Email Server

I’m not a big fan of using greylisting to cut down on email spam, since it tends to big a big pain in the ass when I run into it running on other email servers. On the other hand the amount of incomming spam has risen to a level where I decided it’s time to really do something about it (not that Spamassassin was doing a bad job, but it shouldn’t have to go through hundreds of mails each day to sort out the 15-20 real mails).

So I did a quick google what packages were recommended for greylisting with exim, and ended up using “greylistd” which came with a nice example config for exim. I went through the config and loosened up the settings a bit. And after letting it run for 2 days, the stats say that a bit over 96% of incoming mail was never retried (e.g. either spam, or a crappy MTA sending me mail).

Next thing I’m having a look at is SPF. I’ve got it up and running, but it only throws warnings to the log right now, doesn’t block anything (same goes for messed up DNS entries of servers sending me mail).

Something positive I noted was that the number of MTA servers supporting TLS connections seems to be rising. Server <-> Server encryption of data is a good thing. Having users view and send mail via secure HTTPS/SSL/TLS cconnections is pretty useless if the mails gets forwarded to the destination in plaintext.

nForce4 and ActiveArmor

God that crap just cost me a half a day getting my network running again. Even had to downgrade my bios to get my network running again. It was so messed up, that it didn’t even work when I booted from a linux CD. Crappy nForce drivers and crappy nvidia ethernet port. Windows didn’t work again until I installed the stupid nvidia firewall software because for some strange reason there is no other way to turn off nvidia’s ActiveArmor junk.

How stupid is that, having to install useless firewall software in able to turn off the firewall.

Climbing

Like most mondays I was indoor climbing yesterday. Today, almost every muscle in my body is sore with my arms on top of the list. Now don’t anyone dare give me a “hah, you were climbing wrong”, I know that you push yourself upwards with your feet and don’t pull with your arms.

Nothing much else been going on lately

RSS Feeds

Ok, so today I’ll post some interesting RSS Feeds I have laying around here.
First off is the “BuHa Board Feed Aggregator” http://85.17.201.20/buha/feed.rss2 (Grüsse an xaitax die dreggs nudde, danke für’s Einrichten).
Then we of course have milw0rm, can’t live without that one http://www.milw0rm.com/rss.php
I’ll wrap it up today with a box.sk feed http://neworder.box.sk/rss/news.xml

The other feeds i regularly read are mostly blogs of friends, so if you know me, and have a blog … yeah, I read your RSS feed.

PS. I still haven’t fixed the “You do not have permission to do that.” WordPress error. It’s really starting to bug me.

Camping

So last weekend we went camping (if you can really call it that). “Camping” as in 750 people from the DLRG in our state (german lifeguard association). Since our group was only about 15 people this time, we only needed 2 tents (one to sleep in, one to cook in) and a pavilion for about 20 people. was lots of fun as always. There was a river about 2 meters from our tents, so we used that as a fridge for the crates of beer (yeah, I know they float, fixed that by sinking the bottom into the mud in the riverbed)

I managed NOT to get sunburned, which is pretty impressive considering the weather 😉 We were really in the middle of nowhere this time. Taking a shower required a 20 min. walk into town where there was a outdoor swimming pool/area that we had free entrance to.

The official summary can be found here …