The VMware workshop on Thursday was neat. A lot of their speakers seemed to be speaking for the first time ever, but they did manage to get a guy from Siemons to speak, who did an excellent job.

Nate, Mark, Shana, and I went to Mark-Jason Dominus's book release party Saturday evening. It was fun, and a lot of Perl folks were there (many of which we get to see at YAPC each year). Mark's book is High Order Perl.

I'd also like to say that the idea that Debian works so seemlessly that one can just run an "apt-get dist upgrade" is just a bunch of baloney :-) I've spent two days trying to get all the upgrades working on this upgraded server. It's working now, but it was anything but seemless.

That was a mailserver. Redoing the mailserver did give me an opportunity to redo some things. The new version of SpamAssassin is doing really well, and we're using RBL's like SpamHaus and Razor.

The even bigger thing is that it's using greylisting (Postgrey). Over the weekend, I could typically expect to collect around 200, which awaited my arrival on Monday. This weekend -- not one. Not everyone was so lucky, but there's been far fewer.

It's setup so that only the first email from someone is greylisted. Once they "pass the test", they become whitelisted. So I'm pretty thrilled about that.

Onto troublesome issues, first on the list is LDAP. What I thought was a successful LDAP migration (from the old mailserver to the new one) was anything but. I have now since determined that LDAP is annoying :-) I think for what we get out of it, that it may not be worth the hassle and headaches it gives us. I spend more time troubleshooting LDAP problems than anything else (during upgrades or changes anyway, once working it tends to work well).

We only need the users on two boxes, have them on the four that do LDAP now was mostly a convenience. The mailserver needs the users -- I think I may put them in a password file. The webserver used LDAP for webmail. Instead, it could use imap and remotely connect to the mail server, instead of accessing NFS mounted mail boxes. The rest of the servers only need some admin accounts, and those change so little that they can easily be added manualy.

I may also consider MySQL for this, but I don't think we'll start with that.