The Boston Diaries

The ongoing saga of a programmer who doesn't live in Boston, nor does he even like Boston, but yet named his weblog/journal “The Boston Diaries.”

Go figure.

Friday, September 14, 2007

Yet more notes on a Greylist implementation

It was bad enough getting up early this morning to cover the phones (Smirk and P were heading out of the area for several meetings) but to wake up to a customer (who had gotten my cell phone number when I called him yesterday) complaining about bandwidth issues (and yes, their 100Mbps connection is slower than a 56Kbps modem) made it all the worse.

After dealing with that issue (turned out to be a problem with The Monopolistic Phone Company, but it took several hours to diagnose that problem) I turned to what I had originally planned on doing today, working on the greylist daemon.

I managed to fix the problem with fork(). The code I used for this daemon I borrowed from a previous daemon, which set each open file to be closed when calling exec(). I removed that code, it worked on the server. I'm not calling exec() (I am calling fork(), but I don't know why marking files to be closed on exec() would have an ill effect, but it did, so it went).

Go figure.

I also wrote an interesting frontend to the daemon, which is called gld_mcp (short for “Graylist Daemon Master Control Program”). Prior to this, I had to send a variety of signals (as root—otherwise I don't have the appropriate permissions), and check the system log files to get any information out of the daemon. Now, I can do:

gld-mcp>show stats

Start:             Fri Sep 14 20:58:16 2007 
End:               Fri Sep 14 21:10:37 2007 
Running time:      12m 21s
Tuples:            33
IPs:               46
Graylisted:        14
Whitelisted:       19
Graylist-Expired:  0
Whitelist-Expired: 0

gld-mcp>

without having to be root or grovelling through system log files. (By the way, the IPs: field is the number of entries in the IP whitelist; any email coming from an IP address that matches an entry in this table is automatically let through)

Since I changed the program to check the creation time instead of the last access time, only a few more spams have gotten through, but the issue of maybe never getting a legitimate email has gone away, which is good.

And it wasn't a totally bad day—at least the phones were quiet.

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