Smarthost - Second copy of psa?

[mparadis]

I am in need of a smarthost to work with plesk for a few of our domains.
What I was thinking was to buy a second copy of plesk, a smaller version, and running it as a smarthost for our primary.

Anyone have any thoughts on this or how they might go about it.

Mike

 

[faris]

I think it might help if you explain what you actually mean by "smarthost".

Your question isn't really explaining what you need to do and why.

Faris.

 

[mparadis]

I think it might help if you explain what you actually mean by "smarthost".

Your question isn't really explaining what you need to do and why.

Faris.

Sorry, I was sure that smarthost said it all. It means, a secondary email server that will accept email for the primary should it be down. Users could either get their email from that secondary (smarthost) or the smarthost will forward it to the primary once it is back up.

That better explain?

 

[breun]

Take a look at Atomic Rocket Turtle's Project Gamera: it can be used as either a gateway or a fallback MX.

http://www.atomicrocketturtle.com/Joomla/content/view/77/29/

 

[mparadis]

Actually, I've installed it and am talking with those guys in their forums. I'm surprised at how it seems to be insanely easy, I've never come across a spam/virus solution that was not going to take some monitoring, some teaching, ongoing maintanance so I'm a bit confused about it right now. but, hopeful. I came across the atomicrocketturtle site quite some time ago but have never understood what it's connection is. Wa he the original plesk developer or something, and still is allowed to develop or something? Guess I should ask him that in his forums :0.

Mike

 

[atomicturtle]

Yup, I am one of the founders of Plesk

 

[mparadis]

Thought so, guessing you retained some rights then .

 

[atomicturtle]

Nothing special, I'm just a shareholder now

 

[mparadis]

Ok, so I gave Gamera a try, didn't see how it works and had to give it up. You said that it's pretty much ready out of the box and nothing else is required. I installed assp to compare it and assp is actually stopping spam while gamera is not, at all.

You might want to consider documentation. Your products always look so interesting but not for end users, more for other programmers .

Mike

 

[atomicturtle]

Works like this:

yum install project-gamera

edit 2 files (/var/qmail/control/rcpthosts and /var/qmail/control/smtproutes)

 

[mparadis]

I did exactly that. I rebooted the new server, which is dedicated to gamera, making sure that the services are in fact running, they seem to be.

I then changed the MX records of two domains and flowed them through both spam servers and only assp started catching spam instantly.

 

[breun]

Project Gamera works for us.

 

[mparadis]

Not saying it doesn't work, saying it's not as simple as install and forget. I've followed the simple directions, it's up, it's running, it's not stopping spam, not one little bit.

So, if it's working for you, what did you have to do because certainly, it wasn't as simple as that .

 

[breun]

If you want spam to be dropped instead of tagged you need to set SA_DELETE in /etc/qmail-scanner.ini. That file documents all other qmail-scanner settings. Run qmail-scanner-reconfigure after editing that file.

 

[mparadis]

If you want spam to be dropped instead of tagged you need to set SA_DELETE in /etc/qmail-scanner.ini. That file documents all other qmail-scanner settings. Run qmail-scanner-reconfigure after editing that file.

Like I said, even a short doc would help .

Ok, I'll give it another try. What else is there that I should be looking at to make this setup do it's magic?

Mike

 

[atomicturtle]

spamassassin will train itself over time, and one of its key components is the bayesian classifier system. It wont activate at all until it has at least 200 spam and 200 ham messages. You can jumpstart it if you want, (man spamassassin) or just wait and it will figure it out on its own. The other is the automatic whitelist system, which also trains automatically.

This is the documentation for it:
http://www.atomicrocketturtle.com/Joomla/content/view/77/29/ and
http://www.atomicorp.com/wiki/index.php/Project_Gamera

personally I also turn on greylisting, using the qgreylist package for plesk (yum install qgreylist), and use the zen.spamhaus.org RBL.

 

[breun]

Basic docs for qmail-scanner are on the qmail-scanner site: http://qmail-scanner.sourceforge.net/ If you have any questions about ART's software, I suggest joining the ART forum: http://www.atomicrocketturtle.com/forum/

You can change the configuration of your anti-spam (I guess you're using SpamAssassin) and anti-virus (I guess you're using ClamAV) software if you like, but that's not specific to qmail-scanner. I like to lower SpamAssassin's required_hits to something like 3 for instance (/etc/mail/spamassassin/local.cf and restart spamassassin).

 

[mparadis]

Yes, he did suggest I look up the individual components which make up the package. It certainly installed simply enough.
I've made notes of these things and will take a look and try it again.

Thanks very much.

Mike

PS: Anyone know why turning on RBL on plesk eventually kills the SMTP server?
My thought was that perhaps I had too many RBL providers in the list, thereby timing out the server?

It was just a guess.

Mike

 

[breun]

'Killing the SMTP server' and timeouts are not the same thing in my book. Are your SMTP daemons actually crashing? If not, what is the problem exactly? RBL timeouts shouldn't really stop mail from getting through. But it's good to frequently check if the RBL's that you use are still in service. How many RBL's are you using? Anything special in your maillog?

 

[mparadis]

'Killing the SMTP server' and timeouts are not the same thing in my book. Are your SMTP daemons actually crashing? If not, what is the problem exactly? RBL timeouts shouldn't really stop mail from getting through. But it's good to frequently check if the RBL's that you use are still in service. How many RBL's are you using? Anything special in your maillog?

What I said was, if I enable RBL, the SMTP server eventually shuts down. Always has, for many many versions.

Someone replied to me on another thread and reminded me that I did see something about this a long time ago, something to do with using a specific character between RBL providers in the listing.

I said that I wondered if having too many RBL providers might be causing a timeout of some sort and SMTP turning off. I removed the listings, down to two but it died anyhow after a few hours.

I'm sure there's an answer, just have to find it .

Mike