Locked out

Today Bruce and I tried to get access to the colocated server held at the datacentre in Manchester in order to restart a failed service and do some maintaince I have been trying to contact Lee our provider for sometime but he is priving ellusive at best and evasive at worst.

A few days ago Ian remarked to me he was worried about the amount of spam he is recieving ever loyal to a customer I decided to have a go at improving things. Last night after sorting out the dead fan dead tape drive problems started working on Mars as a sandbox before takign it live onto alpha. Last night I added the free clamav which will virus check on e-mail relayed through mars.

I have been following the tutorial on the excellent debian administration site.

Had a couple of hiccops when setting up maildrop I kept getting the following error

status=deferred (temporary failure. Command output: /usr/bin/maildrop: Invalid home directory permissions - world writable. )

In /var/log/mail.log after much messing about I found that root can receive mail in this sort of scenario using another user as an alias for root and everything worked fine.

Next is to implment on alpha, then future work move the domain handling to a database that should make things a lot easier to handle than the text file structure it would also mean we could replicate the set up much faster.