Tech.It.2.Me->{By.Anton.Perez}

If you use MediaWiki to power your wiki, you’ve probably heard of the Bad-Behavior plugin to help fight spam.

Bad Behavior is a set of PHP scripts which prevents spambots from accessing your site by analyzing their actual HTTP requests and comparing them to profiles from known spambots. It goes far beyond User-Agent and Referer, however. Bad Behavior is available for several PHP-based software packages, and also can be integrated in seconds into any PHP script.

I was all for it after I read the description as well as the functions it adds to one’s wiki.  So, I did the following:

1.   Downloaded it like so:

wget http://www.bad-behavior.ioerror.us/download/bad-be…

2.   Unzipped it with the -a option (for ASCII mode):

unzip -a bad-behavior-2.0.10.zip

3.   Copied the whole folder to /path-to-wiki/extensions

cp -R /path-to-wiki/extensions

4.   Edited LocalSettings.php an added the following line at the end of the file:

include( ‘./extensions/Bad-Behavior/bad-behavior-mediawiki.php’ );

The include statement above should’ve worked where a new table would’ve been added in my MediaWiki DB, but this did not happen, and when clicking on any link, I would just get a blank page.

My HTTPD logs also showed “undefined variable” errors, so after searching for fixes, I found that the following line had to be added just below the require_once(“includes/DefaultSettings.php”) line to resolve the issues. 

Apparently, you’ll need this if you’re using a certain combination of Apache-PHP-MediaWiki versions:

require_once( “includes/DatabaseFunctions.php” );

I restarted Apache and all worked fine.  You can also add the Bad-Behavior 2 Extended extension if you’d like, which I did.

Over the weekend, I finally installed and configured my own e-mail server. What a challenge that was!

I’m successfully running Postfix, Dovecot, Spamassassin, Amavisd-new, ClamAV, SQLgrey, and Squirrelmail. I, however, encountered problems sending to Gmail.

It returned with the following message:

host gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com[64.233.163.27] said:
550-5.7.1 [76.170.212.236] Our system has detected an unusual amount of unsolicited 550-5.7.1 mail originating from your IP address. To protect our
550-5.7.1 users from spam, mail sent from your IP address has been 550-5.7.1 rejected. Please visit 550-5.7.1 http://www.google.com/mail/help/bulk_mail.html to review 550 5.7.1 our Bulk Email Senders Guidelines. 39si20019987nzk (in reply to end of DATA command)

Rejected? Huh? Apparently, my IP address has been blacklisted because Google couldn’t identify my server; also because I don’t have a static IP.

They said:

To ensure that Gmail can identify you:

• Use a consistent IP address to send bulk mail.
• Keep valid reverse DNS records for the IP address(es) from which you send mail, pointing to your domain.
• Use the same address in the ‘From:’ header on every bulk mail you send.

We also recommend publishing an SPF record, and signing with DomainKeys.

At this point, I don’t really want to run and maintain my own DNS server nor obtain a static IP (everything works fine and it’s cheaper!), so I found a way around it: Set Postfix to use another SMTP server.

Here’s how:

1. Edit /etc/postfix/main.cf, and add or edit this line:

relayhost = smtp.servertouse.com

2. Restart the Postfix service (I run FC6), so:

sudo service postfix restart

That’s it! Your server will now send to the SMTP server specified above rather than sending directly to the destination, which as a result, will not be “rejected” by Gmail or the like. ;0)