Month: April 2008

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Use the source, Luke!

I wrote earlier about SASL and postfix. One side affect of my setup has been that I get these spurious warnings in my logs.

Apr 4 10:22:19 corellia postfix/smtpd[69626]: auxpropfunc error invalid parameter supplied

I’ve been meaning to throw some time at this problem for a while now but everything works so I haven’t. Upgrading my infrastructure to the latest Open and FreeBSD’s has me using newer packet filtering code with more capabilities so what was once a non-problem has become a pain in the neck. This problem is tied to another feature of cyrus sasl that if find annoying. The configuration for postfix and cyrus is handled through a file called smtpd.conf. This file is stored in /usr/local/lib/sasl2/smtpd.conf. This is annoying for one because under Unix configuration files like this belong in /etc. But for two because the file is poorly documented at best. Reading the source for postfix shows that this is handled by the smtpd_sasl_path. It’s already well documented that this variable isn’t a path, it’s the base file name for the configuration file. This is fixed in postfix 2.5. The warning comes from the initialization of the ldapdb component of sasl. Even though I’m not using it I have to specify the parameter ldapdb_uri.

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Trackback Spam

Someone is attempting to spam my blog pretty heavily through trackbacks. This is stupid. It’s never going to work since I have so few comments here anyhow that I moderate all of them. It only serves to annoy me by generating an email saying that I have comments to moderate. My original thought was to block inbound packets from the offenders. It would be pretty simple. Add a table to my firewall config and then use a little shell script magic (grep, awk etc) to pull the addresses from the log an load them into the table. But a quick pass through sort confirmed that these attacks were coming from mostly different addresses. For now I’ve disabled trackbacks by disabling the php file that supports them. Next up change my mail filter to quarantine the emails appropriately. Sigh.