[Glastonbury] Mandrake 9.2

[Andrew M.A. Cater]

On Tue, Oct 28, 2003 at 08:14:35PM +0000, tim hall wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> On Tuesday 28 October 2003 19:42, peter wrote:
> > I am up for my laptop to be used for a kernel update at a meeting. So
> > it's there to play with.

>From what to what?  Having rendered my firewall unbootable for half an
evening the other night - it is worth checking these things out in 
advance :) Remember to amend your GRUB menu list / rerun LILO :)

Be aware that: Most distributions customise / patch the kernel in some 
way - know what patches RH/Mandrake apply _first_ so you can get 
equivalent functionality and what modules they load by default.

Don't move yet to the 2.6 test kernels as a matter of course until
they settle some more.
> 
> That would be good. Steve expressed an interest an kernel compilation a while 
> back, although that's a bigger issue. Would be worth a meeting or two tho'.
> 
Simple kernel compilation is probably a matter of running a few commands
fairly blindly - perhaps with somebody sitting next to you saying 
"You'll need that, don't bother with that, ignore that"

(NB. Watching somebody else do this is intensely boring - but if you do 
a quick demo, print out the Howto/brief notes on the process and have a 
few scrap machines so that everyone gets a try, it would be a very 
useful exercise for a longer LUG meeting.)
[It would also be useful for an "install fest" if you wanted to build
custom kernels for certain hardware.]

If you want detailed kernel internals type information as to what's 
happening deep within the kernel as you do this, thats a fairly intense 
topic - but there are books from O'Reilly and others which will tell 
you.

If you want - how do I create the smallest full featured kernel possible
/ how do I write from scratch and hook in my own device driver to the 
kernel at low level? - that's Deep Magic and you might need a good 
quality Computing degree behind you :) 

> 
> I'll second that.
> Is it true that you have to set up a local mailserver to use spamassassin 
> with fetchmail and sendmail. Seems very complicated just to filter emails.
> 
DON'T USE SENDMAIL unless you _really_ know what you're doing / just 
don't use Sendmail. Exim / postfix are conceptually easier to deal with and 
less of a pain to set up. As I understand it - and I've not yet set this up 
properly myself - SA is an "intelligent" filter which uses various 
rulesets to classify spam on a percentage basis.

                          ------------------------|
                          ^                       v
Fetchmail pulls mail in --| postfix <-- "ham" -->[SA]<-->"spam"
                             |
                             v
                      Mail client


So the SA daemon classifies the mail, rewrites headers and pushes the
"ham" back to your local mail spool for your local server to redeliver.
The "spam" gets added to a separate mail file and this is used to update
the rulesets used by SA.  It can optionally be sent back to Razor to
help update global spam set rules.  The larger spamfile you have the 
more it will learn - you may need a couple of thousand messages to 
become spam free. Periodically, you can delete the spam.

Note: spammers are modifying spam to evade SA but this is only really
a delaying tactic - some amount of spam may get through for a while
but SA will catch up.

Distro flame wars are no fun, so I won't advocate the One True Linux
Distribution which makes all this relatively easy here :)

HTH,

Andy