Forums & Blog

dev_shah:

Can i install SAVASM with VM Ware server on my existing live dedicated SM4 box/win2k3?

Yes. 

dev_shah:

I've disabled internal ClamAV & SpamAssian, can SAVASM give me better results?

Yes.

dev_shah:

Is it tough to maintain SAVASM on existing box, i don't have knowhow on linux

You can use without any maintenance; if something goes wrong with your current SAVASM server, you can simply load the original image again.

dev_shah:

can i uninstall SAVASM if things dont work out?

Of course.

Hi,

   I tried downloading twice from mirror 1 savasm.zip it downloads it all, and it will not unzip, it says   error:  invalid compressed data to inflate

Anyone else been able to download this new build in the past few days?  I was able to get the original v0.1.8, but cannot get the new fixed one.

-dave

Well, I suppose it's possible that the file was somehow corrupted during uploading. I'll be uploading it again today, just in case. 

Hi,

thanks, please acknowledge once u upload, so i can start d/loading

thanks

I have now reuploaded the image so hopefully the file will be intact now.

Hi,

  Thank You, I downloaded it and it unzips fine, no errors!

Thanks!

Anyone having problems with it keeping time? I tried on two seperate machines and the hwclock is always right on but not the clock you get when typing date.  The problem is when the user gets the email the time and date is reported wrong because of it.

Hi,

   Oh yea, indeed, on the time issue, I run a cronjob script every minute to sync it up to a time site using ntpdate, I was told this is a vmware issue and you need to have the tools installed, but I have had issues trying to get them installed, not sure why they aren't installed from the image, maybe that is impossible to do?

    I have been meaning to post about this myself, but my solution works basically, so it is not too far off.

-dave

Hey there,
I am no way a linux orientated but I thought I'd post the process I used to convert this Image to Microsoft Virtual Server.

Download the conversion tool from http://vmtoolkit.com/files/folders/converters/entry8.aspx
Run the conversion tool over the Virtual Harddrive.

Then create a New Virtual Machine and mount the converted drive.
Start it up and follow the instructions in the SVASM Readme.

Now we neet to remove the VMware Tools.

Use the following commands to remove the VMware Tools
rpm -qa | grep VMWare
rpm -e <VM-Ware Tools Version>

Now you need to Obtain the VMAdditionsForLinux.msi which you can get from here http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserversystem/virtualserver/evaluation/linuxguestsupport/default.mspx

Mount that in the Virual machine and get back into the SVASM command shell.

Use the following command to mount the CD rom in Linux
mount -t iso9660 -o ro /dev/cdrom /media/cdrom
cd /media/cdrom

Now we need to install the Kernel Sources.
uname -r
yum install kernel-devel-<Version Number>

Eg. yum install kernel-devel-2.6.9-42.EL

Once thats downloaded and installed you need to install the Microsoft Virtual Machine Additions.
rpm -ivh vmadd-full-0.0.1-1.i386.rpm --force

If all went well we can start the Service.
service vmadd start

Hope this helps!

 Hello;

I've just set this up to help with the recent increases in spam.

 Initially I was seeing timeouts in the SM logs, and the spamd logs said consider increasing childred.

 So I've upped the ram to 400 megs and the children to 20, I hope this works better.

 We might have 10000 emails a day so I'm not sure why 5 chilred and 256 megs wouldn't cut it.

I'm currious if we can get the web admin to be simplified. Given that I'm only concerned with spamassassin and clamav, I'd rather not see all the extra stuff.

 Perhaps a quick link to log files for both apps could be added?

I'm not much of a linux guy, but perhaps someone else may be able to help?

I have had to set up 2 vm's to cope with our mail/spam and upped both of those to atleast 400mb, every now and again I have to reboot them as they simply seem to fall over as all the ram gets used up. I have them set as folows:

-d -u spamassassin -c -i -A xx.xxx. -H --max-children=5 --max-conn-per-child=128 -s /var/log/spamd.log --virtual-config-dir=/vhome/%u/spamassassin -r /var/run/spamassassin/spamd.pid

 We get about 10000 messages in a day

 just wish they didnt keep needing to be rebooted.

I think that 5 child nodes are too few for 400 MB. At that figure, I think that 10 would be a safe setting, and that the extra child nodes should help with the processing time (and as such, with mail flow).

Note that instead of rebooting the servers, (assuming that the bottlenecks are caused by SA) you could just set up a cron job to restart the spamd daemon at certain intervals. Restarting spamd should be more efficient (and painless) then rebooting the server.

the problem I have seen is that spamd sessions werent closing under heavy load as if they were waiitng for the acknowledgment for them to close.

one VM is set at 425mb and the other is at 525mb

so you believe i should set both to 10 children?

and set up the cron to kill spamd? 

how often should it run and can you tell me the command as i am real linux newbie, windows is my bag

Other than that they work GREAT!

Cheers

eastwood:

one VM is set at 425mb and the other is at 525mb; so you believe i should set both to 10 children?

Well, you can certainly try, and see if it works out better. 

eastwood:

and set up the cron to kill spamd? how often should it run and can you tell me the command as i am real linux newbie

The interval is up to you; basically, as often as you would normally reboot the system. The command is simple:

service spamassassin restart 

I'm about to down SAVASM and give it a try however I thought I would ask one question before I spend the time.

Does SAVASM just scan the e-mails and send the good ones off to the mail server?
I'm looking for something that just does the above, we currently have a McAfee appliance that scans the e-mail and sends the non-spam to our Exchange server. As a fall back to the McAfee appliance I was thinking SAVASM might work.