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.
