted by PMAS : 3626 = 83.5 o/o (Files: 31)
Handled by explicit rule
Rejected : 2765 = 76.2 o/o (processed), 63.6 o/o (all)
Accepted : 239 = 6.5 o/o (processed), 5.5 o/o (all)
Handled by content
Discarded : 120 = 3.3 o/o (processed), 2.7 o/o (all)
Quarantained : 254 = 7.0 o/o (processed), 5.8 o/o (all)
Delivered : 248 = 6.8 o/o (processed), 5.7 o/o (all)
On 01-Jun-2014, I installed the TCPIP-update, because the new version of POP ruins Outlook output. At least, it doesn’t show as it should. It seems the server breaks on extension header records (the ones that are added by PMAS, for instance: beginning with “X-PMAS”) and fails to recognize MIME headers; mail that is sent locally – like the T4 output and batch status messages – are Ok. Just incoming mail fails.
Sent some info on the issue to the OpenVMS Netwokring forum, got a reply mentioning a freeware POPserver but that requires TCPWare, which I don’t use and therefore it cannot be considered.
The final solution – for now – is switching from POP3 to IMAP, which was already enabled. The only problem here is the requirement of a separate mailbox file. Only to find out how I can bypass that, or change it’s location…
30-May-2014
System update succeeded
As expected, the update of Diana from VMS 8.3 to 8.4 went smoothly, as was installation of the required patches. Just rebooting the system after the first inslatted patch (Update 7) raised an eyebrow because shutting down took an unexpected amount of time – but in the end, no action was required, and all subsequent reboots went as smoothly as expected. The whole action took about three hours; the environment has been set up that between reboots, mail could be delivered (spamfilter and mailserver were accesible) but web and related – including continued monitoring – were not started so there is a gap in the performance statistics – no problem.
And yes: the problem with the CRTL that I mentioned is indeed gone.
There are more side-effects that came with the reboots: The throttle settings on the blogs are now correct, as well as the Soymail configuration. It turned out the issues I had were caused by the failure to locate .CSS files and a javascript-file, likely because some logicals weren’t defined in the proper state. Plus that I have the impression that the webserver can react more quickly. Nut there is no hard evidence, yet.
Next step is testing PHP 5.3 (where I had problems in 8.3 but none in 8.4 on the test system) and updating WordPress. It means the blogs may be inaccessible, or show problems.
Update
There is onew little problem – with POP, I think. When mail is retrieved using the POP protocol, the headers are not separated from the message, and Mime is not translated within Outlook, where it did work properly before. It might have been solved in a TCPIP patch – this wasn’t done today – or it could be a setting within the SMTP and/or POP configuration. However, the VMS documentation that is available online is not updated to version 5.7!. Scanning through the configuration files, it looks all
it all is defines properly, as it should be in the previous version. So this is something to dive into very soon!
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.
10-Apr-2014
Webmail ‘failure’
A bit of a haste, yesterday.
I guess that after installation of the webmail agent, the previous version was still in the server’s cache, and when it had to map the newly installed new version, it found a mismatch and failed.
Second, I made the mistake to $ INSTALL ADD the latest version by hand and forgot it requires privileges.I found that the logicals involved referred to the pre-10 version of the WASD webserver, and the definitions of these are in the installation script of the mail agent.
This mistake came into mind today, so this night I removed the wrongly installed version, changed the install procedure to define the logicals correctly, and launced it.
Apart from some settings that are now missing, the program runs fine., Except I think I found an anomaly, still to be investigated.
09-Apr-2014
Webserver updates
The WASD mailing list sent out a notice of a vulnerability of OpenSSL, nicknamed “heartbleed” and since this server is built using OpenSSL (be it the WADS version) it coul be effected as well. Mark Daniel has taken a look into his sources and plugged the hole – and the new kit has been made available, send out word and recommended a rebuild of WASD.
And since the latest version (10.3) was already planned, I did both in one go. So now the server runs WASD 10.3, linked with (WASD) OpenSSL 1.0.1G. In the process, I also updated the webmail program (now 1.7.0), and some other products are waiting. But Soymail returns an error:
Internal consistency failure ... language file. and WATCH doesn’t show anything weird..
It’s not something to be worried about too much. Just a nuisance.