MailScanner ANNOUNCE: ac.uk users of Spamhaus zones

[Julian Field]

This is only relevant to users of the Spamhaus zones (i.e. anyone using 
SpamAssassin or MailScanner) who are connected to JANet.

The JANet mail team already have a subscription to the Spamhaus zones, 
which they provide under different names on their own DNS servers, which 
are accessible to all JANet sites.

However, the problem with that is that you have to redefine all the 
SpamAssassin rules that use these zones in order to use their different 
names. This totally breaks the ability to use sa-update every night (and 
update_spamassassin) in order to automatically fetch new rulesets. Which 
is a real pain.

So I asked them to provide the zones under their original names as well, 
so all we needed were 4 entries in our named.conf files to forward the 
zones to the JANet servers instead of the original Spamhaus servers 
which it will do by default.

My request has been answered :-)

So now they have 6 DNS servers (which are all listed in the A records 
for ns.mail-abuse.ja.net.) which provide the 4 main spamhaus zones under 
their original names.
So you can put your SpamAssassin rules back to how they were by default, 
and just tweak your named.conf by adding this:

zone "sbl.spamhaus.org" {
        type forward;
        forward only;
        // JKF 2008-04-22 Using Janet-provided copy of the zone.
        forwarders { 194.82.174.182; 194.83.56.228; 194.83.56.244; 
128.86.8.85; 128.86.8.120; 128.86.8.245; };
};             
zone "pbl.spamhaus.org" {
        type forward;
        forward only;
        // JKF 2008-04-22 Using Janet-provided copy of the zone.
        forwarders { 194.82.174.182; 194.83.56.228; 194.83.56.244; 
128.86.8.85; 128.86.8.120; 128.86.8.245; };
};             
zone "xbl.spamhaus.org" {
        type forward;
        forward only;
        // JKF 2008-04-22 Using Janet-provided copy of the zone.
        forwarders { 194.82.174.182; 194.83.56.228; 194.83.56.244; 
128.86.8.85; 128.86.8.120; 128.86.8.245; };
};
zone "zen.spamhaus.org" {
        type forward;
        forward only;
        // JKF 2008-04-22 Using Janet-provided copy of the zone.
        forwarders { 194.82.174.182; 194.83.56.228; 194.83.56.244; 
128.86.8.85; 128.86.8.120; 128.86.8.245; };
};

Once a month or so, you should check the list of IP addresses you give 
in the lines above against what you get from the command
    dig ns.mail-abuse.ja.net. A
to make sure your list of IP addresses is up to date. I have asked them 
to set up an announcements mailing list for us to join so that we get 
notification of any changes to the list of IP addresses. I'll let you 
know what I hear about this.

They will shortly update their web pages to reflect this new service.

I hope this is useful to all the ac.uk sites out there!

Jules

-- 
Julian Field MEng CITP CEng
www.MailScanner.info
Buy the MailScanner book at www.MailScanner.info/store

MailScanner customisation, or any advanced system administration help?
Contact me at Jules at Jules.FM

PGP footprint: EE81 D763 3DB0 0BFD E1DC 7222 11F6 5947 1415 B654
PGP public key: http://www.jules.fm/julesfm.asc


-- 
This message has been scanned for viruses and
dangerous content by MailScanner, and is
believed to be clean.