Apparently I am sufficently serious and annoyed by both spam and the hasslement of accomplishing my objective that I’m sticking to it, in abeyance of my previous sour declaration.

My objective is to get a server-side spam filter, or “milter” as the kids would have it, installed on my mail server so that all incoming mail gets vetted. Cursory research revealed that Spam Assassin is the Bayesian weapon of choice. Forthwith, the links I’ve been haunting in search of the wise words of early voyageurs into OS X serveration.

One person, as noted earlier, has actually accomplished my goal.

Unfortunately for me, the world has turned, and the versions of sendmail and SpamAssassin there employed are both superannuated. Currently, I’ve been able to get everything to work as desired up through the compile of the milter proper, which barfs on something I haven’t noted yet but which appears to be different than Numbski’s compile problem.

Or maybe it is, as he had problems with a function called “new_poll()” while mine also have to do with polling:

spamass-milter.cpp:86:24: subst_poll.h: No such file or directory
spamass-milter.cpp: In member function

Savannah: Project Info – SpamAssassin Milter Plugin and mailing list archives are my next stop.

Previously was having trouble getting sendmail to unzip – it was because I stubbornly persisted in attempting to use a non-commandline product, Stuffit Extractor, to do the job. Once I broke down and typed “tar xvf filename” all was well. Silly me – expecting a GUI tool to do a man’s work!

Monkeying around wth my sendmail has led me to seek to disentangle the gordian wiki that is the documentation – or lack thereof – of the beloved SquirrelMail, a PHP-based webmail system that relies on IMAP to manage email on the server. Unfortunately for me, in previous incarnations, SM had no clearly documented capacity to handle secure communications with sendmail or the uw-imap family of mail demons. Sufficiently curious about what’s failing, I’ve joined the support list, which did not apparently show a record of my specific problem. The PHP part of the program looks like it’s working just fine, but it does not successfully establish communications with the IMAP demon, desite currently supporting the needed protocols.

Secure connections are no longer an option, but rather the default in most of these projects. This has had the salutory effect of requiring the casual user, such as yours truly, to seek the wisdom of such masters of clarity and open, clear communication as the PGP corporation, which, in their defense, did explain to me how to resolve a bug in their free version, once I was aware that they did not, in fact, provide support for the free version.

(I should explain I actually was a good boy ages ago and setup a bunch of security stuff server side, albeit grumpily. Mmmm, brussels sprouts and lima beans!)

So.

I think that hits most of the links I’ve been pawing through lately – it feels rather like digging around trunks of other people’s old clothes. One of the special qualities of the open source support mailing lists is the testiness of many of the knowledgeable users in response to support questions from, well, those less knowledgeable.

It’s understandable, sure.

But I’d venture to guess each nastygram on the support list of a given opensource project translates directly into increased shareholder value at a certain large, friendly software provider across the lake from where I live. Hm, I wonder – could there be any legislative pressure aimed at UW-developed projects such as pine and uw-imap?

I am at least getting sendmail to compile OK. There’s still scads of disentanglement to work through but with luck the spamassassin stuff will come up after a few more head-smacks into the monitor.

What else is new?

I have a painful infected pore on my elbow, for which we went to the emergency room today. My parents are home safe and sound.

SpamAssassin Milter on MacOS X describes how one person managed to get Spam Assassin up and running, server side, on OS X.

I managed to muddle through the foundational work, but was unable to get the sendmail distribution to unzip. The distro requires PGP key verification, which I was ignoring because I did not want to spend more time chasing half-documented implementations of SW for OS X all over the web.

So the bogus untarring could be because of that.

I am reminded that I am not a person who enjoys this sort of thing. I am reminded that I saw a copy of “Close to the Machine” in a used booksale the other day and thought, hm, I should read that some day. That which is broken shall remain so.

I believe I abuse bellerophon overmuch.

There was a disk crash that led to unbootable drives. After much fiddling and a clean install of OS9 to the bay-mounted backup drive, all is well. For now.

There will be spotty outages and peculiar content and functionality changes as I run through some backup procedures over the next couple days.

But right now, a haircut!

The Tussin-Up Web Archive is now restored, withh nearly-complete functionality (the guestbook hasn’t been brought back yet). Gallery also is hosting all my photos now, but there’s some sort of issue with album grouping, which makes it harder to apply changes to a broad selection of albums easily.

Therefore the Tussin albums have a grey-blue background for now and display some needless Galler nav-chrome.

I also implemented rollovers in the top frame, for fun. Just to see what comes out of ImageReady, I did it all automagically and, man, that’s some needlessly complex code, lemme tell ya. It works, though, so what-evah.

Today’s meditative activities included getting the image-server ‘Gallery’ back up, the php/mysql-based site counter reactivated, and some other wrangling along those lines.

My outstanding goals, then, are:

• add images back to Gallery
• re-update the resume site
• re-deploy modock.whybark.com and tussinup.whybark.com
• re-deploy the guestbooks for both of these sites
• re-deploy the Ken Goldstein Project

Of these, getting the images into Gallery and redeploying the KGP look to be the trickiest, as both modock and tussinup are relatively simple sites that I developed offline – so, in theory, I should be able to more-or-less slap the dev copies up and fine-tune. Tussinup is dependent on Gallery-hosted images, however.

And there’s the rub. On bellerophon, Gallery takes about 20 seconds to process each image – and I estimate up to 4000 images to be processed. Leave aside the whole issue of my storage structure conventions. Yeesh.

Search has been restored, as has word count (and SmartyPants and Trickle, in theory).

But the ol’ mind is firing on one cylinder today and I haven’t yet suceeded at some slightly more complex twiddles yet. Tomorrow.

…and we’re back.

There will be countless broken image links, I realize. Please bear with me. There are many things to tackle on the machine, and I am far from having a comprehensive list. I could go on, but, of course, I must spare my esteemed dancin’ banana-lovin’ colleague.

Won’t you try the comments?

Progress! I was able to re-deploy MT with relative ease – read-write to and from the database, writes files to the drive when a rebuild is engaged. Still some permission problems to clean up and I haven’t tested the image-processing routines yet.

In other news, in their current issue, Tablet ran some 125-word comics reviews I wrote a while ago. Re-reading them, I was disappointed – I had intially written them without worrying about length and cut them to 125, and I feel it shows. It’s kind of standard to include three points in a comic review: a brief plot summary, a description of the overall artistic style and approach, and some critical analysis. At 125 words, I found that was roughly a sentence apiece. Next time I’ll begin with shorter copy.

EVERYTHING in the whybark.com domain got nuked. That means that the Ken Goldstein Project will need to be rebuilt, as will my blog, as will many of the miscellaneous images on the blog, and so on.

The biggest PITA will be rebuilding the Gallery-based image collections. The files themselves remain available elsewhere, but Gallery takes about 20 seconds to process each image and I’m missing about 18 months worth of digital pix as a result.

Then there’s the software redeployment. Yeesh. Well, at least the writing from the blog is still there, sitting in its’ database, waitng for MT to call it forth once again.

I do think it’s kind of neat that I finally figured out QPQ’s ssi. About two years too late, but still.