My last houses lease was up at the end of June, and the next house’s lease doesn’t start until August 2, so I’m stuck at home this month and that’s where I’m working from. I figured I’d save on rent and avoid moving more than I needed to. It’s also nice to be back here to take care of some things, but I do miss Bellingham during the summer.

ResTek’s been fairly smooth this summer. I haven’t implemented too many major changes yet (I can’t do things like repartition servers from remote…) but I did manage to switch our mail server from Qmail to a much, much cleaner Postfix setup. Qmail served us fairly well, but the way it was set up involved too many “moving parts” (most of which were used to filter spam). These included: ClamAV, simscan, SpamAssassin, some TLS+LDAP patches from Qmail (part of a port, fortunately).

I ended up doing away with the server-based spam filtering and instead enabled greylisting in the spamd setup on our OpenBSD firewalls. The number of spam messages we received per day went from around 150 to 5-10 just from the simple greylisting change, which took around 5 minutes. The whole process greatly reduced the complexity of our mail server and even impacted things like LDAP because we use LDAP to store mail delivery information. It had been at the back of my mind for months now; I’m glad I just went ahead and did it.

I announced on the forums today the existence of syweb.

I better get some sleep. I have a feeling John and/or Firass will be calling me in a few hours to ask why nothing on Dev is working….