LogCheck for Sendmail / Linux?
 

While I'm trying to sort out my server problems, I'm also battling with spammers trying to use my server for a relay. Unfortunately for them, it's closed so they're just spamming away at a brick wall.

This is, however, generating REAMS of log entries.

I need to start blocking the spammer's IP address (refuse connection), but am having real difficulty with sorting the Log. Every entry is recorded in chronological order, but in fact many processes run for days attempting delivery to bounced non-existent addresses.

I've tried sorting the file in Excel by JOB number, and that at least has grouped processes together. But now it's difficult to find the connection which triggered the process in the first place.

What I really need is a good log analyzer which can track and thread processes. I hear there's something called "Logcheck" for Linux, which e-mails log reports to the admin account each day.

Does anyone know where I can get this, or if there are better / smarter log analysers out there?

Cheers

I turned off that log feature in Linux. It produced vast reams of stuff that I didn't want. It would send it to me when I logged on - "You have mail!" just before the StartX screen kicked in, so if I ignored it for a couple of seconds it disappeared anyway. There is probably a way to pick up that mail at a more helpful time, but I stopped looking before I found it.

Can you turn up the security a notch on your router, so that the spammers don't even register on the PC? If Shields Up! says it's fully stealthed, they should get bored and go away after a while. Mine's like that, and I now have the log turned off.

I turn on the router's log once in a while, just to check, and there's usually either nothing or just a couple of "pings".

Thanks for the suggestions, but it defeats the point of having a mailserver if you hide it behind the firewall :rolleyes:

I don't want to stop anyone (or other mailservers) connecting to it. I need to receive the (genuine) mail they want to send me! But I do want to block those IPs who are trying to spam the server, and for that I need to be able to analyze the logs a bit better than I can at the moment.

(I'll be pointing it to the spamcop blacklist soon too - when I figure out how!!!)

http://www.freeos.com/articles/3540/

"You can download Logcheck from http://www.psionic.com and go for the download URL. Get the latest sources. At the time of writing the article, Logcheck was in version 1.1.1. A point to be noted out here; while you can download Logcheck as a non root user, you would have to login as root while installing as Logcheck prefers to install its scripts, binaries and other configuration files to directories owned by root.

Step 1

Untarring the sources is the first step towards [blah, blah blah]

Good luck!

:ok:

Ooops! That psionic url leads to Cisco. But Logcheck is still available on Sourceforge at http://sourceforge.net/projects/logcheck

Good Man! :D

Thanks very much. :ok:

Puppy Linux
 

http://www.puppylinux.org/user/image...logo_trans.gif

Puppy Linux - http://www.puppylinux.org - is a slick smooth fast mini-distro that's designed to run off a live CD or USB key. Interestingly, it can also run off a rewritable CD/DVD and keep stuff there! Or it can store your personal data on a Windows partition.

I installed it to the harddrive of an old 233 PII with 256Mb memory I have lying around and it's bloody impressive! Very fast, really pretty and very capable!

Lots of variants available, I used PuppyOffice (fat at 120MB download) which has OpenOffice2 included and it really is remarkably good.

Give it a whirl! Standard Puppy is only a 70Mb download.

How do you boot from a USB port? I did download puppy to play with but fell at that hurdle.

You have to create a Puppy boot CD first (download an .iso and burn it as as .iso). Boot from it and checkout the Install section, there should be one to install to USB key. Remember to set your machine to try and boot from USB first in the BIOS.

There's a guide at - http://www.apcstart.com/usb/puppy/

This help page might be of assistance:

My PC can't boot from USB|CD

http://www.puppylinux.com/boot2pup.htm

Posted at the same time as Mac.

Just to add...

Puppy Linux Dummies Guide
http://tmxxine.com/Wikka/wikka.php?wakka=PuppyLinux

and the wiki
http://puppylinux.org/wikka/HowToUsePuppy

http://www.puppylinux.org/user/image...logo_trans.gif

I think Puppy is great fun and very clever. My Pup is rapidly morphing into a dog!

Tip: Unless you're familiar with iptables don't turn the firewall on if you're on a local network (otherwise it's fine). I found getting SAMBA to work over a firewall quite difficult.

IE for Linux
 

From the Inquirer - http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=34625

"A BRAZILIAN web designer got tired of having to boot Windows to see how web pages looked in IE, so he coded a little script allowing anyone to download, install and run IE on Linux.

...Sérgio Lopes, a 21 years old web designer and Linux user from Brazil, decided to make it easy for non-techies to install and run the Windows version of the Vole's web browser effortlessly.

