Thanks to all who offered suggestions aimed at solving this problem, some time after I posted my query, I found an unlikely answer on one of the newsgroups which was to replace the IDE cables with new ones, (and they had to be new as opposed to different), this worked, (and being both cheap and easy, was most satisfactory), and Chris and I have managed to install both Slackware and Debian now. It has to be said that in my case they are going in at an alarming rate until such time as I get it right!
When Chris opened up my case and replaced the cables he found that my rather elderly computer was in fact suffering from old age and neeeded replacing. I am having a `bare bones' computer built to take my new drives, and this raises a question, up to now I have followed advice I read somewhere that the swap space be twice the memory, (RAM?), having 64 whatever-they-ares of memory I have a 128 swap space, having ordered 128 memory, do I need a 256 swap space? All suggestions gratefully recieved, although I may be too old/full of pain killers to understand any explanation.
John
I usually reckon on 2*real memory for swap. This is fine for well-behaved programs. However if you going to run memory intensive stuff, e.g. lots of e diting with gimp, then go for all the RAM you can: at 8p/Mb you can afford to go to town.
On 28-Nov-01 John Seago wrote:
Thanks to all who offered suggestions aimed at solving this problem, some time after I posted my query, I found an unlikely answer on one of the newsgroups which was to replace the IDE cables with new ones, (and they had to be new as opposed to different), this worked, (and being both cheap and easy, was most satisfactory), and Chris and I have managed to install both Slackware and Debian now. It has to be said that in my case they are going in at an alarming rate until such time as I get it right!
When Chris opened up my case and replaced the cables he found that my rather elderly computer was in fact suffering from old age and neeeded replacing. I am having a `bare bones' computer built to take my new drives, and this raises a question, up to now I have followed advice I read somewhere that the swap space be twice the memory, (RAM?), having 64 whatever-they-ares of memory I have a 128 swap space, having ordered 128 memory, do I need a 256 swap space? All suggestions gratefully recieved, although I may be too old/full of pain killers to understand any explanation.
John
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on Wed, Nov 28, 2001 at 05:02:38PM +0000, John Seago wrote:
When Chris opened up my case and replaced the cables he found that my rather elderly computer was in fact suffering from old age and neeeded replacing. I am having a `bare bones' computer built to take my new drives, and this raises a question, up to now I have followed advice I read somewhere that the swap space be twice the memory, (RAM?), having 64 whatever-they-ares of memory I have a 128 swap space, having ordered 128 memory, do I need a 256 swap space? All suggestions gratefully recieved, although I may be too old/full of pain killers to understand any explanation.
I think the "twice times physical memory" (yes, RAM :) rule is very general. Certainly with an 8 meg machine, it can pay to give it about 64 megs of swap. The rule is a good safe default, although not necessarily the most efficient.
The real issue when deciding how much swap space you want, is the purpose to which you intend to put the box. I currently run a server which acts as a desktop for several users at the same time, as well as handling mail routing and various other things. The box only has 64megs of ram, and rarely uses more than 10 megs of swap space. Running things such as games and so on can greatly impact the swap usage.
You can find out how much swap space is currently being used by typing "free". You will most likely see a line such as this:
total used free [snip] Swap: 152608 6120 146488
This might help you to determine how much swap space you actually use. Having too little swap space is tends to be annoying, and leads to performance problems, as well as programs running out of memory when you don't want them to. There are very few side effects of having a little too much swap. But having a ridiculously large amount of swap space just seems like a waste of good disk space to me. :)
Also under some operating systems the structures in the kernel that keep track of swap space are "locked" into physical ram, that is, they cannot be swapped out. So having too much swap space can make these structures unnecessarily large. I don't know if this issue affects Linux, though.
If at all possible, try to play around with the amount of swap space you have. Maybe try three sizes; small (say, 32 or 64 megs), medium (say, 128 megs) or large (say, 256 megs).
You could always turn any free space from playing about with the swap size into another partition. This could be used as a /tmp filesystem, or even something like /usr/local depending on the size of your swap partition after experimentation.
Or, just think "disk space is cheap, would I really miss 256 megs of hard disk space?"
Good luck!
My main email address has been activate for about 3 years and thus gets a lot of spam. Are there known methods inside Fetchmail or procmail to filter out 'spam' into a separate folder for later viewing?
If not, do people on the list use services to eliminate the spam? There has to be a better way than 'download and delete'.
Ashley
On Thu, 29 Nov 2001, Ashley @ Turton wrote:
My main email address has been activate for about 3 years and thus gets a lot of spam. Are there known methods inside Fetchmail or procmail to filter out 'spam' into a separate folder for later viewing?
If not, do people on the list use services to eliminate the spam? There has to be a better way than 'download and delete'.
Procmail recipes get rid of the worst of it for me. Here's the recipe I use (all the other meaty goodness such as automatic list filtering and SMS forwarding deleted, I'll put the whole recipe on a web site at some point, honest).
