To hell with it

[outlier_lynn]

I gave up entirely on the greylisting perl script that came with my distribution of postfix. It is a resource hog, doesn't clean up after itself, and it's spawned processes refuse to die when asked politely.

I also discovered that I had disabled amavis-new virus and spamassassin. I forgot that was one step in the struggle to regain control of my server. :)

A bit of mad googling and I found gld. a greylisting daemon written in C. It's small, it's fast and it stores it's lists (grew and white) in a postgresql database. I'm a happy camper.

And I started up amavis-new again. Within moments, I noted that two of the five emails turned away had virus signatures. amavis-new runs AFTER all the other filters and checks.

In other computer related news, backups are a Good Thing.

I tried a short cut that backfired. I ran the command: sudo cd /var/spool/vmail; rm -rf *
while working on some email admin scripts. I was tired, okay.

sudo is a program that allows the next command to be run with superuser privileges (with a password. It ran the cd command to change the directory to /var/spool/vmail. The semicolon is a command separator and it was followed with the command to delete everything in the current directory.

When i ran that command I was in my home directory. The cd command failed for some reason and the rm command deleted everything in my home directory.

The problem with that line, though is that the semicolon would end the sudo command itself and the rm would have been executed under my more limited permission set.

Thank god for backups!

Comments

[crazed-lynn.livejournal.com]

Replying to myself doesn't mean I'm crazey. Really

[blueelephant.livejournal.com]

that sudo command would have done one thing, changed directories to /var/spool/mail, and then exited. Thus returning you to the previous directory.

this might have done what you were looking for:

sudo "cd /var/spool/mail;rm -rf *"