That's how 'IEs4Linux' was born, a script that 'automagically' downloads and installs not one but the last three release versions of Internet Explorer -6.0, 5.5 SP2, and 5.0- on any 32-bit linux desktop with the wine core libraries in place. The installer program by Lopes -released under a GPL licence- relies on 'wine' and a third party utility dubbed 'cabextract' to decompress the windows archives downloaded from Microsoft's site. The IEs4Linux program is at version 2.0 after a long beta testing period that spanned from April to August."

I think IE is an awful browser but some sites are hard-coded to IE and unusable with anything else. Personally, I don't bother and we successfully lobbied my bank to make it's website and transactions W3C compatible so that other browsers could use 'em :ok:

Rather than going the IE for Linux route we should pressurise websites to conform to W3C standards!

But Rome wasn't built in a day.

"The program's author advises: "Please, don’t use any of these IEs to navigate!! Get Firefox instead". And I agree, the last thing the web needs is for broken sites to remain broken and IE only. But while we bug forever the worst lazy webmasters to fix their web sites for cross-platform, web standards compliance, IEs4Linux is a beautiful way to avoid booting Windows or the bloat of dealing with a complete Windows virtual machine on something like VMWare. "

Get IE 4 Linux at http://www.tatanka.com.br/ies4linux/index-en.html

Mac

Good info Mac, Thanks 4 that.

As an aside I'm currently adding Google Maps to a couple of my sites - guess which browser had trouble displaying the location pins after I tested it successfully in Firefox, Opera and even Netscape?:ugh:

Free Linux Distro
 

Hey. I want to install a copy of Linux on my Laptop, i only have a copy of the old RH8 and a copy of SUSE 8.?. I dont want to pay, so i am looking for a freebie. Whats out there? I am going to be using Linux more for development use. I want it more or less just for C Code, as i am doing this at Uni. Ideally i want Solaris, but i cant get it to install on my laptop, keeps saying Hardware not recognised and reboots, cant find a way around it. anyways, any advice would be grateful. Thanks...

Welcome to free software!

You could always pay for something. Then:

(1) There's a fair chance it will actually work.
(2) If it doesn't work you've got someone to complain to.
(3) Programmers will continue to write new software, so you'll actually have some software to use.

Some people seem to be incapable of understanding that programmers have mortgages to pay and children to feed just like anyone else - why should their work, uniquely, be expected to be given away for nothing???:confused: :confused: :confused: :confused: :confused:

I needed a free Unix distro to host a Mail server and Ubuntu is working fine for me :)

Had problems installing from the "Live CD" onto an older PC (didn't have sufficient memory to install from the GUI) but the "Altenate CD" (which uses a text base GUI during installation) worked fine.

RC

Urrr... Linux IS free

Linux (or GNU/Linux if you want to be picky) as an operating system is distributed under the Gnu Public Licence (v2) - which means that the software (and source code)is free and open. You can use is, copy it, pass it on and pretty much do whatever you like with it (especially mess around with it). If you make changes and then distribute it then you must (under the terms of the GPL), pass on (by including the source code of) any improvements or modifications you make.

Here is the GPL - http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html - quite simple and worth reading.

There are hundreds of "versions" of Linux available for free on the Web - most belong to a few main families like Red Hat, SuSE, Debian etc.

There are thousands of free applications available for download on the Web - anything from office suites to CD burners to compilers to nuclear physics. Most of them are open-source.

There are also a smaller number of non-free applications which are closed-source. These are mostly very specialised apps. - you're free to use these under Linux if you want.

If you distribute Linux you can charge whatever you like for it, $1,000,000 if you want, but there are plenty of free versions so you may not have many takers! You can charge for the CD's, support and documentation, but not the software.

The boxed versions that SuSe, Red Hat and the rest make their money from include support, guides, and documentation.

I'd junk your old Red Hat and SuSe 8 (they're way out of date) and try out a recent release.

I'd suggest Mepis Linux - http://www.mepis.org/ or Kubuntu - http://www.kubuntu.org/

Yes, there is life after Microsoft - and considering the drastic licence terms of Vista (only two installs and then you have to buy a new copy, pervasive digital rights management, no virtual machine installations, restrictions restrictions restrictions, etc.) now's the time to switch.

I've been dabbling with Linux, on an old PC, for a couple of years. It is indeed free (or most versions are).

The one I get on best with is Fedora. I paid something, not a lot, for the CDs of it. I think I could have downloaded it for free, but for the size of the download it wasn't worth the faffing.

