Chuck's Blog

Found this while stopping for lunch today. I think it speaks for itself.

I just about finished moving everything over to my server located on a VPSLink Link-3 from its previous host, a 1GHZ P-III with 512mb’s of RAM running off my DSL connection. I also opted to configure all my services manually instead of using DTC to manage it all, primarily to save on RAM.

I think I’ve fixed everything up on the xtarutaru.com domain other than moving mailboxes over, but if anyone notices any glitchs let me know.

Quick little how-to for setting up a simple postfix mail server to send outgoing emails on a Debian etch server. Really useful to have running on web server to provide for services like WordPress and SMF.

First we start off with a fairly blank VM. We’ll assume the domain your server is running on is
example.com

You want to start by upgrading all your currently installed packages.

apt-get update && apt-get -y upgrade

Then you want to install the basic postfix package

apt-get install postfix

And after downloading the package debconf will ask you a few questions

Type of server -> Internet site
Mailname -> example.com
Other destinations to accept mail for -> example.com, localhost,
  localhost.example.com

Now open up /etc/postfix/main.cf in your favourite editor and add the following to the bottom of it

smtpd_recipient_restrictions =
   permit_mynetworks,
   reject_invalid_hostname,
   reject_non_fqdn_sender,
   reject_non_fqdn_recipient,
   reject_unknown_sender_domain,
   reject_unknown_recipient_domain,
   reject_unauth_destination

These lines should prevent your server from being an open relay, and also permit any IP address listed in your mynetworks to relay through your server.

And thats it for my quick how-to on getting a simple postfix server setup for outgoing mail. The server is also ready, with a little modification, to receive mail.

Back about a month ago I signed up for a VPS plan from WowVPS; it was a pretty simple plan that had the following specs:

12GB disk space
200GB transfer
192MB RAM
3 IP Addresses

All for 10.95$ USD. Not too shabby for its price, though there was a sale at the time. (And still is as of the writing of this post!)

The only problem I ever had with them was a small billing glitch that just required me to open a ticket and provide the PayPal transaction ID, and a control panel glitch caused by me reinstalling the VPS image. Their support team took care of these problems fairly quickly, so I suffered no loss.

All in all WowVPS is a great provider. I know there are plenty of negative reviews of them out there on the web, but after trying them for myself I found no problems with them.

So for service I give them a 8/10 and for support a perfect 10/10

Alright, I’ve decided to around the middle of every month to post quickly on the current email spam trends I am noticing, so that I can compare them and figure out the best way to filter them.

So this months trend is: Invoices & Sales receipts pointing to wonderful “Canadian” pharmacy domains

An excerpt from one of the many messages I have received so far:

To unsubscribe from this mailing list, please log in to <removed>,
 click on "My Account", click "Update" to edit your registration details
and uncheck the "Receive Newsletter?" check box.
Or unsubscribe at <removed>

The most notable thing about the spam this month is the subject lines of things like “iTunes Invoice #123456″ and “Sales order from walmart.com” which is significantly annoying for those of us who do actually receive iTunes invoices from Apple.

Fortunately this spam is easily blocked with simple text analysis, so its no biggy. Its definitely better than this time last year where messages were placed inside an image and required an OCR filter to effectivly remove them from your inbox with a low false positive rate.

And if you have more gullibe users on your system your going to have to try to restrict them from attempting to unsubscribe from the spam. Unless of course you don’t mind an overloaded server and complaining users.