shwango! blog

With the deluge of viruses and worms on the ‘net, our local antivirus software wasn’t enough. Sure it would catch it on the client usually, but why even let it get that far? With a limited budget, the commercial packages just couldn’t help – and why pay when there’s a great open source package out there?!?!

Clam AntiVirus is a wonderful open source antivirus program. I’ve only had it running for a few days, but already 40 or so viruses have been blocked.

The biggest issue was that our mail server’s sendmail was a bit dated and wasn’t compiled with milter support – sendmail’s “mail filter” API. I was temped to go the download source and compile route, but didn’t really want to deal with that – I like things that are easy to upgrade and manage these days! So I did a bit of Googling and found that RedHat 7.3 RPM support was still out there! Thanks to Dag’s packages, I was able to upgrade sendmail and install Clam all from RPMs! (I was a little weary of doing this cuz I have lots of custom stuff for sendmail – virtual domains, aliases, procmail configs, etc.)

The process:

- Install apt from Dag:

rpm -ihv apt-0.5.15cnc6-1.rh73.dag.i386.rpm

-I installed the clamav, clamd and clamav-milter packages first since I was new to apt-get and wanted to test it first:

apt-get install clamav
apt-get install clamd
apt-get install clamav-milter

-Then to upgrade sendmail:

apt-get install sendmail

The version of sendmail is 8.12.8 with a ton of good compile options, including milter support. The biggest difference is that sendmail looks for sendmail.cf in /etc/mail/ not simply /etc/.

I’ve got a custom mc file for our sendmail configuration, so I had to make a few changes to it and add some things here and there to get everything working, but the upgrade when without a hitch. The biggest issues was needed to comment out the “define(`confAUTO_REBUILD’)dnl” line by putting the standard “dnl” in front of it.

Then all I had to do was add the following:

dnl # clamav milter config
INPUT_MAIL_FILTER(`clmilter’,`S=local:/var/clamav/clmilter.socket,F=, T=S:4m;R:4m’)dnl
define(`confINPUT_MAIL_FILTERS’, `clmilter’)dnl

This is documented all over the place on the web, but to get it to work I had to this:

m4 -D_FFR_MILTER /etc/mail/market-assist.mc > /etc/mail/sendmail.cf

I’m not sure if I need to update my m4 or not – haven’t looked into that one.

I also got SMTP-S working using “temp” SSL certs.

Oh yeah… I almost fogot to mention “freshclam” – it runs as a cron job to update the local virus signature database automatically! Can’t beat that!

I’m also testing SpamAssassin – I’ll post about that soon, but so far it kicks ass!

Ok, so we were all pissed when we heard RedHat Linux 9.0 was the “last” RedHat Linux. (No, RedHat’s not gone away, just too big for the little guys anymore – focusing on “RedHat Enterprise Linux.) I haven’t had a chance to play with “Fedora” yet, but that might be promising, but don’t rm -rf / your RedHat 7.3, 8.0, or 9.0 install just yet… The Fedora Legacy project might be a good thing to check out – it’s not the only choice out there though! I found Dag’s Apt/Yum RPM Repository to be just the ticket recently! There’s even some stuff for 6.2!

So why am I even looking at RPMs you ask? Don’t I compile from source? Sorry to disappoint, but I just don’t have time anymore to deal with source compiles! If I can find an RPM for the package I need, I’ll use it. Too much other stuff to work on… and I do have a life you know!

I meant to post this a while ago, but kept forgetting… for those of you who are or were in Cincinnati or Oxford, 97X is going “internet only”. It will be a bit of a bummer when travelling north and not being able to listen, but I “tune in” mostly on the ‘net anyway cuz I can’t get decent reception here. They’ve posted more details on the whys and whats. Maybe they’ll go to XM or Sirius – then I’ll spring for satelite radio for sure!

For those who don’t know, 97X (aka WOXY) is and has been the best radio station ever since 1983. I think I started listening on occasion back in ‘85 when I became a fan of Depeche Mode and they also used to have Doctor Demento on Sunday nights back then.

And yes, it is the station Dustin Hoffman quotes in the movie “Rainman”.

Looks like more and more companies are looking at blogs to help build out communities for their employees, partners and developers. I like the fact that it’s not always company specific stuff.

I have previously posted about the “mesh on mx” blog by Mike Chambers, the Macromedia Product Manager for Developer Relations. Macromedia has a bunch of other blogs available.

Now Sun and Microsoft are getting into things… You can check out the MSDN blogs, as well as Planet Sun.

I hate to admit it, but I still use Windows as my desktop OS. XP isn’t too bad for me. Sure it has its problems, but it’s what gets the job done. Linux still needs a few more refinements and apps for me to really switch. But I do love the command line! So if you need to use Windows, but want those great utils, head over to the GnuWin32 packages page at SourceForge. These utils make things better, along with WinSCP and PuTTY.

I know it was mentioned to me before, but I didn’t install MT-Blacklist until today. The blog spam just was getting out of control! Let’s see how well it works!