I've also installed Debian (excellent, but on my machine it's not as stable as Fedora), SuSe v 10.1 (OK), Ubuntu (bit restricted), and Knoppix (really a "run from CD" package).

The enormous plus of Debian is Kpackage - an installer that will download a complete list of all software available for Debian, and install what you choose for you. It's quite amazing what's available for Debian! The installation process is pretty much fully automatic - all that nonsense of compiling, building, testing, etc before installing is gone.

There is a similar package for Fedora, called Yum (or Yumex if you want a GUI version), but mine doesn't show anything like as much stuff as does Kpackage.

With Linux and Grub (or any of the alternatives) you can have as many versions (aka distros) of Linux as you like (and as you have hard drive partitions). You can boot to whichever one you want to use today. If you put your mail etc folders on a separate partition, you can use the same mail/data folders regardless of which distro you are running.

Once Win XP ceases to do the job, and Vista tries to make those silly restrictions, I'll be a Linux bunny.

Ho ho! Just spotted Gertude the Wombat's post - popped in while I was writing.

I wouldn't take too much notice of Gertrude if I were you planecrazy - she's a Bill Gates fanboi troll who always emerges to badmouth Linux when the subject comes up.

Hey Gertrude, does it occur to you that poor old planecrazy is probably trying to install Solaris for SPARC on an x86 platform? No wonder the poor chap isn't having much luck!

(1) There's a fair chance it will actually work.

It works for most of the servers on the Internet and for millions of home users and businesses. Don't be so silly.

(2) If it doesn't work you've got someone to complain to.

Well, you can always join in a forum or send a bug-report to the author(s) - you've got a lot better chance of getting an answer than emailing Micro$haft - ROTFL!

(3) Programmers will continue to write new software, so you'll actually have some software to use.

Even sillier. New apps for Linux are being released a lot faster than new apps for Windows. At least the Linux APIs are free and open, which certainly isn't the case for MS. Bugs get fixed within days and released apps are regularly improved and updated. What planet are you living on?

"Some people seem to be incapable of understanding that programmers have mortgages to pay and children to feed just like anyone else - why should their work, uniquely, be expected to be given away for nothing???"

Plenty of programmers make a good living writing in-house Linux software for businesses or working for the big Linux houses. Some of the code is released under the GPL so that others can use it, improve it and pass it on. Some of them tinker with GNU or kernel code for fun. You are, as always, labouring under massive misapprehensions about open-source software.

Gertrude believes that there should be only one software company in the world, that will write all our apps., tell us what to do and what to think and collect all our money. I prefer to have my nose somewhere less odoriferous....

:ok:

Thanks for all the posts, have been loads of help. Mac, you are half way right with Solaris, i did have the Spark version, but that wouldnt run at all. I got the X86 and giving me hardware issue, not so sure if its due to been a laptop?

I am also finding very few reasons to stick with M$ now. All i need is FS2004, and i am considering just scrapping that now FSX looks like its just got a graphics makeover and going for X-plane.

I just downloaded Freespire, seems pretty good, i got a demo of a Windows Emu from Linspire and it run FS pretty well, and a funny thing is, it costs less that a copy of Windows, i am pretty sure though it would have some drawbacks?

Thanks again anyway, i am going to try figure out Solaris as thats what my Uni is running and i wanted it to be the same, but if not, looks like Fedora is my pic. Thanks again...

Solaris on a laptop CAN be done, but be prepared for a long hard struggle.

It seems that the difficulties with some laptops are near insuperable, so it depends on what laptop you have. Solaris, true to it's orgins, only understands a limited range of hardware.

Google for "solaris laptop" - lots of hits - http://www.bolthole.com/solaris/x86-laptops.html is a starter.

I got Solaris booting successfully on an Intel-based x86 desktop and then, I confess, lost interest.

Good luck!

:ok:

Thanks for the URL. Not sure if its worth the effort, but i will have a go. I am getting the error due to not having my partitions set-up correct for Solaris (According to a help site article bug base thing). My experience is limited here, and would like a nice graphical partition manager, and suggestions?

try and find out what others are using with the same laptop as you have.
no use reinventing the wheel.

i can recommend ubuntu, knoppix or redhat all day to you , but ive no idea if they will work on your lappy HW. all the others are in the same boat.

some lappys and some devices just cannot work with linux. nobody has written the drivers for them. yet.
good luck.

Best "Linux" for a Sony Vaio Laptop?
 

My son managed to comprehensively trash his laptop, mainly (as kids do) by installing the content of every computer magazine cover CD onto it. This was after he put a virus called Windows Vista (beta, build 5744222653) on it! Then he caught about 15 trojans.

