A Mind Lost

The hard drive on our mail server died this week, giving SATA media errors on the Linux console.  I had a spare server almost ready to go so I migrated our data and configuration over to it.  Everything appeared to go smoothly until I tried to send an email in from outside to test it.  Every message I sent appeard in the recipient’s inbox as a blank message.  No subject, no content and the To field marked as “undisclosed-recipients”.

I initially traced the problem to the spamassassin configuration in that if I disabled the spamfilter content filter in Postfix, emails were sent and received correctly, albeit they would include the 1500 or so junk messages the filter traps every day.  I tried removing and reinstalling spamassassin but that made no difference and I tried running “spamassassin –lint” to test our configuration but no errors were found.  Log files reported no problems.

In the end the solution was incredibly simple.  If you run

apt-get install spamassassin

on debian, you get a spamassassin installation with one important feature missing, the spamc program used to actually filter the messages through the spamd daemon.

apt-get install spamc

fixes the problem.  I don’t remember installing them seperately in the past but maybe I’ve just forgotten that I did!

All last week I managed to get to work despite the snow and ice here in the Midlands.  However, this morning I’ve been beaten.  We had a layer of snow yesterday evening and it’s frozen solid overnight.  Having left for work early this morning I gave up after 25 minutes having completed only a mile of my 10 mile journey.  The area is grid-locked and the roads are like glass.

I’ve been pretty supportive of the councils and highways agency in their gritting strategy.  People seem to think that laying grit while it’s snowing will magically clear the roads instead of the grit just getting covered with snow!  However, my local authority and the one where I work have no fear of running out of grit/salt because they haven’t used any!  I live on what is considered a main road and although the snow stopped before 7:00pm last night, there is not a grain of salt on the road outside my house and people are doing suicidal speeds, oblivious that the shine on the road is actually ice until they try to stop at the roundabout just down the road!

Hopefully, once the rush hour has come and gone, I’ll be able to get to work sometime today.  If not, the VPN to the office will have to be get the work done today.

According to todays news, drugs giant GlaxoSmithKline are announcing over 6000 job losses.  If you believed the spin, including the BBCs report, it’s all tied in with other job losses resulting from the current recession.  It is clear beyon the spin, however that this is due to increased competition and would be happening anyway.  It seems that the the recession is a great cover for getting rid of staff in order to “cut costs and boost profits”!