Oh, and I can't claim the glory for this. It's been around the block a few times, and came to me via a certain slacker currently sunning himself in Australia ;-)
Lob this in your .procmailrc: --- cut here --- # I do not accept responsibility for any mail lost, stolen, deleted, eaten # alive, or otherwise accidentally discarded. Wasn't me, didn't do it, # can't prove anything. PATH=/bin:/usr/bin:/usr/X11R6/bin:/sbin:/usr/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/X11R6/bin
SHELL=/bin/bash
# "VERBOSE=on" is only used for debugging. #VERBOSE=on
# Tweak these for your own local configuration MAILDIR=$HOME/Mail DEFAULT=$MAILDIR/inbox LOGFILE=$HOME/.mail/procmail.log # LOGABSTRACT = "all"
# where to send spam SPAM=spam
# A list (one per line) of people I KNOW are spammers :-) # can match any part of name so you can use fred, fred@aol.com or aol.com to # match a user, mail address or domain. # Note that this file is case-insensitive. SPAMMERS=$HOME/.mail/spammers LISTS=$HOME/.mail/lists
################################################################## # SPAM filter. I don't like spam. I just don't # ##################################################################
# Here we search a file with a list of people we _never_ want to # get anything from, tossing the mail if it's from one of them. # SPAMMERS is set and described above. :0: * ? (formail -x From: -x Sender: -x Reply-To: -x Received: | grep -iqf $SPAMMERS) $SPAM
# look for X-Advertisement header or 'advertisement' in the subject, # accounting for possible sp. error. "Nice" spammers use this header. :0: * ^X-Adverti[sz]ement: $SPAM
:0: * ^Subject:.*adverti[sz]ement $SPAM
# To: friend(s)@public.com or you@wherever.com and the like. Spam. # (arrangements made for those who spell at a 4th grade level as # well, i.e.: freind) :0: * ^TO.*( |<|,)(fr(ie|ei)nd(s)?|you)@ $SPAM
# <Undisclosed Recipients@pop.isp.net> seems common to spam. :0: * ^TO.*[Uu]n(disclosed|listed)(-| )?[Rr]ecipients $SPAM
# snag the To: and From: headers TO=`formail -zx To:` CC=`formail -zx Cc:` FROM=`formail -zX From: | formail -zrx To:`
# So do some mailing lists. Commented out for now. # # spammers love to set their "To:" and "From:" fields to the same # # thing. If this is the case and it's not from you, it's spam. # :0: # * $ TO??$FROM # * !$ ^To:.*$LOGNAME # $SPAM
# no To: line AND no Cc: line. You could filter out anything with no To:, # but there are lots of mailinglist idiots who Cc the list and don't To: # anyone ;-) #:0: #* TO??^$ #* CC??^$ #$SPAM
# no legit From address (formail generates foo@bar in this case) :0: * FROM??^foo@bar$ $SPAM
# purely numeric address. blah. I've never seen this be legit. # Even compuserve addresses have a punctuation mark of some sort. :0: * ^From:.*( |<)[0-9]+@ $SPAM
# bogus pegasus header, very common with spammers, and I've never # seen it used by anyone else. :0: * ^Comment: Authenticated sender is * ! ^X-Mailer: Pegasus $SPAM
# bad message id -- empty or no @host part. :0: * ^Message-Id:.*<[^@]*> $SPAM
#sex spam -- "XXX" in subject (case sensitive, word boundaries) :0 D: * Subject:.*<XXX> $SPAM
# 1-900 in the subject. Yeah, right. :0: * ^Subject:.*1-900 $SPAM
# mlm crap -- MLM in subject (case sensitive) :0 D: * Subject:.*<MLM> $SPAM
# 'dear friend' at the start of a line in the body of message # (in brackets is a tab and a space -- if you edit the file, make # sure you keep them in there -- one tab, one space, in either order) # provisions made for misspelling. :0 B: * ^[ ]*dear fr(ie|ei)nd(s)? $SPAM
# nothing from email blaster etc :0 B: * EMAIL (BLASTER|PLATINUM) $SPAM
# Your research sucks ("our research indicates that you wanted our spam..") :0 B: * (our|my) research indicates $SPAM
# sex spam, "adults only" in subject :0: * ^Subject:.*adults only $SPAM
# popular pyramid scam signature :0 B: * order report #1 $SPAM
# we don't ever wanna hear about mlm (message body) :0 B: * multi(-| )?level marketing $SPAM
# # or abbreviated (message body, case sensitive) # :0 BD # * MLM # $SPAM
# Unfortunately, I know far too many excitable people who use excessive # punctuation ;-) Commented out so I get their mail. # # 2 bangs in subject. spammer hype. # :0 # * ^Subject:.*(!!) # $SPAM
# 2 dollar signs in subject. spammer hype. :0: * ^Subject:.*($$) $SPAM
# don't even want a 1-900 or 1-800 number in the body. :0 B: * 1-[89]00 $SPAM
#large dollar amount in subject line :0: * ^Subject:.*$[0-9]+,000 $SPAM
##################################### # Last rule: Put mail into mailbox # #####################################
:0: $DEFAULT
# End of file
xfmail has some filtering rules. They incluude re-send e.g. to abuse@ISP, but unfotunately do not include 'bounce with a 5xx error'.
On 29-Nov-01 Ashley @ Turton wrote:
My main email address has been activate for about 3 years and thus gets a lot of spam. Are there known methods inside Fetchmail or procmail to filter out 'spam' into a separate folder for later viewing?
If not, do people on the list use services to eliminate the spam? There has to be a better way than 'download and delete'.
Ashley
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