The machine ended up running at about 1/10 to 1/100 of its normal speed. Later one of the boot files got trashed and now it won't boot.

Anyway, booting with a Knoppix CD we can access all the data files, copy them off onto a flash card, etc. Works amazingly well. We will then do a shop restore, from the usual hidden partition, taking it back to XP Home. Knoppix fails to run some of the hardware e.g. the wifi and sound but this doesn't matter for this purpose.

Now, he likes Linux and wants to play with that! But he also needs XP back, to run some apps.

So I am thinking about doing a double boot: XP and Linux.

I have never really used "Unix" (have used DOS, etc, being an assembler/C developer) but know that X-Windows is the graphical user interface. I also know there are many different versions of it.

Can anyone recommend one, which will create a boot menu as described, come with Open Office, etc? There is just one partition (C:) in total.

There isn't really a "best" Linux distro anymore than there is a "best" car, just one that suits you more than another.

The essential bits of the mainline distros are for practical purposes pretty similar. The engine under the hood is more or less the same. Linux uses two main desktop environments, Gnome or KDE (there are others, like Xfce) - Gnome is simpler and KDE is more Windows like - both are excellent. You can always chose which one you use, it's just that some distros are more Gnome orientated and some more KDE friendly.

Most of the well-known Linux distros come with a nice graphical installer and good package (application) management software for updating and adding or removing software.

If you're going for a double-boot, always install Windows FIRST and then Linux - Windows deliberately trashes any non-Microsoft operating systems or partitions that it finds on install, whereas Linux respects other OSes, makes it's own partition(s) without damaging existing ones and will usually set up a dual-boot automatically.

Personally I like SuSE but I'd also suggest Mepis Linux - http://www.mepis.org/ or Kubuntu - http://www.kubuntu.org/

If you prefer the Gnome desktop then Ubuntu Linux - http://www.ubuntu.com/ is very popular and supports a lot of hardware.

As for the Vaio, if you google for "linux vaio" there's pages and pages of info. on distros and how to do it.

:ok:

PS: Most Linux distros install all the software you'll ever need when you install the OS - office suites, CD writers, audio and video software, browsers. e-mail clients, calculators and so on and so forth. You can always remove applications that you don't need or don't want from the Control Panel equivalent. There is lots of other stuff on the CD and even more in the distros web repository (library) that you can install if you need/want it.

Very similar thread already underway here.

RC

The UNIX admin guy where I used to work didn't like VAIOs because of "compatibility problems". I'm not sure what he meant by that, but I take it it's probably to do with hardware compatibility and Linux s/w.
This was last year anyway, things may well have changed big time by now..

Cesco
<UNIX admins>
UNIX admins never change. :)

As Mac points out, poison first, antidote afterwards. Ubuntu is a good bet - RedHat has plenty of support but seems to be meandering. If you want to punish your son, try Solaris 10 if he aspires to be a UNIX admin. That might be a little too cruel, though.

You are a little hamstrung, in that you cannot thow in a new physical disk for your new OS, so please ensure that anything you cannot afford to lose from the Mickeysoft partition (and you _will_ need to partition your disk) is safeguarded.

BOFH

Try VM.................
 

A free version of Solaris is available to run under VM, which will run on Windows. Works fine on my Acer Aspire 5560.

Try http://www.vmware.com/vmtn/ for the basic idea, then http://www.vmware.com/vmtn/appliances/directory/ to find the Solaris 10 links. All free. Various versions of Linux also available.

Very interesting stuff, and relatively seamless (on my machine). Best of both worlds and no dual booting.



Snooze

Now that's a good suggestion:ok:

Smart thinking Snooze!

Just got back and read that post snooze. Sounds great, running it from Windows would be a better option. Thanks for that, and the other posts, i am going with Fedora for now. Will try and install Solaris 10 in VM ware later today...

My son has just put Ubuntu on his Sony laptop.

Quite nice (if you like that sort of thing) but we got stuck installing Samba (necessary to view his windoze partition data).

And, along with apparently half the internet, we found that it doesn't support WPA/PSK so all our wifi access points, home and work, would have to be reconfigured (with plain old 64-bit WEP) specially for it :ugh: In this fairly basic respect it is about 3 years behind windoze.

He's got Ubuntu - see my post on the other thread. The installation seems to have worked out fine.

I'll be the first to admit that getting Samba working completely transparently can be a chore (it's FAR easier with most distros than it used to be) but I'm a bit confused by what you write.

You don't need SAMBA to access your Windows partition, you just need to define a mount point and mount your Windows partition there.

