Phishing Scams – Spam Filter

     I am sure that you, like myself, are getting tired of being inundated by phishing scams.

     I have added a new plugin to spamassassin which is designed to catch phishing scams.  It works by looking for the URL’s of known phishing websites in incoming e-mails.  It remains to be seen how effective this is but any reduction in the onslaught is good.

     Positives will be sent to your ‘spam’ folder rather than INBOX.

 

Mail Issues

     There were problems with the pop/imap/smtp service this morning after the reboots.  At some point between this reboot and the previous, a Ubuntu update overwrote my systemd configuration file for dovecot, the imap/pop3 server.  My changes to this file were designed to cause dovecot startup to wait until after the /misc file system, where I have the encryption certificates for the domain, mounted.

     Because those were gone, the encryption certificates were unavailable so dovecot failed to start.  Because dovecot SASL is used for authentication in postfix, postfix also failed to function on the client mail server.  This was corrected around 7:30AM Pacific time.

Maintenance Completed

     All systems have been rebooted.  All Debian derived systems are now running kernel version 5.8.9, no longer patched as NFS fixes have been incorporated into the base code.

     All systems have been tested for NFS/NIS mounts and binding.

Reboots 3AM

     I’ll be rebooting all servers around 3AM for a kernel upgrade.  Downtime for any given service will be around ten minutes.  The total process should take about 1/2 hour.

Web PHP Outage

     Much of the webserver refused to run PHP code randomly today after I compiled in mod_authnz_external.  It should not have done this, should not in theory conflict with any of the other apache mods but obviously it did.  I will be doing further experimentation to try to nail down the cause.  I have had multi-core compiles of Apache blow up before so I may attempt a single core compile and see if that works.