I finally got tired of hearing “your downloads aren’t working” (thank you Kevin), so I just fixed the Carrots page. The stuff on the page is really old code, but if you need it or just want to take a look at it you can again. Sorry for any inconvenience that it’s absense might have caused.
It wasn’t quite as smooth as Jon led me to believe it would be, but my MovableType upgrade is done!
ModSecurity is a wonderful module - I can’t believe that I’ve gone so long without running it. ModSecurity has done two things: 1st, it has all but eliminated Spam comments and trackbacks (both posted and moderated) from the site’s blogs. 2nd, and far more importantly, it has taken a tremendous load off of the server!
The last few days the spam has been unstoppable… (Tom Petty allusion). Even though MT-Blacklist has been doing its job, and keeping the spam largely out of the blogs, the incoming Comment and Trackback spams have been so great that they’ve litterally taken the server to its knees. So, in typical angry neighbor fashion I put up a bigger fence! The server is now running ModSecurity and is using dynamically created rules with the help of blacklistto_modsec. The server is being forced to jump through alot more hoops in order to generate a page; hopefully, that won’t impact performance too badly. Still, any hoop that it has to jump through has got to be less of a performance hit then a couple hundred simultaneous comment posters!
Intermittent failures tonight... The memory upgrade was a bust! No idea why (yet), but the system didn't like booting with the new DIMMS. Memory issue resolved and the system was very picky about where it would let me install the new Digium TDM400P pbx card - it seems of the three PCI frequencies that the server supports it only likes the 33 Mhz. It's late, and there's more to do so (unfortunately) no working with Asterisk tonight.
About midway through the day, today, it dawned on me that I hadn't received much mail. Closer investigation revealed that I hadn't received anything at all. Watching the maillog, though, showed me that the server was still processing loads of mail - whether I was getting it or not.
But the postoffice never said anything about medilsome sysadmins! Late Saturday night I started playing with my perfectly functioning mail server - trying to incorporate some pattern matching / check sum logic. I finally gave up and went to bed, not realizing that I had inadvertantly toasted my mail server...
It's amazing how quiet things get when you filter out the background noise. Since I've been running my own mail server that's exactly how I feel. I have all but eliminated Spam - Kel actually insisted, today, that her mail was broken... Because her inbin was so empty. The biggest benefit has to be, though, that when my phone polls the server now I'm not stuck wading through all that waste!
I can't tell you how many times I've tried, unsucessfully, to get a fully configured mail server working. I would always get so close, but some key component would invaribly not compile, not work, or hose something else up. Well, at the risk of jinxing myself, that has all changed! I'm now happy to announce that I'm running my own mail server! I have POP, and SMTP after POP (both w/ SSL) as well as IMAP up and running now! Now if I can just keep my fat little fingers out of things for awhile it might just keep running...
