FTP Errors No More

Sunday, May 27. 2007
The FTP errors have been resolved thanks to the help of Remi_Woler on Freenode. I stopped using ProFTPd and installed Pure-FTPd from source, and set it up similarly to the previous setup. It should be all working as of this post, if not - let me know.

This fixed a common problem of random timeouts and things, we'll see.
Posted by Graham Christensen at 16:23 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)
Defined tags for this entry:

Exim: The Mail Transfer Agent

Friday, May 25. 2007
I ordered Exim: The Mail Transfer Agent from Half.com, so I can learn more about The Beast.

If you couldn't tell already, Exim (or any mail server, for that matter) isn't my strong point and it has become one big mess. The configuration files are all a jumble, and I could barely figure it out by following step by step instructions where I needed to stray from the directions.

I'm going to mirror the setup locally here and test it out before I move it to the main server, so don't worry too much, but anticipate better email service. Possible improvements include a webmail front-end.. we'll see.

This all started when I was trying to figure out how to fix the problem I've been having with Google. Since many domains have multiple mail servers, it would be difficult to catch them all. I struck up a conversation with Trii from Freenode about it, and he suggested SQLGrey, a similar implementation that will automatically detect mail servers from the same domain and allow them as valid re-tries. I wanted to try to implement this, but the Exim configuration was quite overwhelming and messy. I'm going to try to clean it up and resolve this.

Graham
Posted by Graham Christensen at 23:23 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)
Defined tags for this entry: , , , , ,

Greylistd

Friday, May 25. 2007
I've setup Greylistd to cut down on spam. It works like this:

When an email from an unknown email address sends mail to the server, it tells the server there was a temporary failure and writes the email to a db of some sort. A properly constructed email server will try again a moment or two later, resulting in the greylistd server permitting the mail, and any subsequent to pass through. A "standard" spam server won't try to resend the email resulting in the email not being put through.

This has been having minor problems with multiple outgoing SMTP servers, as when the first one fails it passes it over to the next one to try again. The server switch changes the IP and doesn't confirm the email address with Greylistd. Google is the biggest issue with that, and I've whitelisted *.google.com.

If you have any problems or concerns, comment or email me at graham.christensen@itrebal.com.

Graham
Posted by Graham Christensen at 02:01 | Comment (1) | Trackbacks (0)
Defined tags for this entry: , , , ,

FTP Errors - PASV

Friday, May 25. 2007
Recently errors have been coming in regarding FTP access via a PASV connection. I've researched the issue and have discovered its cause.

The configuration file for ProFTPd was missing a directive to limit the PASV ports to 60,000 - 65,535 instead of 1024 - 65,535. The ports from 1024 - 60,000 have been blocked for security reasons and therefore connections were not successful. The line has been added back, and it should be working just fine.

If you still have errors, comment to let me know or email me at graham.christensen@itrebal.com.

Graham
Posted by Graham Christensen at 01:54 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)
Defined tags for this entry: ,
(Page 1 of 1, totaling 4 entries)