Back to Newsletters KEYWORDS=spamassassin, anti-spam, traceroute, tracert, tracert.exe, DAVROM CONSULTING Newsletter - Issue # 19 - Dated: Tue Jun 17 18:11:48 EST 2003 From the desk of David Clark No newsletter for May, sorry, just very busy time. A mixed bag of support over the last month or so. Linux, SCO (5.0.7), SnapGear, ePipes and even getting an old Stallion OnBoard 16 port to run on a Linux server (thanks for the tips Alan) - don't throw out the old OnBoards - the latest Linux versions ship with currently supported drivers. My thanks to those who have recently expressed an interest in getting the newsletter - I hope it continues to be of some benefit to our current 545 recipients. I would like to thank the reader for their time in reading this newsletter. David.M.Clark UNIX Quote UNIX, the standard that gave us the Internet standards. SpamAssassin In newsletter 11 I wrote on some methods I use here for blocking spam. Well I stumbled onto SpamAssassin for Linux a few months ago and noticed also that it is on the CD-ROM shipped with the latest PC World Magazine here in Oz (July 2003 issue) - the editor also writes on the war on spam in this issue as well. SpamAssassin is a great Linux based antispam software product that is easy to install and allows you to use a variety of methods of "plugging" it into your existing e-mail system. It plugs into MTAs such as Sendmail but also allows you to run it with e-mail handlers such as procmail. I chose the easy way out and just configured it to use procmail by simply adding the relevant entries to the /etc/procmailrc file. You can either run the spamassassin program itself or if you wish have a more "service" approach you can run "spamd" with it's client program "spamc" to do the front end processing with spamd. The spamd approach is said to be a more system resource effective way to run spamassassin so I have chosen this one. Spamassassin does not block the spammer it simply routes the e-mail to another location and I prefer to have it go to a local mailbox file in /var/spool/mail/spam - this way I can review the e-mail in this file from time to time to make sure all those nasty spams go there and not to my server e-mail users. Although it is quite affective in stopping spam going to local users, it can also put "friendly" e-mail there as well so it is well worth keeping an eye on the spam mailbox file. You can tell spamassassin to "trust" users and domains by adding entries to its "whitelist" (there's also a blacklist for ones you want to block as well). It is a bit resource hungry on my old gateway (slow CPU's suffer) so I would recommend running it on nothing less than a 166Mhz machine. The war on spam continues but at least with this one we have a good weapon. In the News DAVROM CONSULTING has been trading now for two years (as at June 1st just passed). SnapGear have released (May 29th, 2003) the PCI630 VPN/Firewall internal 10/100 card. It contains its own onboard processor and the released information states "Unlike co-processing products on the market, the PCI630 is an advance self-contained VPN and stateful firewall multi-tasking appliance." RedHat and Sun recently have entered into a global partnership to combine their technologies. RedHat will distribute SUN's Java Virtual Machine and SUN will support all x86 version of RedHat Enterprise Linux. SCO Forum 2003 will be held in Las Vegas - MGM Grand Hotel, August 17th-19th, 2003. Any old iron Some time back I asked readers to respond if they had any old gear they may have laying around that could still be used by other customers. Here is an example of some of the equipment that other sites may be able to utilise out there: Stallion EasyServerII and all serial board technologies (EasyConnects, OnBoards etc) Stallion ePipe Tape drives Wyse Terminals Monitors Modems (particularly fax capable) Hard drives (1GB, 2GB - 10GB - IDE/SCSI) Please let me know and I will start to build a central list on our website. Tech Tip traceroute and tracert.exe After recently stepping customers through the use of traceroute (and tracert.exe, the version of this program for Windows/NT), I thought I would just quickly cover this command. traceroute is a great utility for working out what gateways your server or local PC is using to get to remote server/IP destinations. For example, if we knew the remote IP address of a server in our LAN or WAN was 192.168.201.50, and we need to make sure that our local server or PC was using the correct gateways to get to it, we would type: traceroute 192.168.201.50 or for Windows/NT: tracert 192.168.201.50 The output would appear as follows: traceroute to 192.168.201.50 (192.168.201.50), 30 hops max, 38 byte packets 1 bongo (192.168.201.1) 1.514 ms 0.815 ms 3.196 ms 2 192.168.202.1 (192.168.202.1) 175.022 ms 176.638 ms 168.077 ms 3 192.168.202.2 (192.168.202.2) 179.793 ms 173.534 ms 169.709 ms 4 remote.srv.my.com (192.168.201.50) 179.834 ms 184.031 ms * Keep traceroute in mind next time you are debugging your network connectivity. Back to Newsletters 
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