Ok, I want to end up with something i can experiment with xen but have a kernel that doesn't have a lot of unused modules and such and answer the question, what is the best Debian way to do this.

apt-cache search linux xen

I pick what looks like the latest one out of the list

apt-get source linux-image-2.6.18-5-xen-686

I get a line that looks like

Get:1 http://ftp.us.debian.org unstable/main linux-2.6 2.6.22-6 (dsc) [4825B]
Get:2 http://ftp.us.debian.org unstable/main linux-2.6 2.6.22-6 (tar) [57.4MB]

Interesting...it is bringing down 2.6.22, must be matching what I currently have installed...

Ok, that's done

now

dpkg-source -x linux-2.6_2.6.22-6.dsc

dpkg-source: extracting linux-2.6 in linux-2.6-2.6.22
dpkg-source: unpacking linux-2.6_2.6.22.orig.tar.gz
dpkg-source: applying ./linux-2.6_2.6.22-6.diff.gz

now...what i kind of think should happen next is

make menuconfig...will that take my current working configuration into account?

Anyone know where that program went?

I was helping a friend with a debian install over the phone and after giving him my sources.list file he asked me where he'd find new ones. Well, apt-get.org was mentioned, but what he wanted to know was how to reconfigure his sources.list file with the standard debian listings since his cd install only left him with repositories on the cd (he didn't want to hit the network during his install so he didn't choose anything else)

Anyway, I remembered that you could type a command (which I believe was apt-setup) to get back to that screen during the installation where you chose from a list

anyway, apt-setup appears to be gone, and looking around online I found this discussion http://www.debianhelp.org/node/3756 but that didn't end conclusively.

I don't really need this, as I edit my sources.list by hand, it's just nagging at me

aaron

bayes: locker: safe_lock: cannot create lockfile /home/aaron/.spamassassin/bayes.mutex: Permission denied

over and over and over again in my logs. But...why?

installed package

configured sendmail per instructions (and i really followed them this time)

i keep getting these in my logs

Milter (spfmilter): local socket name /var/run/spfmilter/spfmilter.sock unsafe
Milter (spfmilter): to error state

so, i checked the process table and sure enough, there was no spfmilter process running

if i restarted it using init.d/spfmilter

i'd have the process running and i'd see messages in the logs about spfmilter doing it's thing

but eventually, i'd get more messages in my logs and spfmilter would be dead

from a console, i ran it this way

/usr/sbin/spfmilter --debug --nodaemon --user spfmilter --pidfile /var/run/spfmilter/spfmilter.pid --markonly /var/run/spfmilter/spfmilter.sock 2>&1 | tee spfmilter.log

and eventually, got this to the console

*** glibc detected *** double free or corruption (fasttop): 0x08054530 ***

that's the story so far...

finally got around to getting my DCC and it's minion packages back to standard. Meaning, I removed my custom packages as the bug i submitted (or noticed, can't remember which now) was fixed. IPv6 support was necessary for things to work.

Now, that i've gone back to the standard package and still had the same problem (greylisting not working), I wondered about my earlier diagnosis. Unfortunately, I didn't keep very good notes then (something i'm hoping this blog helps with) so I can't re-diagnos without considerable effort, and i'm not willing to do it, so there. But without those notes, I just know that I got it all to work using a custom package and some config tweaking.

So, I figured, I'd start over. After a few hours of half-assed configuring and reading of man pages and googling I realized that no one had my particular issue as I was describing it. That usually means I didn't read the documentation right or I need to submit a bug.

I opted for the former

so anyway, it turns out that the GREY_CLIENT_ARGS= settings must be set GREY_CLIENT_ARGS=-Gon in order for greylisting to work with sendmail

i had read it as if I just set GREY_ENABLE=on it would be enough. That will turn it on, but sendmail won't know about it. Sendmail knows about it through the milter interface (dccm), THE CLIENT PROGRAM. And the only way to tell dccm about it during startup is by setting GREY_CLIENT_ARGS.

It is spelled out very clearly in the dcc-common file in /etc/default "to turn on greylisting in the dccm and dccifd DCC clients.". But it took me a while to put it all together that (it seems so simple and straightforward now that i wonder what my problem was. I can only imagine it was my mistaken belief that the DCC server got out in front of sendmail. While this flies in the face of everything I know about servers and such it's an example of how a bad beginning assumption can waste a while lot of time).

There are a couple of startup bugs in the DCC packages, but they've been reported and fixes will be coming out, so using this with sendmail is really easy if you are clear headed.