One of my servers was subjected to a SPAM attack again yesterday (via PHP using an insecure php mail() call I suspect). Thankfully the user was tracked down quickly and suspended. Leaving some 10,000 messages on the queue!! Digging out the Exim Cheatsheet that I posted on this blog in December saved my bacon yet again! The argument for turning on PHPSuExec continues!

A couple of days ago I had reason to get really hands on, down and dirty with Exim my MTA. The basic problem being that for some absolutely unknown reason a couple of clients messages were stuck on the queue and not able to be delivered to me. They were failing with some reason about broken pipes: 2005-12-14 10:18:17 <MSG ID> <someone@email.com>: virtual_sa_userdelivery transport output: An error was detected while processing a file of BSMTP input. 2005-12-14 10:18:17 <MSG ID> == <someone@email.com> R=virtual_sa_user T=virtual_sa_userdelivery defer (0): transport filter timeout while writing to pipe Try as I might I couldn’t get them off the queue – later whilst trying to uninstall clamav/Mailscanner (which seemed to be the problem) a reboot of… Continue reading »

Sed can be a pain in the butt, so thanks to Shooter.net I’ve recently been changing files with perl using the following code: perl -pi -e ‘s/search/replace/g’ *.text -p Assumes an input loop around the script. It reads each line of the file and outputs it after processing -i Activates in place editing of files -e Indicates a single lines script ‘s/search/replace/g’ is the script or command. In this case it’s a search and replace regex *.text the filename(s) to operate on Extending this via some digging around I did for searching and replacing recursively through subdirectories, I found this piece of code: find . -print | egrep “*\.html” | xargs perl -pi -e ‘s/this/that/g’ This is far cleaner than… Continue reading »

rwxrwxrwx 777 Read, Write and Execute permissions for all users. rwxr-xr-x 755 Read and Execute permissions for all users. The file’s owner also has Write permission. rwxr-x – – - 750 Read and Execute permissions for the files owner and the group; The file’s owner also has Write permission. Users who are not the file’s owner or members of the group have no access to the file. rwx- – – – – - 700 Read, Write and Execute permissions for the files owner only; All others have no access. rw-rw-rw- 666 Read and Write permissions for all users. No execute permissions to anyone. rw-rw-r- – 664 Read and Write permission to the owner and group. Read only permissions to all… Continue reading »