[Cerowrt-devel] Dave needs to get better at pushing out patches

[david at lang.hm]

On Thu, 8 Dec 2011, Dave Taht wrote:

>> as a holdout pine user I understand your frustration :-)
>>
>> have you considered doing something like setting up openvpn to connect to
>> the bufferbloat.net server and then configuring the mail server to trust
>> mail arriving form the VPN clients?
>>
>> I know this is horrible overkill for such a trivial job, but it avoids all
>> the problems of doing authentication for the SMTP connection (and the fact
>> that many locations block outbound connections from dhcp addresses to port
>> 25)
>
> Both 25 and VPNs are blocked at lincs. 567 works. Neither certs nor
> sasl from postfix worked. So far I've figured out

openvpn works over any port you want.

now, as a security person I am going to point out that you should not 
break the security of a company network by establishing a VPN that 
bypasses the security controls.

but if it's just a careless network config (they allow anyone to connect 
to it, but then block specific ports outbound), I feel no guilt over 
establishing connections over oddball ports :-)

I just took an openvpn class, and one of the upcoming features is the 
ability for openvpn to work over ping, so I'll bet that you can make it 
work (odds are really good that it will work over port 443 from just about 
anywhere, and anyone who has security setup well enough that you can't do 
it over 443 is probably a place where youreally shouldn't be doing it 
anywhay :-)

> That the last 'update' from ubuntu wiped out my certs on my main
> email box.
>
> That dovecot sieve sucks compared to procmail
>
> that they've created a new abstraction for mail handling
> for doing sasl that doesn't want to work
>
> and I forget what else.
>
> I mean, mail used to 'just work'. Even with bang
> paths it would mostly just work. Nowadays you have
> to be a rocket scientist to run your own server,
> and damn it, I LIKE running my own mail server.
>
> Or at least, I used to.

It's not quite that bad, but yes, the spammers have required significant 
changes.

If the problem is doing this from one particular network (and one that you 
trust to be sane, like your office), why not just configure the mail 
server to allow unauthenticated mail from that IP (or IP range)?

David Lang