MailScanner ANNOUNCE: ac.uk users of Spamhaus zones

[Anthony Peacock]

Hu Julian,

Many thanks for this.  I was aware (and use) the JANet subscription to 
the MAPS+ lists, but wasn't aware of the Spamhaus list feeds.

Your DNS forwarder solution makes this very neat indeed, and I have 
adopted it today.

Julian Field wrote:
> 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
> 


-- 
Anthony Peacock
CHIME, Royal Free & University College Medical School
WWW:    http://www.chime.ucl.ac.uk/~rmhiajp/
Study Health Informatics - Modular Postgraduate Degree
http://www.chime.ucl.ac.uk/study-health-informatics/