Some questions while I plan my redeployment/reinstall

[Dennis Willson]

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I recently did the same thing, I rebuilt and re-installed both my mail hubs. I used CentOS 4.1, Sendmail, MailScanner, SpamAssassin, 
ClamAV, MailWatch and Milter-Greylist. You didn't say what the hardware you're using actually is, but mine is a single processor P4 
Xeon running at 2.6Ghz. I had 512MB RAM, but found that to be just a bit small, so I increased it to 1GB. The load at 512MB was 
okay, but I noticed it was using just a little more swap space than I would like, so I upgraded the memory and now it and I are happier.

This was the first time I used Milter-Greylist and I was really surprised at the results! I takes out about 85-90 percent of the 
Spam right there. This actually reduces the CPU load because that's all eMail that MailScanner, SpamAssassin and ClamAV don't have 
to spend any cycles to scan.

The only problem is since Milter-Grey list is not part of MailScanner, mailwatch doesn't report the number of eMails processed by 
the Milter. So what it actually reports is what made it past the Milter. The Milter actually logs everything it does in the maillog, 
so when I get some time I will just add a filter for the maillog to pull out those numbers. Roughly I count a little over 12,100 
email attempts before the Milter per day. Approximately 1100-1200 make it by the Milter into MailScanner. About 50% or about 550-600 
are then caught by MailScanner and SpamAssassin (all these numbers are an average over the last week). On high scoring Spam I store 
it for 7 days on the mail hubs. The users use mailwatch to look at what is stored of theirs and can release any of it to themselves 
if the decide they want it.

Overall I really like the way it works.

So do the users!

Dennis

Chris W. Parker wrote:
> Hello all!
> 
> It's been a long time since I've posted to the list. I hope everyone is
> well.
> 
> I'm planning to do a complete reinstall using the latest software that
> make up a good MailScanner box. My Linux distro will be FC4 and my MTA
> will be sendmail.
> 
> I'll still be using the same hardware as I am currently, but that's
> probably not so bad as the server load seems to be quite low in it's
> current form. I just hope that all the new software doesn't become too
> much for the machine.
> 
> I'm making my own document right now (which may or may not be worth
> distributing once I'm finished with it) and I've got a few questions for
> the list.
> 
> I understand that some of the following questions can only really be
> answered by knowing what kind of traffic I get. According to
> MailScanner-MRTG the Average (Count of Recipients) for Number of
> Messages Processed in the past year is 598 and in the past year the
> average number of Bytes of Mail Transferred is 8MB. Traffic has been
> consistantly going down over the past year. But that's not to say that
> the traffic 1 year ago was much higher than it is now.
> 
> I don't know the specs on this computer(!) but top says I have about
> 255MB of RAM.
> 
> So... on with the questions.
> 
> 1. Is MCP worth the trouble of patching SpamAssassin (I've only briefly
> read over the steps that are listed in the Wiki but it seemed rather
> involved)?
> 
> 2. Currently I use MailScanner-MRTG to get an idea of what's happening
> with my box. Is MailWatch a complete replacement for MSMRTG or should I
> install both? And what about Vispan, how does that compare?
> 
> 3. With regards to performance, right now I'm not doing any AV scanning
> so I don't know what kind of load it will put on my box. I plan to use
> only ClamAV and BitDefender and MAYBE one from Symantec if they have a
> command line option available for Linux in their Enterprise Suite). What
> kind of load should I expect from these with the amount of traffic I
> have?
> 
> 4. How about Pyzor/Razor/DCC? (I don't really know what they do yet as
> I've still got a lot of reading to do. :) ) Will these greatly increase
> the load?
> 
> 
> I think that's it for now!
> 
> 
> Thanks everyone!
> Chris.
> 
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