Linode had been a great provider of services, and I would of loved to continue using them, but just do not have the time to maintain things. So I’ve taken the hosting of the web content back to a shared provider. I was recommended VentraIP, so signed up with them on a suitable plan. Lucky for me they had a promo on and I saved 50% on the first invoice.

I’ve been having some issues on my ADSL service since getting a new router. I put the link under some load and get disconnections all over the place. Going to try and fault find this a little more tonight/tomorrow. After making lots of changes on router the problem continues. Next step is to swap back to another router/modem and see if the issue continues, if it does, then my line might be having problems. Although it wasn’t having issues until this new router, so the router could be at fault. Won’t know until I investigate further. Stay tuned on progress.

WordPress has been upgraded and website moved from TLD to current location of blog.heimic.net.

Oddly enough I had been considering the purchase of some extra diskspace. Guess I don’t have to consider no more, as I now have 4gb more. All I need to do is to decide a good time to shutdown the host and expand existing volumes as required to make use of the new found free space.

I highly recommend Linode. I’ll be renewing my account once the 12 months expires around the end of September this year. If you’d like to sign up with them, then please by all means use my referal code by clicking here.

I am trying to get a http proxy to work from an internal network via a httptunnel to say my linode host where another http proxy exists to get the webcontent required.

Anyone managed to play around with something similar and have it work. As I’d certainly appreciate a bit of a head start on any research already done by others.

Our smtp server was running great guns on linode 360 account, and then after a few days I started to get atleast 150+ bounce messages an hour. It was at that moment I decided with the assistance of my wife, that running our own smtp server is just not worth the effort. Infact it’s totally not worth it.

As much as the linode 360 account rocks, I cannot justify having it just for web content. So terminated the service. Moved our weblog over to another location.

I am using Debian 4.0. Had thought about using Ubuntu, but decided to stick with Debian as I have used it previously in the same capacity, without it failing me.

On a previous setup where I had smtp virtual accounts in the usual directory structure of;

/home/vmail/${domain}/${user}/Maildir

I was always looking for a way to have a .procmailrc for the smtp virtual accounts, and finally after a bit of research I have managed to put something together that works. I cannot give much technical details apart from the fact I can now have procmail rules for smtp virtual mail users, and also have those users even have a custom .procmailrc file that will be honoured.

I have a procmail entry in /etc/postfix/masters.cf like so below;

procmail    unix    -    n    n    -    -    pipe    flags=DRhu user=vmail argv=/usr/bin/procmail -t -m /etc/vmail-procmailrc ${recipient}

We then have the /etc/vmail-procmailrc file as below;

SHELL=/bin/sh
VERBOSE=yes
UMASK=007
ADRES=$1
ADRES=`echo $ADRES | /usr/bin/tr A-Z a-z` # force lowercase username
DOMAIN=`echo "${ADRES}" | cut -d @ -f 2 | cut -d "<" -f 2| cut -d">" -f 1| cut -d @ -f 1`
USER=`echo "${ADRES}" | cut -d @ -f 1 | cut -d "<" -f 2| cut -d">" -f1| cut -d @ -f 1` # get username for local delivery
LOGFILE=/home/procmailnew.log  # for testing & troubleshooting
INCLUDERC=/home/vmail/${DOMAIN}/${USER}/.procmailrc  # allow users to create their own recipes
#LOGNAME: ${LOGNAME}"
MAILDIR=/home/vmail/${DOMAIN}/${USER}/Maildir/

Then we have the following two lines in /etc/postfix/main.cf

procmail_destination_recipient_limit = 1
virtual_transport = procmail

And then you just drop an .procmailrc into each of the smtp virtual users home directory, one level above where the Maildir/ folder is. Since I don’t put mail into the directory based on the users name directly, I created a Maildir/ folder below it for mail.

/home/vmail/subdomain.heimic.net/username/.procmailrc

This was one problem that I never fixed when I was tinkering with this type of setup sometime back, finally I got a solution that works.

If anyone would like assistance, feel free to contact me. Always happy to help another fellow Debian/GNU Linux user.

Postfix is accepting the messages, then we pass it off to a content filter, in this case its amavisd-new. This processes it via spamassassin and then passing it back to an alternate postfix for final processing. ie. delivery via procmail or bounce etc.

Anyone got some guides on procmail rules so that I can send messages with certain headers to certain Maildir/ folders. ie. spam to Junk

And if anyone has any suitable amavisd-new config files for latest debian, then this would be appreciated too (or even a new guide/howto).

All in all, the service is great.

I’d prefer to use Debian, although I don’t mind Ubuntu either, but I am curious to hear from folks who currently have an Linode VPS host who have say postfix configured with some spam filtering etc, along with the usual LAMP setup on the VPS host. Looking for some install notes for setting up a very optimized host to run within the limits, rather then attempt to reinvent the wheel so to speak.

Looking at a Linode 360 account for this task. Any assistance would be appreciated.