I just updated Qmailadmin 1.2.11 for Etch amd64/i386 to include some changes : instead of a checkbox to enable/disable spam filtering on pop accounts, there is now a list to chose what to do (no filtering, marking spams, deleting spams, learn spam, learn ham). This allow anyone to easily train your bayesian filters. Spamassassin is now recommanded and will replace bogofilter in a near future Clamassassin replaces clamfilter.pl due to performance issues. Please DO update the /etc/procmailrc-* files during the upgrade to ensure virus are scanned.

I often receive emails telling me that Dotdeb is a great tool, but that some useful packages are missing, such as some PECL extensions. I wish I could maintain many and many packages, but I don’t think it’s a good idea for the Dotdeb’s overall quality and for my free time ;) Sorry for that. Then, this article will show you how to build packages from your favorite PECL extensions in a strict Debian way, using the dh-make-php package.

Vpopmail 5.4.25 has been packaged for Etch amd64/i386 to fix some annoying bugs. It’s safe and recommanded to upgrade your servers to this version. For more information, read the official Changelog.

… World Day Against Software Patents You can : read the press announce sign or comment the petition spread the word so many other things to fight those absurd patents…

FYI, ClamAV has been removed from Dotdeb, since it is more actively maintained on Debian Volatile. Volatile is now part of the Debian project and will be activated by default on Debian Lenny. Its goal is to provide up-to-date packages of some specific pieces of software (ClamAV, Spamassassin for example). Please use it instead of Dotdeb for your mail-filtering packages.

Just a little tip : By default, Qmail listens to all the available IP address on the machine (0.0.0.0). It is possible to change this behaviour to bind Qmail to a specific IP. We suppose that you are using Qmail from Dotdeb and launching it using the provided init script, /etc/init.d/qmail. Just edit it and change these lines : sh -c "start-stop-daemon --start --quiet --user qmaild \ --pidfile /var/run/tcpserver_smtpd.pid --make-pidfile \ --exec /usr/bin/tcpserver -- -H -P -R -l 0 \ -u `id -u qmaild` -g `id -g nobody` -x /etc/tcp.smtp.cdb 0 smtp \ $rblsmtpd /usr/sbin/qmail-smtpd 2>&1 \ | $logger &" by those ones : ...

The Google Perftools, especially tcmalloc (Thread Caching Malloc), can be very useful to speed up your applications, depending on your environment : TCMalloc is faster than the glibc 2.3 malloc (available as a separate library called ptmalloc2) and other mallocs that I have tested. ptmalloc2 takes approximately 300 nanoseconds to execute a malloc/free pair on a 2.8 GHz P4 (for small objects). The TCMalloc implementation takes approximately 50 nanoseconds for the same operation pair. ...

If Dotdeb is useful for you and if you want to mirror it, just add a cron job to periodically fetch the packages : rsync -a --delete rsync.dotdeb.org::packages/ /your/local/path/ Then, if you wish your mirror to appear on the mirrors list, send me its full URL. Note 1 : mirroring once a day should be enough. More frequent updates could lead to a ban without any warning. Note 2 : Using anything else than Rsync (Wget, HTTrack…) could lead to a ban without any warning. ...

Using PHP sessions can be a problem when your PHP applications are load-balanced on many web servers. You can store them on a NFS export or recode the session_set_save_handler using a SQL backend for example. But there is no solution more efficient, more scalable, more performant and easier to deploy than using memcached… Memcached is a high-performance, distributed memory object caching system, generic in nature, but intended for use in speeding up dynamic web applications by alleviating database load… ...

Greylisting is very useful to avoid most of the incoming spam on your mail server. The Qmail packages shipped on Dotdeb have built-in MySQL-based greylisting. Here is how to enable it… Installation First of all, be sure to have Qmail installed from Dotdeb with a version number greater than 1.03-37.dotdeb.1. Then, since we’ll use a MySQL backend to share the greylisting database between several servers, be sure to have MySQL installed somewhere on your boxes. ...