Mail Queue Monitoring with Nagios
If you know Nagios, then you probably know that that some of it's monitoring scripts (aka "plugins") suck. And that's why I wrote nifty scripts to monitor sendmail mail queue size over snmp today...
ftp://noc.hep.wisc.edu/pub/src/nagios/
NSF & DOE Whitelisted
I whitelisted email messages from *.doe.gov an *.nfs.gov just now. (It appears that Sophos PureMessage thinks some of their automated emails with ugly formats are spam!)
New SSL Certificate
I installed a new SSL cert on hep.wisc.edu today. Woo-hoo.
The New Mail Server
It's up. It's new. It's spiffy. It's got 4 Opteron CPUs and 16 GB of memory! It's got SCSI u360 disks configured as RAID1 disk arrays connected via an Adaptec 2230S controller. Nice.
Second Try at the Email Service Outage/Upgrade
The UW-HEP email service upgrade has been rescheduled for tonight. It will be unavailable starting at 1:00AM CDT Monday May 1st. Service should be restored by 8:00AM.
POSTPONED: Email Service Outage/Upgrade
The UW-HEP email service upgrade (previously scheduled for
2:00AM CDT tomorrow morning, April 29th) has been indefinitely
postponed because of unforeseen difficulties with the Sophos
PureMessage software.
Email Service Outage/Upgrade
The UW-HEP email service (hep.wisc.edu) will unavailable starting at 2:00AM CDT Saturday morning, April 29th. Service should be restored by 8:00AM.
During that time, the existing (Sun Solaris) server will be replaced by an enterprise-class x86_64 (Opteron) based system running Scientific Linux 3.
Email Service Change
In accordance with University of Wisconsin policy, the UW-HEP email service no longer accepts email messages that are larger than 45 MB.
If you have any questions about this change, please contact me.
UW-HEP Email Service Change
The UW-HEP outgoing (SMTP) email service on port 587 now requires SMTP AUTH. This allows folks who are off-site to send email without being subject to the Spam and Virus Filtering Service.
To securely send email and have it not subject to spam filtering, you must do the following: set your "Outgoing (SMTP) Server Port" to 587 and enable SMTP AUTH by checking the "Use Secure Sockets Layer (SSL)" check box under "SMTP Server Options" or the "TLS" check box under "Use secure connection".
Documentation with the appropriate settings for using the UW-HEP email service can be found at...
http://www.hep.wisc.edu/computing/email-settings.html
Information about our spam and virus protection can be found at....
http://www.hep.wisc.edu/computing/spam.html
Improved Spam Filtering
Sophos released a new version (5.1) of PureMessage today. It includes the ability to block messages from given IP addresses before they're accepted for delivery. That should improve the UW-HEP spam filtering system, because it will decrease the number of messages the spam filtering engine has to inspect. Unfortunately, Sophos did not include instructions about configuring this feature so I opened up a trouble ticket with them.
