bsd.m3th.org
Yet another *nix admin blog

Well, it seems like people like to mess around with Ubuntu logo. Some of them are creative, hilarious, and offensive in the eyes of Ubuntu users. PLEASE PARDON THE PUN. DON’T HIT ME! Especially Ubuntu-my meetup is just around the corner. Please don’t ask me for the author of those images. These are just some of the images that I came across on the net.

WARNING!

Rated 18SX: The images might contain non-excessive sexual element and they are only for viewers of age of 18 years old and above. :p

Click to view.
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Another way of fighting images spam is by Realtime Black List lookup. This tactic is probably one of method which is inexpensive to server resource.

With postfix, you could just add reject_rbl_client images.rbl.msrbl.net to smtpd_client_restrictions section of postfix’s main.cf.

For instance:

smtpd_client_restrictions = permit_mynetworks,
    reject_rbl_client images.rbl.msrbl.net,
    ....

For qmail, you could just add -r images.rbl.msrbl.net as tcpserver option of your qmail smtp startup script.

Note : images.rbl.msrbl.net – Hosts found sending mail contaning spam images. Check out MSRBL for more info.

On my previous post, I have discussed some of the anti image/PDF spam. I have tried clamav with Sanesecurity’s phishing and scam signatures.

On FreeBSD, I downloaded update shell script by Dan Larsson and made a slight modification as I do not wish to install/use rsync on production servers just to download signature files. I have added these two lines to update shell script under “http_source_urls” and commented out “rsync_source_urls“.

http://download.mirror.msrbl.com/MSRBL-Images.hdb

http://download.mirror.msrbl.com/MSRBL-SPAM.ndb

http_source_urls="

http://www.sanesecurity.com/clamav/phishsigs/phish.ndb.gz

http://www.sanesecurity.com/clamav/scamsigs/scam.ndb.gz

http://clamav.securiteinfo.com/vx.hdb.gz

http://download.mirror.msrbl.com/MSRBL-SPAM.ndb

http://download.mirror.msrbl.com/MSRBL-Images.hdb

http://www.malware.com.br/cgi/submit?action=list_clamav,fetch_interval=86400,target_file=mbl.db

"#rsync_source_urls="
#   rsync://rsync.mirror.msrbl.com/msrbl/MSRBL-Images.hdb
#   rsync://rsync.mirror.msrbl.com/msrbl/MSRBL-SPAM.ndb
#"

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A lot of spam image/PDFs were slipping through my office MXs since this spamming technique has gained its popularity and it was getting really out of hands. I have decided to put an end to this madness and experimented various tactics to curb image/PDF spam. Generally, this can be achieved with spam scoring from SpamAssassin or clamav via Sanesecurity’s Phishing and Scam Signatures for ClamAV.

On this post, I will share some of the tactics that I have tried with SpamAssassin. With SpamAssassin, fighting image/PDF spam was trivial.

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Previously on my post on pidgin msn switch error, a lot of pidgin users were affected by the bug/defect. However, there are simple workaround suggested.

1. edit your msn account information

2. click on the advanced tab

3. clear “use HTTP method”

4. make proxy type: no proxy.

Well, it works for me. This won’t help in corporate network environment though. (Outgoing connection on port 1836 is not commonly allowed).

In case you are using Pidgin and using “HTTP method” (In fact that is the only way to get connected to MSN), you might find that you are not able to send message to your friends. You will always get this error message whenever you try to send them message. “Message could not be sent because a connection error occurred:“.

Guess have to wait for next update of pidgin. There is an open ticket on this issue 4 days ago.

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I hate to say this. But I really disappointed by the way LPI handles their operations especially email inquiries to info@lpi.org. About 6-7 week after receiving notification of completion of LPIC 1, I didn’t get my certification from LPI. I tried to contact LPI via email.

All I get from info@lpi.org is auto email response stating, “Hello, and thank you for writting to the Linux Professional Institute. This email is being sent to you because you sent a message to info@lpi.org. yada yada yada blah blah blah………..”.

After a couple of weeks with a few follow-up emails, and still no response from the LPI. I admit that I hate CC feature in email, but it works effectively on most of cases and especially in Malaysia.

So I checked up the staff list at this page and picked up the emails of Director of Communications, Director of Operations and Executive Assistant. Added them to CC and forward my queries. Guess what, I’ve got a response from Scott within 5 minutes (Thank you Mr. Scott Lamberton).

All I can say is a professional body should behave the way its members are expected to behave professionally.

It has been a while since my last maintenance on office debian server. It’s just my plain laziness. :p I was quite happy with apt tool set for debian box maintenance.

Happily, I fired up the command, apt-get update and it complained about NO_PUBKEY for 2 public keys. Am I missing something?

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Just a note for my own reference on dump/restore over ssh. It is fun to dump/restore for remote backup.

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