Mark's 20 Percent Time

Since I last posted, I've built my new computer, but gave up on Xen for the time being. I was having more troubles than I wanted to deal with, and I just wanted my computer to work. So I installed Windows 7 on it and called it done. I now have a ridiculously over-powered Windows 7 system on my desk. :-D

I've also spent a good amount of time working on my Boxee system. It's up and running on my Atom 230 system, but the video throughput isn't nearly what I want it to be. The motherboard only has a PCI slot, so I'm somewhat limited on what I can add to it. I ended up getting one of these, an nVidia 8400GS with a PCI interface, and supposedly component Video output (my TV doesn't have VGA or anything digital.) Two problems I'm still having: 1) The video card doesn't want to detect the analog TVs. As soon as the driver loads, the TV outs shut off. 2) Video decompression isn't as fast as I expected it to be. Honestly, I can't tell a difference between the 8400 and the onboard Intel 945 chipset, which is completely unaccelerated. I assume I'm doing something wrong, but the instructions I found on the net suggest I did it right.

So, I'm not quite sure what I'm going to do here. I'm tempted to just cut my losses and get a Boxee Box when they're available.

As for what I've been doing tonight... I've spent most of the evening reading documentation on Postfix, ClamAV, SpamAssassin, Amavisd-new and Mailman, trying to make a plan of attack for the rest of the week (have I mentioned that Cindy and Zoe are at Disneyland this week? I've got the evenings to myself!)

My goal is to get email setup on the new system (puffer) and start migrating domains over to it. Postfix has pretty good documentation on itself, but all the documentation about how to integrate the other apps into it tends to be in the form of "do this, then do this, then do this and *MAGIC!* it works." I really want to understand what's going on under the hood. Also, they tend to show how to integrate a single item, but given how Postfix works, I'm not sure how to integrate more than one at a time.

So, yeah. Lots more learning to do here.

I might be home by myself, but it's still damn late. G'night world.

This whole week has been vacation for me, a bit of a sabbatical, really. Went to Disneyland for three days in the middle of it, so I didn't get as much done as I would have liked, but I have made some good progress on somethings.

Today's progress has been on getting email migrated from Chiba (old server) to Puffer (new server.) I've successfully gotten ClamAV plugged into email received on SMTP, and am working on SpamAssassin, but my eyes are starting to cross so I'm going to bed. Yes, it's before midnight. Yes, I'm getting old.

But before I go to bed, I have a question for anyone reading this who understands such things: What is the benefit of using Milters with Postfix as opposed to just doing standard SMTP style before-queue content filtering?

If I'm reading it correctly, Postfix supports Milter so they can talk to off-the-shelf plug-ins that support the Sendmail Milter protocol. However, the plugins I'm wanting to install (SpamAssassin and ClamAV for starters, possibly others) seem to only support Milters using a additional glue-layer package that talks Milters on one side and the normal SMTP mechanism on the other.

If this is correct, then it seems that using Milters with these particular plugins is just MORE overhead. The question is, do I get any additional benefit by using Milters?

If not, I'm thinking of simplifying things and just ripping the Milter layer out and either doing pre-queue filtering, or just going lazy and doing post-queue filtering.

Anyone have any thoughts? Feel free to hit me up on GTalk, AIM, Yahoo and/or Twitter as @SmittyHalibut, or throw a comment here. Thanks for your help.