AJ.'s questions

I'm reviewing SMART attribute data for different disks and notice that some disks report the following attributes while other disks don't:

• 241 0xF1 Total LBAs Written
• 242 0xF2 Total LBAs Read

What determines whether this attribute is available for a given drive, and is there a way to tell this by looking at smartctl or hdparm output?

I'd like to be able to export the BIOS settings for systems with SuperMicro H8SCM-F motherboards. I need to be able to process the results programmatically, so text output is ideal. What sort of tool/utility exists to provide the settings export functionality?

I am using fail2ban on my mail server. I discovered this morning that there were some 5000 failed login attempts (in the course of 1 hour) via SMTP that didn't get picked up by my sasl filter. Here is an example of an entry in /var/log/mail.log

Jan 25 04:39:56 ***** postfix/smtpd[23828]: warning: 114-32-231-17.HINET-IP.hinet.net[114.32.231.17]: SASL LOGIN authentication failed: authentication failure

Here's my (unmodified) sasl filter definition for fail2ban:

# Fail2Ban configuration file
#
# Author: Yaroslav Halchenko
#
# $Revision: 728 $
#

[Definition]

# Option: failregex
# Notes.: regex to match the password failures messages in the logfile. The
#          host must be matched by a group named "host". The tag "<HOST>" can
#          be used for standard IP/hostname matching and is only an alias for
#          (?:::f{4,6}:)?(?P<host>[\w\-.^_]+)
# Values: TEXT
#
failregex = (?i): warning: [-._\w]+\[<HOST>\]: SASL (?:LOGIN|PLAIN|(?:CRAM|DIGEST)-MD5) authentication failed(: [A-Za-z0-9+/]*={0,2})?$

# Option:  ignoreregex
# Notes.:  regex to ignore. If this regex matches, the line is ignored.
# Values:  TEXT
#
ignoreregex =

Can anyone recommend an improvement to the regex that would have also caught this record?

I upgraded from Debian 5 to Debian 6, and in doing so went from Postfix 2.5.5 to 2.7.1. I'm using MySQL as a backend for virtual domains/mailboxes.

After the upgrade, I'm able to receive mail from outside sources, but when I try to relay outbound mail, I'm getting 554 Relay access denied. Here's what I think are the relevant configuration parameters in my main.cf:

mydestination =
relayhost = # using virtuals
mynetworks = all
smtpd_recipient_restrictions =
    reject_invalid_hostname,
    reject_unknown_recipient_domain,
    reject_unauth_pipelining,
    permit_mynetworks,
    permit_sasl_authenticated,
    #reject_unauth_destination,
    check_relay_domains,
    reject_non_fqdn_recipient,
    permit

smtpd_sender_restrictions =
    permit_sasl_authenticated,
    permit_mynetworks,
    reject_non_fqdn_sender,
    reject_unknown_sender_domain,
    reject_unauth_pipelining,
    permit

Can someone please help me to understand what might have changed in the upgrade that would cause this to break?

I've been searching for a resource on how to do this but not having much luck.

I am running a working MTA/MUA that is based on Postfix and Courier with MySQL as a backend for virtual users. I based my system on the following article:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/PostfixCompleteVirtualMailSystemHowto

It was great up until the empty sections! My SMTP/IMAP setup is working great, and I managed to get SpamAssassin and ClamAV installed as well with some separate documentation I found online.

What I need help with is setting up Postfix to use Procmail as the mailbox_command so that it will work with virtual users. I want to be able to define different Procmail rules for each virtual user separately. I've read the Postfix documentation, and as I understand it the default functionality for mailbox_command will only work for local (non-virtual) users.

Thanks in advance!

UPDATE:

Since this post, I've come to realize that mailbox_command is not tenable. Instead I found a way to do this using transport_maps. Read my own answer below.

I am working with a very large (~11GB) checkpoint file and trying to do a -jr (journal restore) operation. About half way through the file, I'm hitting an entry which causes an error to occur. I'm unable to come up with a conventional way to print, edit, and save changes to the offending line.

So right now I'm splitting the checkpoint into files of 500k lines each...up to 47 files and counting. My question is, once I have these separate files:

1. Can I run journal restore on each one separately to check for errors?
2. Once fixed, is it necessary to merge them back together again to do my full journal restore?

Any other ideas on how to tackle this problem would be appreciated.

Thanks in advance,

-aj

I am trying to run gdb to debug my Ubuntu 9.10 Apache2 install and having a couple of problems:

1. It seems like the package installed by Ubuntu for Apache2 does not include debugging symbols; is there a different version of the package I should be using for developing/debugging?

2. When I try to run gdb, I get an error that looks to be caused by some missing environment variable. Are there additional options I should pass to "run" to get this to work?

Here is the output of the debugger session:

root@aj-ubuntu:/usr/sbin# gdb apache2
GNU gdb (GDB) 7.0-ubuntu
Copyright (C) 2009 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
License GPLv3+: GNU GPL version 3 or later <http://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html>
This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute it.
There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.  Type "show copying"
and "show warranty" for details.
This GDB was configured as "x86_64-linux-gnu".
For bug reporting instructions, please see:
<http://www.gnu.org/software/gdb/bugs/>...
Reading symbols from /usr/sbin/apache2...(no debugging symbols found)...done.
(gdb) run -X
Starting program: /usr/sbin/apache2 -X
[Thread debugging using libthread_db enabled]
apache2: bad user name ${APACHE_RUN_USER}

Program exited with code 01.
(gdb)

Thanks in advance, -aj