From Linux you can read NTFS partitions no problem, but writing to them is more problematic (MS won't release any details of the NTFS system so writing has to be reverse engineered and MS make this as difficult as possible).

But CAPTIVE - http://www.jankratochvil.net/project/captive/ and FUSE - http://www.linux-ntfs.org/ at least make writing possible albeit a bit slow (only important if you're shifting a lot of data).

Linux reads and writes FAT-32 without needing any tinkering but it's an old filesystem with no understanding of permissions and ACLs. Nevertheless, putting shared data on a FAT-32 partition (or just using it as a temporary transfer area) is a quick solution.

There are other approaches. One is to format your Windows data partition as ext3 and use the free Ext2 File System Driver for Windows - http://sourceforge.net/projects/ext2fsd - Linux of course understands ext2/ext3 partitions without problems.

:ok:

According to the WifiDocs/WPAHowTo page in the Ubuntu documentation, it does?

I've managed to work out all the Samba I've needed using the relevant section in the Ubuntu Starter Guide.
But agree with Mac that I'm not sure it's what you need to pick up a Windoze partition on the same machine.

RC

Sorry guys you are right - Samba is for windoze networking. I got confused. It was opening the NTFS partition we need a solution to (Ubuntu just says it cannot mount it). Creating a small FAT16 or FAT32 partition and use that to transfer the data is one OK solution.

I did do a google for the WPA/PSK issue but TBH I know so little about Linux and the way it works... I don't even know how to install a program under it! My son just wants to have a play. I keep telling him that an O/S is no more than a platform for running applications :) He had earlier put Vista (beta build XXXXX) on it, thoroughly trashed it with it (it worked but extremely slowly) and we had to restore it from the recovery partition.

I won't spend a lot of time on this. A friend knows unix well and I will ask him to help on the WPA/PSK issue.

Linux and printer drivers
 

As a result of reading Mac The Knife's recommendation in the "Longest Suicide Note" thread, I decided to give SimplyMEPIS 6.0.1 a trial from the live CD on my XP box.

I was very impressed by the way that it picked up all my internet and wireless network connections and worked flawlessly "out of the box" as the saying goes. Unfortunately, it will not recognise my Canon MP700 printer/scanner/copier. I have visited the Canon download site and they do not seem to offer a Linux driver for this machine.

Can anyone offer a suggestion to overcome this problem?
An alternative source for the driver or a different Linux distro perhaps? All information gratefully received.

A bit of a Google using various combinations of "drivers canon mp700 linux ubuntu suse" got me to http://www.turboprint.info/

Haven't tried it so no idea whether it's value for money / whether there are better cheaper (free?) alternatives.

RC

Nothing under System Administration - Peripherals? Have you tried here:
http://"http://http://www.mepislover...ums/index.php"

Go to Hardware then Printers: listings of supported types are being developed.

Mepis is a cool distro - glad you like it!

That's the tough thing about switching, you're stuck with the gear you have and can't just start with hardware that supports Linux....

Luckily Stylus Toolbox - http://stylus-toolbox.sourceforge.net/ - drives my Epson Stylus Photo R200 very nicely.

I don't have a Canon printer, so I've never looked for drivers.

There's a Canon subgroup on the mepis org forums - http://www.mepis.org/forum/107 - have a look there or ask, they're always very helpful .

There's also a good Mepis forum on LinuxQuestions.org - http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/f64 - where you could look/ask.

Contrary to some perceptions, Linux people are normally extremely helpful if you're polite and it seems like you've made an effort to solve your problem yourself. It's a community, after all.

At the moment Canon provide drivers for the iP2200-iP4200 and iP1000-iP1500 PIXMA series only - http://www.canon-europe.com/Support/software/linux/

Drivers for multifunction scanner/printer/copier machines are in general much harder to find.

Canon has a page at - http://www.canon-europe.com/Support/...gistration.asp - where you can register to request support for your printer. Even if you don't get it, at least they know that people want it. It's the squeaky wheel that gets the oil!

In the end, the driver problem will only be resolved if we can show manufacturers that there is a demand for Linux drivers, and that providing them will sell more of their hardware $$$.

I start with the helpdesk and if this doesn't work (occasionally they can be really helpful!), write or email the most senior people in the company with an explanation and polite request. Someday you'll strike gold (they'll wake up and produce a driver) so you'll benefit other users as well as yourself.

:ok:

Mac

PS: Linuxprinting.org - http://www.freestandards.org/en/OpenPrinting - have a huge database with lots of tips and guides

Windows.

(But you knew I'd say that.)