jd:/dev/blog - naquadah

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.

Updating my .plan

jd — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 12:46:00 +0200

I've been on holidays for one week now, breaking my usual workflow. Well, that allowed me to rest and to think about what I'd like to do and things I need to handle during next weeks.

The urgent things this next days will be my primary server replacement. It is currently dying, and I already had to change its power supply twice in a month. Unfortunately, I'm now at a point where I do not have any spare piece so if things go wrong again, I'm screwed. I need to collect some money and buy a new server, or maybe get a server if someone have an old or spare one to give me, I do not know yet.

On the awesome front, I'm about to release awesome 2.3, which will be the final minor release of the major branch 2. This will lead me to work on awesome 3 at a slower rate and a cooler pace.

Then, the thing I do not have to hurry for is awesome 3. There's no big problems in awesome 2, and the xcb-util stuff are not stabilized yet. After my gentle yelling on XCB mailing list, it seems that things will move but will slowly. So I do have time to make things right and do what I want on that branch, making bugfix release on awesome 2 if needed. You can read more about futur on my last post about awesome.

All this should give me some more spare time to work on the upcoming Debian release, lenny, which I'd like to work on. Two years ago (my god, time flies), we've done good work with the french cabal squashing critical bugs and I'd like to go back on this and squash asses again.

We've been almost down

jd — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 18:02:00 +0100

I had a big fright this afternoon. My friend ludo asked me to shut down my main server (delmak.naquadah.org) for racking one of my new equipement.

Delmak is my oldest server, hosting almost everything since 5 years. I knew I will have to shut it down some days, but after 280 days of uptime I was pretty confident everything will be allright.

But obviously, it refused to boot again. Fortunately, only the power was burned, and after changing it with a new one, we manage to get delmak booting again.

Now I'm really thinking about some better solution to not having everything on a server that can explose any day now.