Virusscanner on Mailserver working again

Last week an uncarefull performed update of my linux mailserver broke my viruscanner AMaViS . I still don’t know what really broke it, it was either Perl or Glibc.

I was already considering moving my mailserver to another intel box, so I went to work. A fresh new RedHat 9 instead of 7.3.

Not.

AMaViS did it perfectly, installing all the needed perl-modules with CPAN etc. SpamAssassin is also easy with CPAN btw. I migrated the useraccounts with no problem.
But Hey …why is UVscan from mcAfee still crashing?

Hey..booting my ” old ” mailserver….it’s not amavis crashing…it’s UVscan!

It seemd that my ISP, who offers a license for mcAfee, only has an old version of mcAfee for download.
And everywhere on the internet you can find horrific stories of mcAfee with RedHat 9.

A collegue however pointed out that a new version of mcAfee does work with RedHat 9. I asked my ISP for the new version, but they told me that mcAfee is a real bitch with releasing a new version for download through their website. So I decide to call mcAfee, after searching the mcAfee website for a place where I could enter my creditcard info.

me: Hello, I want to buy the mcAfee commandline AV for unix/linux.
they: eh…….
me: I’m looking at the product description right now on http://…etc.
they: eh…..
me: I want to buy it, please tell me where or how I can order it….
they: ….eh…..for linu…unisss….eh….sorry Sir, we can’t help you….
me: sigh…forget it. Bye!

10 minutes later I have Sophos sweep happily running. Catching three SOBIG.F/SWEN in the next 24 hours….

update: legally buying sophos in the Netherlands sucks. The dealer is an asshole and their licensemodel isn’t build for small companies. We decided to buy McAfee. Really cheap and reliable. We contacted this time their bussiness line directly.

Btw. a good place for help on AMaViS is the
forum on sourceforge

SCO vs The rest of the World

They have gone totally bonkers.

For months I’m following the newsfeed about the wankers of SCO. There were multiple times that I tought about putting up an article about it at gargleblaster.org, but hey…

I’m busy enough…there are more important things in the world etc .etc .etc. Until today… A Dutch website (www.webwereld.nl) reported that SCO is offering every linux-sysadmin the bargain of a lifetime.
Pay $699 / linuxserver now, or $ 1399 later. The price for desktop systems is unknown. (more info)

I’ve one word for that:
WANKERS

Installation woes and Certification

A couple of weeks ago I started with the Linux+ course from Comptia. The goal is to finally certify myself as a linux-sysadmin.

I thought it would be a “seen it, done it. bought the t-shirt” experience, since I work with linux for years now, as pro-sysadmin and in my home network. But hey! I’m actually learning things.

Like the fact that Debian is an arse to install:) I’m chapter 3 at the moment, and I thought I would manage a dry run (or: not doing the practical excersises) but to my surprise knowing the debian package system is part of the exam.

So I combined my squid and dns server, freeing a pentium II 300 mhz as playbox. First I installed Mandrake (which accompiened the course) By far the most convienent installation procedure I have seen until now. Even a Windows-user could install this distro.

After an hour I got bored with Mandrake, so I decided to try an net install of Debian.
Debian won. I lost. Fuck. That’s hard.

I find myself doing a net-install of RedHat 9 right now. Hey! I only want to fiddle around with the gui stuff…he he

First some reading for Debian. Debian refused to see my NIC’s (three, 1 intel etherexpress 100 mbit and 2 realtek 8139’s) But now I remember the Intel caused some problems with RH as well…and yes…I’m forced to use the realtek for doing the netinstall.
An 8 mbit DSL line kicks ass with a net-install.

UPDATE:
I did manage to install Debian today (4th june). I was using the wrong diskimages and I have thrown my intel etherexpress100 in the trash (where it belongs).

Redhat 9

Today I recieved the following email from RedHat:

We appreciate your support of Red Hat Network and wanted to alert you to a special service that we are extending to paying Red Hat Network customers such as yourself. For the past couple months we’ve gathered feedback and listened to our customers. We’ve heard that one of the things you want most is early access to Red Hat Linux ISOs. Well, we’ve responded. Starting March 31st at 9am Eastern, you can start downloading Red Hat Linux 9 ISOs — a week before they will be generally available in retail stores or via Red Hat FTP. For more information, go to:
http://www.redhat.com/mktg/rh9iso/

–the Red Hat Network team

WTF?! 9? They must be kidding? A full version? no 8.1,2,3 ? Have I missed something? Is the 3.0 kernel released? Has Glibc been upgraded to 4? It was only six months ago when RH 8 was released. Before we know it RH27 will be released within 3 years

UPDATE
Red Hat Linux 9 features include:

1. First introduction of new threading technology: NPTL (Native POSIX Thread Library)
2. OpenOffice.org office suite for creation of documents, spreadsheets and presentations.
3. Mozilla Web browser , email client, address book, HTML composer and authoring tool
4. Ximian Evolution TM email client, calendar and contact manager
5. CUPS for drag-and-drop printing capabilities
6. Upgraded core components: Linux kernel 2.4.20, GCC 3.2.1, GNU libc 2.3 (with NPTL), web server powered by Apache 2.0

RedHat 8 made publicly available

Today the new RedHat release has been made available for the general public. It can be downloaded form several sites. My personal favourite has always been dl.xs4all.nl.

Very fast and thus suitable for ftp install.

Be warned though! the *.0 series of redhat are known to be full of bugs. My advice: wait for the 8.1 release.
I’ll maintain my good-working 7.3 installs. But if you can’t wait, go ahead and get 8!

UPDATE“http://osnews.com/story.php?news_id=1842″ target=_blank>
Here is a detailed article about the latest RedHat.