Thursday, February 07, 2013

Rebuilding

Turns out the datacenter outage this week seriously damaged the host server that my VPS was runnning on. I've spent the better part of the waking hours since I got home last night rebuilding the email server portion.

I swear by Postfix, complimented by policyd-weight and postgrey. I have some tweaking to do to the policyd-weight settings and I need to install fail2ban for the spammers who continually hammer the server in spite of receiving a BuzzOffNotice. Amavis, ClamAV and SpamAssassin are fairly hands off. One site I was reading debated the need for ClamAV these days, saying that most of the virus payloads get stopped by the anti-spam measures. Interesting idea.

It's not lost on me that, yes, I should have had a backup of these files. It's not without irony that I deleted the files from the last server update just last week. I'll have to search the WayBackMachine for a few bits of website that I don't have backups of.

As for things residing in ~, I got sshfs working this afternoon and I'll be able to keep settings synced across different servers. Next step is to combine sshfs with autofs and have it mount the remote files as they are needed.


Links
Postfix setup:
http://rimuhosting.com/support/settingupemail.jsp?mta=postfix
http://colekcolek.com/2012/02/25/install-spamassasin-clamav-amavis-ubuntu-debian-squeeze/
http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/articles/focus_spam_postfix/

http://www.unixwiz.net/techtips/postfix-HELO.html

fail2ban:
http://www.howtoforge.com/fail2ban_debian_etch
http://www.fail2ban.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page



pflogsumm:
https://calomel.org/pflogsumm.html

postgrey logging:
http://www.debuntu.org/postfix-and-postgrey-a-proactive-approach-to-spam-filtering-page-2/

Wednesday, February 06, 2013

Exhasperation

Currently debating my choice in VPS provider. Before November, I was a long standing user of TekTonik VPS service, but the price and limits on certain services had me go shopping for another service. The service I opted for was 1/3 the price and allowed me to run a Tor server.

Since switching over I have had a server issue due to high loads on their LA servers which the said was due to the high number of Pacific Rim users who VPN in to access U.S. content. After getting my server transferred to Chicago, there have been several datacenter outages and one service interruption/suspension due to someone using my Tor Exit relay for spamming.

I didn't have very many issues before the move. Now after the latest host crash I am debating the need to do a new round of shopping. I am not looking forward to having to transfer server setting over all over again. I wish I could run a virtual server on a virtual server and just copy the server from one install to the other.