Daily Archives: 2012-02-04 [Saturday]

How do I permanently disable Linux’s console screen saver, system-wide?

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I was wondering how I could disable the console screen saver on my server (so I can watch progress of stuff in the background) and I found this article, How do I permanently disable Linux’s console screen saver, system-wide?

One of the solutions suggests installing the console-tools package, but there is another solution that looks like it doesn’t need any package installed, so I’m gonna give that a try first. The solution is to edit /etc/kbd/config and specify:

BLANK_TIME=0
POWERDOWN_TIME=0

I’ve configured that now but won’t be able to test for a while as I can’t reboot my server just at the moment.

While I was at it I figured I’d have num lock enabled by default too:

LEDS=+num

Update: I was finally able to reboot my system and test that config, and: it didn’t work.

I tried to apt-get install console-tools, but that make things even worse! I recommend that you don’t try and install console-tools on Ubuntu Lucid, if my experience is anything to go by. Lucky I could still SSH to my server, because there was no console!

In the end I settled on a solution I found over here, being to add the following to /etc/rc.local:

setterm -blank 0 -powersave off -powerdown 0

Postfix header checks

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I wanted to do something about the fact that I get a lot of spam where the date is substantially in the past, that is, months or years ago.

I figure I’ll never get any mail that I care about where the date is set that far back so what I wanted was a way to filter out such email.

There didn’t seem to be any suitable option in Thunderbird, and I’d rather have this done on the server than the client anyway, so I started fishing around for options in Postfix.

I found out about header checks.

To enable I had to add a file to the header_checks configuration option in /etc/postfix/main.cf:

header_checks =
  regexp:/etc/postfix/header_filter_map
  regexp:/etc/postfix/spamheadercheck

Then I created a header_filter_map file with some regexes for the date:

/^Date: .* [JFMASOND][aepuco][nbrynlgptvc] 1\d\d\d/ DISCARD Date 1
/^Date: .* [JFMASOND][aepuco][nbrynlgptvc] 200\d/ DISCARD Date 2
/^Date: .* [JFMASOND][aepuco][nbrynlgptvc] 201[0-1]/ DISCARD Date 3
/^Date: .* Jan 2012/ DISCARD Date Jan
/^Date: .* Feb 2011/ DISCARD Date Feb
/^Date: .* Mar 2011/ DISCARD Date Mar
/^Date: .* Apr 2011/ DISCARD Date Apr
/^Date: .* May 2011/ DISCARD Date May
/^Date: .* Jun 2011/ DISCARD Date Jun
/^Date: .* Jul 2011/ DISCARD Date Jul
/^Date: .* Aug 2011/ DISCARD Date Aug
/^Date: .* Sep 2011/ DISCARD Date Sep
/^Date: .* Oct 2011/ DISCARD Date Oct
/^Date: .* Nov 2011/ DISCARD Date Nov
/^Date: .* Dec 2011/ DISCARD Date Dec

I also found this file so I added some rules for the X-Mailer header, like this:

/^X-Mailer: 0001/                               DISCARD Mailer 1
/^X-Mailer: Avalanche/                          DISCARD Mailer 2
/^X-Mailer: Crescent Internet Tool/             DISCARD Mailer 3
/^X-Mailer: DiffondiCool/                       DISCARD Mailer 4
/^X-Mailer: E-Mail Delivery Agent/              DISCARD Mailer 5
/^X-Mailer: Emailer Platinum/                   DISCARD Mailer 6
/^X-Mailer: Entity/                             DISCARD Mailer 7
/^X-Mailer: Extractor/                          DISCARD Mailer 8
/^X-Mailer: Floodgate/                          DISCARD Mailer 9
/^X-Mailer: GOTO Software Sarbacane/            DISCARD Mailer 10
/^X-Mailer: MailWorkz/                          DISCARD Mailer 11
/^X-Mailer: MassE-Mail/                         DISCARD Mailer 12
/^X-Mailer: MaxBulk.Mailer/                     DISCARD Mailer 13
/^X-Mailer: News Breaker Pro/                   DISCARD Mailer 14
/^X-Mailer: SmartMailer/                        DISCARD Mailer 15
/^X-Mailer: StormPort/                          DISCARD Mailer 16
/^X-Mailer: SuperMail-2/                        DISCARD Mailer 17

Now that I know how to do this I’ll start adding rules for particular spam that I seem to get a lot of.

I’m not sure if I made the best decision, but I decided to silently discard email rather than reject it.

Slowing down fail2ban

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I had some messages from my fail2ban log like this:

 2012-02-03 00:59:33,810 fail2ban.actions.action: ERROR  iptables -N fail2ban-apache
 2012-02-03 00:59:33,838 fail2ban.actions.action: ERROR  iptables -N fail2ban-apache-overflows
 2012-02-03 03:42:49,355 fail2ban.actions.action: ERROR  iptables -D INPUT -p tcp -m multiport --dports http,https -j fail2ban-apache-overflows
 2012-02-03 03:43:04,998 fail2ban.actions.action: ERROR  iptables -N fail2ban-ssh-ddos
 2012-02-03 03:43:05,035 fail2ban.actions.action: ERROR  iptables -N fail2ban-apache-overflows
 2012-02-03 07:13:04,720 fail2ban.actions.action: ERROR  iptables -D INPUT -p tcp -m multiport --dports http,https -j fail2ban-apache-overflows
 2012-02-03 07:13:20,154 fail2ban.actions.action: ERROR  iptables -N fail2ban-ssh-ddos

I read over here about a workaround that goes like this:

Edit /usr/bin/fail2ban-client and add a call to time.sleep to mitigate a race condition:

def __processCmd(self, cmd, showRet = True):
    beautifier = Beautifier()
    for c in cmd:
        time.sleep(0.1)
        beautifier.setInputCmd(c)