Boarding the Prometheus

jd — Sun, 18 May 2008 10:26:00 +0200

As I said a month ago, my main server Delmak was dying. Well it still runs (proof: you could read this blog some days ago).

Thanks to friends I host for free, they've kindly given enough money to buy a brand new server (C2D E8400, 4 GB RAM, 2x500 GB RAID 1) in order to replace the good old Delmak. This new box has been named Prometheus after the only BC-303 class battleship ever built.

Delmak was used to mainly run as a Web, mail and databases server. I decided to do use this server switch to change the server software I use.

The first mail server I setup was based on Exim 3, courier-{imap,pop}{-ssl,} with userdb files. That was... rough. Later I switched to Exim 4, using vexim, and MySQL as a back-end. That was something like 3 years ago I guess. Since then I never really touched that back. I added spamassassin and clamav filtering some months after, because some users asked for it. That's all.

So this week, I decided to switch away from this configuration. I do not understand Exim anymore anyway, so I decided to use Postfix which I often use and administrate at work. Obviously, I also now use PostgreSQL as database back-end, since it rocks, and since Postfixadmin supports it. By the way, be aware that the Debian package of postfixadmin is crappy (the configuration file is readable by anyone by default, with the database password in it). I also set up postgrey which is quite nice and efficient.

Well, then was time for amavisd-new installation, but I did not do it. Seriously, amavisd-new configuration is a bloody mess, as the language it is written in (yes, Perl).

So I switched to dspam which I heard is nice. Well, it seems to be for now, since it even supports clamav daemon usage directly, which is very very nice because that means I do not have to set up another thing for that.

I also switched from courier to dovecot, mainly because the latter seems to be faster and lighter. I then changed the default virtual_transport to Dovecot LDA. The main advantage of this is that the LDA updates the Dovecot index while delivering. It also supports quota, which I do not use and plug-ins, like the Sieve language for mail filtering.

So I decided to change my procmailrc to a new Sieve filter. My procmailrc is quite small since I only use regex to match lists and some mail address, so it has only something like 12 rules. And well, I did not do it since I discovered after some googling that Dovecot implementation of Sieve is grabbed from Cyrus which does not support variables for now. That means that the following procmailrc code:

:0:
* ^X-Mailing-List: <debian-.+@lists.debian.org>
* ^X-Mailing-List: <debian-\/[^@]+
list-debian-$MATCH/

which will translate to:

require [ "regex", "variables", "fileinto" ]
if header :regex "X-Mailing-List" "<debian-(.+)@"
{
    fileinto "lists.debian.${1}";
    stop;
}

But that won't work since Dovecot Sieve implementation does not support "variables". Well, since I'm not ready to list all the lists I'm subscribed to, Sieve is a no-go for now. I'll stick with procmail.

Why you won't use MySQL/ndb

jd — Sun, 17 Jun 2007 11:25:00 +0200

I just failed to migrate a big project at work because of that, the D day:

Jun 15 10:46:39 hostname mysqld[20095]: Version:'5.0.32-Debian_7etch1-log'  socket: '/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock'  port: 3306  Debian etch distribution
Jun 15 10:46:43 hostname mysqld[20095]: mysqld got signal 11

So no, you won't use NDB, at least with MySQL 5.0.31 (included in etch). It's _so_ buggy that we get a segfault on the first DELETE statement with a 30 MB database.

Backporting version 5.0.41 from sid gives better results (at least for now).

I knew we should have used PostgreSQL from the beginning...

jd:/dev/blog - Tag - mysql

Boarding the Prometheus

Why you won't use MySQL/ndb