Maintenance triggers investigations
Although the montly processing didn’t reveal a lot of (potential) trouble:
PMAS statistics for February
Total messages : 2338 = 100.0 o/o
DNS Blacklisted : 0 = .0 o/o (Files: 0)
Relay attempts : 218 = 9.3 o/o (Files: 29)
Accepted by PMAS : 2120 = 90.6 o/o (Files: 29)
Handled by explicit rule
Rejected : 1057 = 49.8 o/o (processed), 45.2 o/o (all)
Accepted : 202 = 9.5 o/o (processed), 8.6 o/o (all)
Handled by content
Discarded : 227 = 10.7 o/o (processed), 9.7 o/o (all)
Quarantained : 347 = 16.3 o/o (processed), 14.8 o/o (all)
Delivered : 287 = 13.5 o/o (processed), 12.2 o/o (all)
and the number of relay attempts were not that much (less than 100 spread out over a few days), there was some concern over mail: Quite a lot of messages appeared in the last weeks that carried a ‘grootersnet.nl’ sender, but all of them faked: I don’t have accounts like ‘webmaster’, ‘test’, ‘info’, ‘admin’ of ‘contact’. Nor are addresses 46.32.239.98, 149.202.152.58 or 208.100.26.232 connected to my domain. According whois, the owners are webfusion.com (UK based), OVH (Germany) and Steadfast networks (US).
ANY email from the grootersnet.nl domain will be sent from Diana.intra.grootersnet.nl, address 192.168.0.2. ANY other sender IP address that appears to be sent from this domain, but without this signature, is FAKE.
To those that still want to try relayiung mail: FORGET IT. Both the SMTP frontend and the SMTP server will not accept other destinations than my own, unless the mail originates from within the local network.
For the record, under the newEU ruling, I may have to report break-in attempts, even on d non-commercial system. I will.
WP update – continued
I checked the files of the container (WordPress.zip) and the result on the VMS box, and I found a few nasty
differences.
VMS (in my standard setup) will translate dots in a filename to underscores. Reversing that action would take a lot of work: Scanning all files and rename the ones that need to be re-versed. Luckily, WordPress has no underscores in the names, throughout the whole package so I could develop a command procedure to do the job. It served me well: Installing WordPress the usual way, rename the directory the unzip creates, set a logical and run the procedure; No extra work except changing the logicals of each blog referring to the right WP version.
But version 4.4.2 proved to have a trick. mainly in code included from other parties: directories that contain underscore in the name. It may, of may not have caused the problems I ran into, but this should be handled. There were just a few, but in one case, the directory contains some files with underscores by origin, and some that where underscore was the result of the replacement.
But in the end, it was not a big change in the procedure to handle these differences: Just check if a particular string occurs in the file specification and if so, skip processing. I ran it against the latest WP version (still 4.4.2) and that seems to be fine now. Next, check if this will do the trick and allow 4.4.2 to run. For that, both regular blogs need to be offline to prevent interference (of I have to set up a separate environment – whatever is easiest).
Work on the power grid ahead
We got a notice from the company maintaining the power grid that on 24-Mar-2016, there will be a power interruption between 8:30 and 12:00. It will mean power will be cut off for some time.
So I’ll have to do some preparations.
One possibility is to enable the serial console on a laptop (with sufficient power when fully loaded) and hook that up on the COM port; Add some external control on that system so when power is restored, I can reboot Diana. Otherwise, the system will be down all day….
