Blowfish gets a positive deluge of spam. Given that we have a bunch of public email addresses, and have had them for years, this is not surprising. After much tinkering, I decided to Get Serious, and on recommendations, I bought a Barracuda Networks 200 dedicated spam filter. (It’s really just a Linux box running custom mail filtering software. It sucks up the mail as your primary MX, and then sends on the stuff that passes the test to your real mail server.)
I installed it with much excitement, and early reports were promising. It was, indeed, much more effective than my home-grown solutions.
And then it all went terribly wrong.
At 8:30am on the Saturday after it was installed, it just stopped working. Plop. Kernel panic message on the console. Power cycle, cross fingers. Nope, Saturday evening, same thing. Fine, whatever, back to our old mail server, call tech support on Monday. (Why do these things only happen on weekends?) The nice tech support guy SSHes in, fixes a file system corruption (!), and the box runs fine.
Until the next Saturday. 10am, plop, dead spam box. This time, it’s even more insidious: it will open connections, but won’t actually accept email, so our monitoring service doesn’t flag it as down. Drive out to Blowfish, cycle power, and same problem.
Hassle with Barracuda tech support again on Monday. This time, they send me out a replacement box. Great! Finally! I really want this to work. So, tonight, I install it and . . . Dead on arrival. It will boot, and the console comes up fine, but even after setting the network address properly, it doesn’t respond over the network interface. No web admin, no ping, nothing.
I can hardly wait for my conversation with Barracuda tomorrow morning. I think I sense a market opportunity out there; anyone want to start a spam filter box company with me?
posted 22:52You know, this wouldn't happen if the system was running a reliable OS, like Windows.
Posted by: Jamais Cascio at July 14, 2004 10:56 AMSo, after playing with it for a while, I finally did get the replacement box to work. (I'm not quite sure why it wasn't coming up before, but a hard reset to factory settings seems to have done the trick.)
It then started operating correctly, with a very odd glitch: The time-based graphs were "stuck" at the most recent hour; several hours after the box had been up, it showed that all the mail had been processed in the same hour.
That fixed itself after about 12 hours. NTP weirdness, perhaps?
I'm not going to declare victory until the thing makes it through a weekend, though...
Posted by: Christophe at July 16, 2004 02:51 PM