Managing MailScanner on multiple hosts

[Julian Rawcliffe]

I've recently introduced MailScanner, Sophos and SpamAssassin
on a number of Sendmail servers feeding outgoing email and
two iPlanet (or whatever it is now called) Messaging Server
instances.

Most of the documentation I've read refers to one machine
running MS and delivering to local users; SA seems especially
geared toward this kind of setup.

Three things concern me: reporting, user preferences and where to go
after the basic service is up and running.
Reporting: Currently my six machines log locally, but I'm looking
at a centralised loghost. I don't especially want MySQL, PHP and
Apache running on all my gateways. Is anyone aware of a reporting
tool that allows logs to be dumped to another server and then
processed; I'm not too bothered about capturing server load and
memory stats, just mail volume, spam and viruses.
User preferences. Whilst SA is doing a great job and has been beneficial
to most of the user community, there are some that are extremely
irritated by the filtering. None of the users have a home directory on
any of the mail gateways, so ~/.spamassassin/user_prefs is a
non-starter. I had thought about using MySQL for storing prefs wih a
PHP script to manage the contents (as described elsewhere).  This may
be possible but there are other obstacles. Anyone do anything
different?
Lastly, moving on from a basic install. I know I could hit the mailing
lists and scour them for how to get Bigevil and bayes working without
completely disabling all spam detection, but is there anywhere that
describes how to do this without the lists (not that I am in any way
knocking the sound advice and help found on the lists).

None of the above is a moan about how these tools work - they all
do a fantastic job - it's just an attempt to find out what other
people do when running the scanner across more than one host that
only relays email.

--

Julian Rawcliffe

London Business School, Sussex Place, Regents Park, London. NW1 4SA
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