I know you’ve been eagerly awaiting my next post, but I can tell you that not too much is going on. Or: maybe I’m just too busy; or even maybe all of my complaints are the same and you’ve already heard them before. Whatever the reason, I’ve not posted much this month. In fact, after last month’s record number of posts, I’m down to two for the first half of this month. I must have hit writer’s block.
What has been going on with me, you ask? Well, I have taken some good pictures of the cherry blossoms here in DC and did that again this morning in better light.
I’ve also been experimenting with network-wide anti-spam products so that I can keep my mailboxes clean. After working with Laura on a slide-show presentation eulogizing Jim Kiley [another friend of ours who passed away recently], we’ve decided that I need to re-install her machine fresh so that we can rid it of it’s legacy of Windows 98 and old software as well as the infestation of spy-ware that is on it. After cleaning and reinstalling that machine [as well as my own desktop which had a serious bout of “crash” this weekend], I will look into transferring my firewall to a Linux box and maybe adding some anti-spam filtration on that [since it’s free…] instead of the setup I have now. I haven’t quite decided what I want to do, but I know I want to do something to keep the garbage from coming into my network.
So: if anyone knows of some good free-ware or open source anti-spam, anti-virus, anti-spy-ware, firewall products out there, post a comment…
::: jeffphillips.org ::: 
Like most things in *nix land, it’s a process of making a cake rather than buying a cake. In other words, there are a number of applications you layer together.
For virus and spam filtering on email traffic, the combination of amavisd-new (plus various individual virus catching engines, including clam-av and perhaps some that you have to license) and spam assassin is great.
on the firewall side of things, Smoothwall is an interesting option, but there’s also good old ipchains, part of every *nix distro in recent memory.
And on the spyware filter side of things, I prefer to use Firefox.exe on the PC as my spyware filter. In other words, don’t use IE, and you won’t get much spyware (if any).
LikeLike
I got the postfix thing going, but I have yet to configure spamassasin to work correctly. I’ll probably be asking you some questions. I’ve also decided to forget about the firewall as I have several options including hardware.
Are there any of these products which might be manageable by HTTP? Or maybe a plugin tool which presents the management as a web page?
LikeLike