Managing MailScanner on multiple hosts

Neil Robst neilrobst at ALM.ORG.UK
Wed Jan 21 16:15:52 GMT 2004


Hi Julian,

I can't help you with all this, but I can mention that I'm just
MailScanner with Postfix patched with LDAP for easy maintenance. With
LDAP you can replicate your [(virtual) user] databases easily between
multiple hosts.

Also, most syslog daemons have the ability to log to a central host
which is indeed what I'm doing currently. Take a look at the man page
for it.

Regards,
Neil

On Wed, 2004-01-21 at 16:06, Julian Rawcliffe wrote:
> 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
> t: +44 (0)20 7000 7782 direct  ---  Helpdesk t: +44 (0)20 7000 7700
> m: +44 (0)7966 90 7782 mobile  ---  Helpdesk f: +44 (0)20 7724 6300
> mailto:jrawcliffe at london.edu   ---  http://www.london.edu/technology/



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