TUHS

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Who is running their own mail server and what do you run?

by Larry McVoy

I tried running my own server on mcvoy.com but eventually gave up, the spam filtering was a non-ending task. If someone has a plug and chug setup for MX I'd love to try it. Thanks, --lm

7 years, 9 months

Sockets and the true UNIX

by Ian Zimmerman

This question is motivated by the posters for whom FreeBSD is not Unix enough :-) Probably the best known contribution of the Berkeley branch of Unix is the sockets API for IP networking. But today, if for no other reason than the X/Open group of standards, sockets are the preferred networking API everywhere, even on true AT&T derived UNIX variants. So they must have been merged back at some point, or reimplemented. My question is, when and how did that happen? And if there isn't a simple answer because it happened at different times and in different ways for each variant, all the better :-) -- Please don't Cc: me privately on mailing lists and Usenet, if you also post the followup to the list or newsgroup. Do obvious transformation on domain to reply privately _only_ on Usenet.

7 years, 9 months

Re: [TUHS] Who is running their own mail server and what do you run?

by Norman Wilson

I run my own mail server, on systems in my basement. It is a setup that no one in their right mind would replicate, but the details may actually be proper for this list. A firewall/gateway system runs a custom SMTP server, which can do simple filtering based on the SMTP envelope, SMTP commands, calling IP address and hostname. It is also able to call external commands to pass judgement on a caller or a particular message. If mail is accepted, it is passed through a simple MTA and a stupidly-simple queueing setup (the latter made of shell scripts) to be sent via SMTP to a different internal system, which uses the same SMTP server and MTA to deliver to local mailboxes. Outbound mail is more or less the obvious inverse. I have put off naming names for dramatic effect. The two systems in question are MicroVAX IIIs running my somewhat-hacked-up version of post-10/e Research UNIX. The MTA is early-1990s-vintage upas. The SMTP server, SMTP sender, and queuing stuff are my own. I wrote the SMTP server originally not long after I left Bell Labs; I was now in a world where sendmail was the least-troublesome MTA, but in those days every month brought news of a new sendmail vulnerability, so I wrote my own simple server to act as a condom. Over time it grew a bit, as I became interested in problems like what sorts of breakin attempts are there in real life (back then one received occasional DEBUG or WIZ commands, but I haven't seen any since the turn of the century); what sorts of simple filtering at the SMTP level will get rid of most junk mail. The code is more complicated than it used to be, but is still small enough that I am reasonably confident that it is safe to expose to the network. The SMTP sender and the queueing scripts came later, when I decided to host my own mail. Both were designed in too much of a hurry. There is no official spam filtering (no bogofilter or the like). A few simple rules that really just enforce aspects of the SMTP standard seem to catch most junk callers: HELO argument must contain at least one . (standard says it must be your FQDN) and must not be *.* (I see dozens of those every day!); sender must not speak until my server has issued a complete greeting (I follow Wietse Venema in this: send a line with a continuation marker first, then sleep five seconds or so, then send a finish). I also have a very simple, naive greylisting implementation that wouldn't work well for a site with lots of users, but is fine for my personal traffic. The greylisting is implemented with a pair of external shell scripts. I have had it in mind for a long time to consult the Spamhaus XBL too. It would be easy enough to do with another plug-in shell script. There are stupid reasons having to do with my current DNS setup that make that impractical for now. The mail setup works, but is showing its age, as is the use of Research UNIX and such old, slow hardware as a network gateway. One of these years, when I have the time, I'd like first to redo the mail setup so that mailboxes are stored on my central file server (a Sun X2200 running Solaris 10, or perhaps something illumos-based by the time I actually do all this); then set up a new gateway, probably based on OpenBSD. Perhaps I should calculate how much hardware I could buy from the power savings of turning off just one of the two MicroVAXes for a year. I have yet to see an MTA that is spare enough for my taste, but the old upas code just doesn't quite do what I want any more, and is too messy to port around. (Pursuant to the conversation earlier here about autoconf: these days I try to need no configuration magic at all, which works as long as I stick to ISO C and POSIX and am careful about networking. upas was written in messier days.) At the moment I'm leaning toward qmail, just because for other reasons I'm familiar with it, though for my personal use I will want to make a few changes here and there. But I'll want to keep my SMTP server because I am still interested in what goes on there. Norman Wilson Toronto ON

7 years, 9 months

Re: [TUHS] Happy birthday, Dennis Ritchie!

by Doug McIlroy

> When you say MIT you think about ITS and Lisp. That is why emacs IMHO > was against UNIX ideals. RMS was thinking in different terms than Bell > Labs hackers. Very different. Once, when visiting the Lisp machine, I saw astonishingly irrelevant things being done as first class emacs commands, and asked how many commands there were. The instant answer was to have emacs print the list. Nice, but it scrolled way beyond one screenful. I persisted: could the machine count them? It took several minutes of head-scratching and false starts to do a task that was second nature to Unix hands. With hindsight, I realize that the thousand emacs commands were but a foretaste of open-source exuberance--witness this snippet from Linux: !ls /usr/share/man/man2|wc 468 468 6766 Even a "kernel" is as efflorescent as a tropical rainforest.

