lojjic.net
Home of Jason Johnston
Thursday, November 06, 2008
This past weekend I finally stopped procrastinating and upgraded my server. It had been a long time coming. As in: the version of Ubuntu it was running had been out of the security update period. For about a year. I feel lucky it wasn't hacked (that I know of).
Anyway, I finally bit the bullet and devoted most of the weekend to backing up all the data and configuration, wiping the disk clean, installing the latest Ubuntu distribution, and setting all the services back up. For the most part it went smoothly, though there were a few gotchas I had to work through. The big change, though, was changing the setup for email. My number one priority was finally integrating a server-side spam solution. For years I had gotten by with letting everything through on the server (and I do mean everything, since I don't have a fixed set of mailboxes but put everything@domain.net in the same inbox), using a pretty complex set of client-side filters and bayesian spam detection in Thunderbird. But over time the sheer volume of spam and backscatter had outgrown this combination; the filters would move hundreds of messages to the trash folder each day, and so many were getting through that I'd have to manually delete a hundred or so more. The trash folder was getting so clogged up that connections to the IMAP server would regularly hang up trying to process it all and I'd have to log in to the server and kill the process and manually clear out the trash directory.
And it was about to become even a bigger issue, because I have ordered a G1 (should be arriving in the next week or two) and want to be able to access my email from it. It of course wouldn't have the same client-side filters, and having to sift through hundreds of spam messages a day would be completely unworkable.
So I integrated SpamAssassin into my MTA, and so far it's doing a terrific job. I've got the sensitivity turned down for the time being so it lets more things through than it normally would, just so I can be sure it's not giving false positives. So far, not a one. Then on top of that, I've integrated a set of server-side sieve scripts that handle most of what gets through. And I'm also collecting messages that get through both those lines of defense, so I can use them to further train SpamAssassin. With all this I'm down to under a dozen spams a day, and everything is much faster. Definitely workable.
There's still minor work left to be done but the server should be all back up and running like normal now. If you see anything out of the ordinary please let me know.
