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Home » Computers » Apple » Macintosh » Software

Vipul’s Razor, Amavisd, SpamAssassin and Mac OS X Server

October 13, 2004 by Jack Zimmermann Leave a Comment

I’ve just added Vipul’s Razor to my Mac OS X Server setup.

By using the excellent article at www.afp548.com on how to setup spam and virus filter on Mac OS X Panther Server using ClamAV and Amavisd, I managed to get it up and running on my server. But I also wanted to have Visul’s Razor installed to catch even more spam. So here is a description on how to get it to work. You need to first setup your server just like in the article to get this to work.

Download razor-agents and razor-agents-sdk tarball from here.

bunzip2 razor-agents-sdk-2.61.bz2
tar xf razor-agents-sdk-2.61.tar

(or the version you downloaded)

cd razor-agents-sdk-2.61

Build it by using the following commands:

perl Makefile.PL
make
make test
make install

Go through and build razor-agents with the above instructions.

Now you should have razor installed, time to do some setup stuff.

We need to change the home directory for the user clamav to /var/amavis because Amavisd expects to find the .razor and .spamassassin folders there. If you have made a spamassassin database, you need to copy the .spamassassin to this location from the old home directory of user clamav.

sudo dscl localhost -create /NetInfo/root/Users/clamav home /var/amavis

This changes the home directory in the NetInfo database for user clamav.

Change to the clamav user:

sudo su clamav

And then do:

razor -client
razor-admin -create
razor-admin -register

This sets up the symlinks, creates the /var/amavis/.razor directory and register a user.

sudo pico /var/amavis/.razor/razor-agent.conf

and add this line:

razorhome = /var/amavis/.razor

Run SpamAssassin setup:

spamassassin --lint -D

Edit the configuration file for SpamAssassin:

sudo pico /etc/mail/spamassassin/local.cf

Add these lines:

razor_config /var/amavis/.razor/razor-agent.conf
bayes_path /var/amavis/.spamassassin/bayes
auto_whitelist_path /var/amavis/.spamassassin/auto-whitelist

We need to make some changes to Amavisd.

sudo pico /etc/amavisd.conf

Find $sa_local_tests_only = 1;

and change it to $sa_local_tests_only = 0;

Now you can run amavisd in debug mode to see if razor is doing it’s job:

amavisd debug-sa

If everything looks good, stop by pressing ctrl-c and start up amavisd with:

sudo amavisd start

To setup so amavisd starts at startup, create a folder at /Library/StartupItems called amavisd. Create a file called StartupParameters.plist and paste this into it:

//
// DNSUpdate2
//
{
Description = "amavisd";
Provides = ("Spamcheck email");
Requires = ("Network",
"Resolver");
OrderPreference = "Late";
Messages =
{
start = "Starting amavisd";
stop = "Stopping amavisd";
};
}

Then create a file called amavisd and paste the following into it:

#!/bin/sh
. /etc/rc.common
ConsoleMessage "Starting Amavis anti-virus/spam daemon."

if [ ! -d /var/run/clamav ] ; then
mkdir /var/run/clamav
fi

chown clamav /var/run/clamav
/usr/bin/su clamav -c /usr/local/sbin/clamd
/usr/bin/su clamav -c amavisd
/usr/local/bin/freshclam -d -c 6 -l /var/log/clam-update.log

make sure that you set execute permissions of the amavisd file by doing:

chmod +x amavisd

You can find more information on configuring Vipul’s Razor here.

Filed Under: Software

NetNewsWire 2

October 8, 2004 by Jack Zimmermann Leave a Comment

I never been a big fan of RSS readers like NetNewsWire. I also want to check out the design of the blogs I read. But after testing NetNewsWire 2 beta, I’m hooked. And out came my Visa card. After using it for a couple of days, it already feels like a necessity. It’s also great when sitting out on location at some customer, waiting for a software update or formatting a disk and there’s no Ethernet or WiFi at hand. Just read all the stuff that’s been downloaded last time you connected.

Filed Under: Macintosh, Software

Bye bye Quark

September 13, 2004 by Jack Zimmermann Leave a Comment

So it’s finally happening. The last couple of months a lot of customers have abandoned Quark Xpress for Adobe InDesign CS. They’re fed up with insane online registration, where you need old serial number, new serialnumber, old activation code and new activation code. And all this adds up to is that all the customers that actually paid for Xpress has to endure a lot of problems. The one’s who havent paid use a cracked version of Xpress 6.1. How a one product company like Quark can be so negligent against it’s customers is beyond me. One would think that they would nurture the customer instead of mistreat them.

And the functions that they added in version 6, is anyone using them? Talk about wasting energy on the wrong things. Stuff for web publishing? Give me a brake.

One evil company on the way down, one big one to go…

Filed Under: Macintosh, Software

And it’s LaunchBar again…

June 29, 2004 by Jack Zimmermann Leave a Comment

Took a day for me to go back to LaunchBar. I really wanted to use Quicksilver, but the fact that it does not remember my standard choices, and does not include iTunes songs in the main search did it.

I’m now officially back to LaunchBar…

Filed Under: Software

Quicksilver

June 29, 2004 by Jack Zimmermann Leave a Comment

I’ve been raving about a program called LaunchBar for quite some time now, and I have been using it extensively. But this article got me curious to try out QuickSilver. And I have now switched to QuickSilver. It has a much nicer looking interface, and more functionality. The only thing I found so far that I don’t like is the fact that it does not remember my choices when it displays the wrong one. It is possible to change the default, but I like it better when it remembers my last choice instead.

Quicksilver is free, compared to $39 for LaunchBar. It appears that Quicksilver will go Open Source later on which is good.

Would I recommend you to try it out? Hell, yeah! You can’t go back after starting to use either of this utilities. Several times a day I press Command-Space on customers machine when trying to start programs. I’ll start to install Qucksilver from now on when upgrading machines to Mac OS X.

Filed Under: Software

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Portrait of Jack Zimmermann I'm a Swedish computer old timer hacking away on computers since 1979. I'm a total Apple and Linux gear head. Right now, I'm really into electronics. [Read More]

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