7 years, 9 months

Re: [TUHS] Happy birthday, Dennis Ritchie! [ really sun vs dec/apollo --> X and NeWS ]

by Norman Wilson

On Tue, Sep 19, 2017, at 10:42, Larry McVoy wrote: > slib.c:1653 (bk-7.3): open failed: permission denied > > which is way way way more useful than just permission denied. Random832 replied: Well. It's less useful in one way - it doesn't say what file it was trying to open. You could pass the filename *instead* of "open failed", but that still omits the issue I had pointed out: what were you trying to open the file for (at the very least, were you trying to read, write, or exec it). Ideally the function would have a format and arguments. ==== Exactly. The string interpretation of errno is just another item of data that goes in an error message. There is no fixed place it belongs, and it doesn't always belong there, because all that is error does not fail from a syscall (or library routine). I do often insert a function of the form void errmsg(char *, ...) in my C programs. It takes printf-like arguments. Normally they just get passed to vfprintf(stderr, ...), though sometimes there is something more esoteric, and often fprintf(stderr, "%s: ", progname) ends up in front. But errmsg never knows anything about errno. Why should it? It's supposed to send complaints to a standard place; it's not supposed to invent the complaints for itself! If an errno is involved, I write something like errmsg("%s: cannot open: %s", filename, strerror(errno)); (Oh, yes, errmsg appends a newline too. The idea is to avoid cluttering code with minutiae of how errors are reported.) I don't print the source code filename or line number except for `this shouldn't have happened' errors. For routine events like the user gave the wrong filename or it had the wrong permissions or his data are malformed, pointers to the source code are just unhelpful clutter, like the complicated %JARGON-OBSCURE-ABBREVIATION prefixes that accompanied every official error message in VMS. Of course, if the user's data are malformed, he should be told which file has the problem and where in the file. But that's different from telling him that line 193 of some file he doesn't have and will probably never see contains the system call that reported that he typed the wrong filename. Norman Wilson Toronto ON

7 years, 9 months

Re: [TUHS] Who is running their own mail server and what do you run?

by Robert Brockway

I received a private request for info on my Postfix config. I'm happy to post to list. This is the interesting bit: https://pastebin.com/tNceD6zM Running under Debian 8, soon to be upgraded to Debian 9. Postgrey is listening on TCP/10023. As an aside I just saw this in my mail queue: # mailq -Queue ID- --Size-- ----Arrival Time---- -Sender/Recipient------- 2182087EA 1618 Thu Sep 21 10:41:07 robert(a)timetraveller.org (host aneurin.horsfall.org[110.141.193.233] said: 550 5.7.1 <dave(a)horsfall.org>... No reporting address for linode.com; see RFC 2142 (in reply to RCPT TO command)) dave(a)horsfall.org That is aggressive standards compliance ;) Rob

7 years, 9 months

Trying some new TUHS mail configs

by Warren Toomey

All, sorry for the test post. Grant Taylor has been helping me resolve the mail bounces, which we think are due to the mailing list preserving the existing DKIM information when forwarding to e-mail. This e-mail is going to a test address which should strip the inbound DKIM stuff before passing to the TUHS list. Hopefully we can observe the result and check the logs. Warren

7 years, 9 months

Steering it back again ....

by Warren Toomey

And ... we now bring the threads on current Unix-like systems and current mail configuration to a close, and remind the group that the mailing list is about _old_ things :-) Mind you, if the list lasts another 25 years, these two threads will meet that criterion. Thanks, Warren

7 years, 9 months

Re: [TUHS] Who is running their own mail server and what do you r un?

by Jason Stevens

I use Exchange 5.5 & MacOS + Outlook... I know very un-unixy but it's more so a test bed for a highly modified version of Basilisk II (more so to test appletalk of all things) I route it through Office 365, since I use that for my company, and they have a 'connector' to route a domain through their spam filters and then drop it to my legacy Exchange server. I gave up on the SPAM fight, it really was far too much of a waste of my time. That and this email address is in far far too many databases... :| I'm on the fence if it's really worth the effort though. I wanted to setup some kind of UUCP / Exchange relay, and maybe go full crazy with X.25 but at some point I need to maybe let some of this old stuff just die... It's the same reason I don't run ATM at home. > ---------- > From: Larry McVoy > Sent: Thursday, September 21, 2017 12:25 AM > To: TUHS main list > Subject: [TUHS] Who is running their own mail server and what do you > run? > > I tried running my own server on mcvoy.com but eventually gave up, the > spam filtering was a non-ending task. > > If someone has a plug and chug setup for MX I'd love to try it. > > Thanks, > > --lm >

7 years, 9 months

Test on TUHS mail config

by Warren Toomey

Sorry all, just trying a change on the TUHS mail list config. I'll set it back once I see what this message does. Warren

7 years, 9 months

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