Category Archives: Computers - Page 2

Greylist stats

Posted by on 23 January 2010 1 comment

Remember that I wrote back in december about greylisting?
Now its nearly a month later, and my main mailserver still uses greylisting. Below here are some stats from this server:

web:~# greylist stats
Statistics since Thu Dec 24 12:59:53 2009 (30 days and 3 hours ago)
——————————————————————-
708 items, matching 12049 requests, are currently whitelisted
0 items, matching 0 requests, are currently blacklisted
332 items, matching 332 requests, are currently greylisted

Of 23386 items that were initially greylisted:
- 708 ( 3.0%) became whitelisted
- 22678 ( 97.0%) expired from the greylist

As you can see the stats are since December 24 last year. Since that moment only 708 pairs of mailserver with emailaddress have been whitelisted (And probarly a lot of that is from a phpBB.com related server :P ). Of these whitelisted addresses the server accepted a bit more as 12000 emails.

Nothing special yet. Looking below, since that starting date around 23000 pairs were greylisted. Of these 23000 only those 708 mentioned earlier are whitelisted. That means 97% probarly is spam of what total is received at that server! Maybe there is some real mail in there, but if there is (What I dont think really), that server is probarly not connected properly. I didnt notice iam missing any mail, so I suppose iam not missing anything.

But these numbers are, what I think, pretty good. It means the spamfiltering done at the server level doesnt need to run on that many mails, what means less CPU usage for that. Iam, at this moment, not sure if the RBL checks are done before or after the greylisting, so maybe these numbers can be even higher when iam not using RBLs at the mailserver. And the same applies for some other checks that are done by exim.

Currently, there is one smaller problem with using this method. As backup MX iam currently using the MX from my host. However, when my mailserver now denies the mail for 10 minutes, it goes to the backup MX (Pretty logical ofcourse), however, the backup MX doesnt run a greylisting, so it just accepts the mail, and directly tries to deliver it. However, the greylisting now denies it again, so it needs to wait again 10 minutes. Due to this, the stats are also probarly a bit off.
A solution for this will be to run the backup MX myself, what hopefully will be happening soon, when I get my second box fully installed :P

And now some other real stats. Iam currently receiving at max 10 spam emails a day. Thats something I can live with. But still 10 to much. Luckily enough they are directly filtered and moved to the spam map when they arrive.

Ajax Shoutbox, no new life.

Posted by on 2 December 2009 1 comment

I know I wrote some time ago a post about that the Ajax Shoutbox gets a new life
This did happen a few days after that post. Badly enough for a lot users there were some users who werent able to follow the instructions I gave to receive support or to report bugs, and even after a few days the topic at phpBB.com was a mess.
Due to this, I decided at that moment that I again stopped the MOD, and that iam not going to publish it anymore in the feature. The MOD will, in the form of how it was, not come back again. It will not be published nor support will be given.

Posting a comment about when support starts again or where you can find the download will not help. I will not provide a download link nor provide support for it. This is caused by the few users who werent able to read what I wrote and just did what they thought was good.
Sorry all.

To give at least a very very very small bit of hope. For a current new site iam currently busy with a complete rewrite of it, and maybe maybe maybe I might publish that brand new version. Hower, iam not going to make anyone more happy as it looks like, so don’t expect that it happens, untill it actually did happen!

Looking back at the last 2 year

Posted by on 17 June 2009 1 comment

You might not have noticed it, but my blog here is started nearly 2 years ago, and since that moment I posted nearly 100th blog posts. This will be post number 98 :) . Read more »

Comparing a plane with webtraffic

Posted by on 15 May 2009 No comments

Yesterday there were some issues at google what caused that their site was not longer working for several people. Googles explaination is pretty funny to read, see it here

working with the PIC

Posted by on 10 April 2009 1 comment

Last week I wrote already about a schoolproject iam currently busy with. withing this project the goal is to make a wireless connection into school.

