Snafu Blog

I spent a fair amount of time sorting out how postmaster email is routed after we received a couple of reports that anyone trying to send email out to postmaster at other domains had their email snaffled and sent to our postmaster account

A look at the Exim config showed a rather confused routing for postmaster that involved rewrites and redirects to another account, back to postmaster and then finally back to the other account again for delivery. I removed all this gumph and replaced it with a single alias to route postmaster correctly. I also managed to cut our oldest mailhub, mercury, out of the loop meaning it’s days are numbered . As usual the actual change took very little time (once I’d figured what out what on earth it was doing) but testing to make sure I hand’t knackered the config took quite a while. It’s in service now and seems to be working, which is good.

A side effect of this is that spamchecking for the Postmaster account now works, a feature requested by the people that look after it. We’re slightly unsure whether this is wise given that postmaster is a likely recipient of Freedom of Information requests. However, they claim the spam folder is checked carefully daily (though you wonder if there is a point spam checking for the account in this case…).

As a quick project I was also asked if I could find a way of checking whether certain windows computers were turned on and run this at regular intervals (this is for lecture theatre pcs). Nice and easy if you have the IP/hostname but a bit more fiddly if you only have the NETBIOS name (yuck). A bit of searching found nbtscan, which while it doesn’t do quite we I wanted does do netbios lookups incredibly quickly and is likely to be a useful tool. In the end I used nmblookup to query the WINS server to look for registrations for the computers which seems to work. If I can get IPs for all the computers I can use nbtscan which might be a bit quicker but it’s difficult to find the IPs out as the hostnames have no correlation to the netbios name. Hohum

As I was off yesterday I spent a good portion of the day catching up on Remedy queries assigned to me and sorting my email out. I had a load of queries assigned about our email system, which is quite rare as the non-JES bit is usually fine (and was in this case as it turned out).
One of the queries was quite an impressive bit of spam. It’s engine had gone far enough as to look up the MX records for our domain and insert a couple of fake header lines into the email. If it had actually got the version number and ID string correct it would have been even better Not entirely sure why they bothered with this though, given how prevelant spam is.

Also had a meeting with one of our departments about taking their backups forward (and out of the 20th century ). Though we though it might have been a little difficult to part them from their system it looks like the promise of diskstaging has won them over. Now to do some testing with EBS 7.3 to ensure that it stages in a way that is convenient for them and also provides the level of data security we like.

As a final thing I spent some time firefighting the odd thing that went wrong here and there, pretty much like normal really

Had a meeting about the new Print Accounting system today (Papercut). Mainly to check progress (slightly behind) and to make sure we haven’t missed anything. Things seem to be progressing fairly smoothly at this stage, which is good.

Also spent some time helping Q&A with a query about mail scanning. Looks like the document I wrote nearly a year ago is finally going to be published so that users have an idea about exactly what the mail system does and does not allow.

Spent a good hour updating Kentmail Sun cases and closing the ones that patches have fixed. Deployed a test CE patch to the testmail system and did some basic testing to ensure it fixed the bugs it was meant to. Handed over to testers for more extensive testing before deployment on the production.