19-Sep-2011

Maintenance

Once again, I wasn’t able to check on the site on the change of the month, and other (more, and less important) jobs interfered. But yesterday I blew the wiki – more on that later – so I had to get into the system anyway….
As to be expected, there were no surprises on the monthy cleanup. Mail statistics are in the logfile:

PMAS statistics for August
Total messages    :   1052 = 100.0 o/o
DNS Blacklisted   :    281 =  26.7 o/o (Files: 31)
Relay attempts    :     87 =   8.2 o/o (Files: 31)
Accepted by PMAS  :    684 =  65.0 o/o (Files: 31)
 Handled by explicit rule
        Rejected :    128 =  18.7 o/o (processed),  12.1 o/o (all)
        Accepted :    213 =  31.1 o/o (processed),  20.2 o/o (all)
 Handled by content
       Discarded :    106 =  15.4 o/o (processed),  10.0 o/o (all)
    Quarantained :    180 =  26.3 o/o (processed),  17.1 o/o (all)
       Delivered :     57 =   8.3 o/o (processed),   5.4 o/o (all)

So not too bad indeed. I don not know what happened in the Internet but the number of spam messages has indeed dropped – as well as the number of relay attempts. Perhaps because the Internet address has changed last month…
Wiki trouble

It all started with yet another bogus user.
When a new account is created, I’m informed, and normally I’ll give them the benefit of doubt, and once they have created a file without creating the personal homepage, and espsiaccly when it’s content is inappropiate, I delete the post and the user. In a specific order: Remove all notofications, delete the post and then disable the user forever. And logout.
Here I made a mistake, I guess. and whatever I tried, I could no longer login as administrator….
It seems MoinMoin doesn’t offer a facility so reset the password and signal it by email – or I have to change the address. But I do get signals from the administrator, so what’s wrong here?
Today I restored a beackup of a day before, but that did’t quite work as expected, but after having changed ownership to the user that the webserver uses to access these files, I was able to regain control.
I know I need to upgrade,,,,
sysblog troube
Almost the same applied to the SYSMGR blog, but at last that offers teh ability to reset teh admin password on request. So that was solved easily. And of course: bogus users have been removed.

10-Mar-2009

VMSWiki actions
In the last few days, several new “accounts” have been created in the wiki – bogus names and bogus email-addresses. At least, the didn’t look like valid ones (though I won’t rule out they could be valid). But now I get an email if an account has been created, and that lessens the need to scan the webserver access-logfile for abuse of the wiki.
But still, access to the files I deleted earlier is still attempted – from several places wordlwide, including search engines. So I added a rule that any accessing “/vmswiki/AirTickets*” raises an error other than “ERROR 404 – The requested resource could not be found“. It now raises “ERROR 501 – The requested action is not implemented by this server“. Practically, this is what’s I did: by this mapping I removed the possible activity 😀
The number of attempts to access these pages has since dropped.
Nevertheless, I’ll keep a close look on the we activity.