Day: August 19, 2008

Spam filter enabled again
It has been running all day but since incoming SMTP traffic wasn’t redirected, PMAS didn’t have a lot to do.
Tonight I enabled it again at 19:00 by redirecting incoming mail to it’s port. To test, I forwarded a mail held at my ISP, and it got through properly. As well as messages get quarantained and discarded, just found one of each.
Hunter can do the monitoring of the anti-spam-system (if he thinks it’s needed). I’ll keep an eye on it for a few days as well.

Demeter died?
I had to do a presentation on this year’s bootcamp tonight and because of all the trouble last weekend, I had to do so this afternoon. But when I powered up Demeter – the company laptop – it failed to read the disk. Just initiates it, but there startup stopped. Luckily I was at the office and a similar system was right available, so we swapped disks to see if it was the disk or the controller. It turned out to be the controller, the system started fine so I could make a full backup of the disk (just in case) and prepare my presentation. The laptop is to be repaired – still has to go for another six months.
So for the time, I’m stuck with a somewhat slower system, with twice as many memory.

Spam filter repaired
Hunter had trouble connecting but that was caused by a typo – wrong port …
Returning late tonight, I only had time to read mail to seen how he was doing, and learned that he finally succeeded to login, and found a cause of the problems. The main issue, as I understood, was the handling of the closing of a message: <CRLF>.<CRLF> which didn’t work. That’s what I found as well, but forgot to mention. It’s something to test if TCPIP is updated! Also, the code that has to do with the verification of the FROM: address was not behaving as intended.

Well, it’s a beta so these things are to be expected.

These flaws have been repaired now, and he showed it by the result of a telnet session to the PMAS port: pretending to be a SMTP client, he typed all code (or had a script running) to see if it was handled, and it got through.

However, it was too late to reconfigure the firewall. So one more day with spam passing: about 50 for the whole day, and counting.

The whole suite will be restarted to get the correct UIC to run in; the workers still run in Hunter’s account.