This afternoon I finally got my programmer from the UK, and now iam able to program the used microcontroller. Some pics of this can be found here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/paulsohier/sets/72157616592620524/

Hopefully I get tomorrow the first real results with the wireless connection :P

phpBB.com offline

Posted by on 22 March 2009 No comments

As all of you know, phpBB.com was offline for some time in begin of februari. I did know that a lot of traffic here at my blog came from phpBB.com, but not that it was that much.
When I looked at my site stats a few minutes ago I noticed a large change in visitors at the time phpBB.com. I really havent expected it was that much, see the attached screenshot. Read more »

Ajax shoutbox, a new life?

Posted by on 22 March 2009 13 comments

A lot people know regarding my AJAX shoutbox MOD. Beside’s that it was very popular within the community there were also several problems with it.
The main problem, for me at least, was the user. Why? They didnt read the topics. They didnt read the support topics, while in a lot cases the answer was there. Because of that the support topics where getting huge, and people started to get angry. At a moment I decided to stop with it.

Currently iam thinking of starting with this MOD again. Ofcourse I still have the source code (Even if I said to several people that I didnt have it anymore!). Iam only not sure how to set up the support for the MOD itself. Doing it at a single topic at phpBB.com will instantly means a large failure, so that will not work. So iam thinking of setting up a seperate board for it so I can use that.
Hopefully more on this soon ;)

But now the question. What features does the MOD need to have? It already had some really nice features, but I still think it need some more. Good stuff to think about ;) .

Debian lenny released, time to upgrade

Posted by on 15 February 2009 No comments

Debian lenny is official released yesterday (See for more information the debian site, http://www.debian.org/).
So I decided to upgrade one of the servers of hosthuis.nl, more exact, my dev server basicly. Its hosting mainly our nagios installation, second DNS, some downloads and my dev things. So not really important for most parts :P .
Ofcourse I started with backupping everything that was at the server already. Doing this i found out there there is like 50gig of junk at the server, that can be removed. So its not only a OS upgrade, its nearly a clean start :P . Maybe I just install the complete box again, but iam not sure for that. Depends on certian other things as well.

First we will need to upgrade apt en aptitude. This to be sure there will be no problems later on this traject. This can be done by running
aptitude install aptitude
After running this command both apt and aptitude are updated to lenny.

Now we first do a minimal upgrade by calling
aptitude upgrade
This will upgrade the packages that dont have any problem or something.

after this its time to do the real upgrade, and this can be done easyly by calling
aptitude dist-upgrade

After this is called the full upgrade is done, and we need to wait a bit :P

and lastly we can reboot the server and hope everything goes Ok :D

After this reboot everything works luckily, and we are finished upgrading. I will only need to reinstall nagios3, as nagios2 was removed. This is hopefully not that difficult :P

Installing freedos

Posted by on 23 December 2008 No comments

The data from the BIOS update official requires DOS to work. Iam now going to try it with install freedos, and running it then.

Firstly to do this I needed to install syslinux from the debian repo. With this ramdisk I will be able to boot with freedos later.

After installing it, I copy some files to /boot/, where grub everything excepts:
cp -a /usr/lib/syslinux/memdisk /boot/.
Now we download and extract freedos:

devbox:~# wget http://www.fdos.org/bootdisks/autogen/FDOEM.144.gz
--15:43:34-- http://www.fdos.org/bootdisks/autogen/FDOEM.144.gz
=> `FDOEM.144.gz'
Resolving www.fdos.org... 65.254.250.110
Connecting to www.fdos.org|65.254.250.110|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 109,795 (107K) [application/octet-stream]

100%[=====================================================================================================================================>] 109,795 128.41K/s

15:43:36 (128.13 KB/s) – `FDOEM.144.gz’ saved [109795/109795]

devbox:~# zcat FDOEM.144.gz > /boot/biosupd.fdd

and after that edit the menu.lst to include it.
Here we add this piece:
title BIOS update
kernel /boot/memdisk
initrd /boot/biosupd.fdd
 And now we are going to test this thing first :)
The first time after rebooting I made a small mistake, what caused a grub error, but after fixing that it works :D

After doing this I mount the biodupd.fdd and copy the files from the bios update. Lets hope it works :mrgreen:

It doesn’t work :(

Posted by on 23 December 2008 No comments

After making the floppy empty, the USB stick empty, and copying the bios update program to the floppy disk it didnt work yet.
Time to find another way of updating it :(