Archive for the 'Linux' Category

I’ve had this post sitting in my drafts folder for ages, I don’t think I’ll ever get around to finishing it because I’ve forgotten the steps I took and I found someone else has already written up a guide.

I followed the instructions here:

http://wiki.apache.org/spamassassin/SingleUserUnixInstall

and the gist is, you have to install local copies of all the Perl libraries you need, i.e.:

perl Makefile.PL PREFIX=$HOME/usr && make && make install

The packages required and the order to install is:

1. IP-Country (2.20)
2. razor-agents-sdk (2.07) Also provides (Digest, Digest::SHA1, File::Spec, MIME::Base64, Test::Harness, Test::More, Test::Simple, Time:HiRes, URI)
3. razor-agents (2.77)
4. Net-Ident (1.20)
5. Socket6 (0.19)
6. IO-Socket-INET6 (2.51)
7. Net-IP (1.23)
8. Net-DNS (0.53)
9. Sys-Hostname-Long (1.4)
10. Mail-SPF-Query (1.997)
11. pyzor (0.4) (Didn’t install correctly)
12. dcc-dccproc (1.3.16)
13. Mail-SpamAssassin (3.1.0)

Check out SpamAssassin 3.1.0 for Dreamhost or the DreamHost Wiki for more instructions.

I did a clean install of SpamAssassin 3.1.0 with the current version of Perl (5.8.4) and retrained the bayesian bit and it still doesn’t work. Upgrading the DB format didn’t make a difference either. I started a post on how to install SA, but I figured it’s pointless to finish it until I know I can get it all working again, so I’m not going to post it now.

Since I can train it and the bayesian checking works from the command line I know it’s all working properly and it going to be some stupid little detail. My first guess is permissions because the bayes files are 600 so procmail might be running as another user or something.

Dreamhost has recently upgraded to Debian Sarge. Along with that upgrade was a new version of Perl (5.8.4) this appears to have broken the bayesian filtering part of my SpamAssassin setup. This Usenet post describes some of the problems I’m seeing. But even after upgrading the database format I’m still having trouble. I’m getting this message in my procmail logs:

Cannot open bayes databases /.../.spamassassin/bayes_* R/O: tie failed:

Which was the error message I got when trying to use sa-learn before upgrading. So far I’ve tried retraining from scratch and even installing a local copy of Perl 5.6.2, but none have solved the problem. What’s really annoying is that if I save a spam message and run it through SpamAssassin on the command line it works fine.

Unless tomorrow’s Google searches turn up anything useful I’ll just try rebuilding all my local Perl packages with the new version and hope that makes a difference.

Before sending my laptop off to IBM I needed to back everything up. I run Gentoo Linux on my Thinkpad and given the amount of time it takes to do an install from scratch, I’d rather avoid having to do it all again if the guys at IBM decide to wipe my disk. Thankfully I’m not the only one. A chap on the Gentoo Forums has written a script that will create a stage 4 tarball of your existing setup. The post with the script can be found here:

http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-312817.html

For those of you who don’t use Gentoo, the initial part of the installation is broken up into 3 stages. They setup things like the disk partitions, network settings, etc. More details can be found in the Gentoo Handbook. The end of stage 3 is basically where you start installing all your app software, e.g. X, KDE, Evolution, etc.

After editing a few variables in the script, it ran without a hitch. After verifying the contents of the tar ball I packaged up my Thinkpad for its trip back to IBM. I’m half curious to find out how smoothly the restore process goes, but I’d much rather just have my hard disk intact.

I got back home and attempted to get my wireless network working again (it broke down when I switched ISPs and was forced to use a different ADSL modem). I switched the router to act as a wireless gateway and live on a separate subnet. This meant it could act as the DHCP server. The modem would serve DHCP addresses over ethernet but not through the wireless router, which was the problem I was having before. Around the same time I upgraded my kernel to 2.6.x and the wireless drivers stopped working, and only have recently come back to life.

Anyway all that was fairly straightforward, back to the drivers. The ‘hostap’ driver connected to my Thinkpad to the network without any hassles (still had the old config). The ‘orinoco’ driver seemed to have troubles with the security setup. Rather than waste any more time I decided to drop it and just use the ‘hostap’ driver.

Without realising it I had switched back to the hostap driver because I had wlan0 set as my default network setup instead of eth1. I don’t remember doing anything to get it to work. It must have been when I upgraded the kernel to 2.6.12.

Some preliminary tests show that I get a better signal with the orinoco driver so it’s probably worth changing to that one permanently. Both setups appear to have something slightly wrong with them at the moment, and I’m sure all I need to do to make the orinoco talk as wlan0 is to change my /etc/modules.d/wlan file.

The error I get with the orinoco driver is:

/etc/init.d/net.eth1: line 683: interfacevariable: command not found /etc/init.d/net.eth1: line 466: interfacevariable: command not found

The error I get with the hostap driver is:

Warning: Driver for device wlan0 recommend version 18 of Wireless Extension, but has been compiled with version 17, therefore some driver features may not be available...

Neither stops the driver from working, but the first one looks like an error in the startup script, the second one looks a bit more serious.

A few weeks ago I decided to finally upgrade my Gentoo profile, and this meant switching to the 2.6.x series of kernel. Since that upgrade I haven’t had any joy with wireless networking on my Thinkpad. The wireless card is the internal PCI one that comes with the T30.

In the past I had used the hostap driver, but that stopped working, but still claimed to detect the card. I’ve now switched to the orinoco driver and everything is working again. Now I just need to figure out how to make it call the network interface ‘wlan0′ instead of ‘eth1′.