spam, graphs and backups

I’ve been spending most of my time over the last week or so trying to get my new server up and running. There’s so many little things here and there to do, it seems like it’s going to take forever.
However, this is what I have currently managed to do:

* Install postfix and cyrus with webcyradmin, SpamAssassin and Anomy Sanitiser.
* Set up virtual hosting with Apache, and move my blog to stuartherring.com (in case you hadn’t noticed)
* get awstats working to give me pretty graphs of the virtually non existant traffic
* Find a way of doing nightly backups.
* Set up webmail (horde / imp).

The backups in particular were a bit of a battle. I currently use bacula to do automated nightly backups at home, so I figured I’d just install the bacula file daemon on wishmaster, and add a new job to the configuration. But no!. it’s not as easy as that.
It seems there’s some weird 3 way thing that happens between the director, the file daemon, and the storage daemon, that means that the director sends the address of the storage daemon to the file daemon, which then attempts to connect back to the storage daemon.
The problem with that, is that since the director and storage daemon are both in my private LAN, the file daemon gets sent an address it can’t possibly connect to.
My first solution was to define a new storage record in the director config file that gave the outside name of my firewall as the storage daemon, and then do port forwarding on the firewall. But that didn’t work, as the director also wanted to connect to the outside address, and I’ve never managed to figure out how to get port forwarding that works externaly, to work internally as well.

Anyway, the final solution was to rysnc the stuff I wanted backed up to a local directory on my backup server, and have the nightly job back that up. That took a bit of fiddling with rsync, ssh, chroot and the firewall before I was happy, but it seems to work well enough, and should be secure enough too.

Most of today was spent working on a little java program to analyse the performance of Spam Assassin. You point it at an IMAP folder with spam in it, and it gives you stats on the tests that matched, for mails flagged and passed by SA.
I’m intending to extend it so as to be able to give it a folder with good messages as well, and have it parse the SA config file to get the current scores, enabling you to experiment with different settings to see what effect they would have on your current mail.
I’ll probably make it available up here somewhere when I’m done with it.

I’ve also been experimenting with Zope and Plone over the last week, but I’ll talk about it later, as there’s probably a fair bit to say, and I need to go to bed right now, as I have to drive to Sydney tomorrow.