Managing MailScanner on multiple hosts

[Julian Field]

Your centralised logging could be done with nothing more sophisticated than
syslog, as that can log to a remote host which would then collect all the
logs from your "cluster" setup. However, that would not give you any
reporting tools, MailWatch, anything like that so your entire system would
have to be home-grown.

What I would advise you to do is contact Steve.Swaney at fsl.com about the
"cluster" edition of their MailScanner-based products they will be
producing soon. This will do everything you describe below, and more.

It will cost you some $ but will save you enormous amounts of time (and
hence money) compared to implementing an entire system yourself to achieve
what you have described.

At 16:06 21/01/2004, you 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/

--
Julian Field
www.MailScanner.info
MailScanner thanks transtec Computers for their support

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