Brett Sheffield . com

The deadline for registration as a system builder under the WEEE(EEY) legislation is today. ie. If you’re building and selling your own systems or rebranded hardware, you’re meant to join a scheme and then pay wodges of cash to ensure environmentally friendly disposal of your systems when they end of life. This doesn’t apply if you’re reselling someone else’s branded systems.

The legal stuff:
http://www.dti.gov.uk/files/file35992.pdf

http://www.dti.gov.uk/innovation/sustainability/weee/page30269.html

Now our penguins are safe.

Anyone looking for amusement should head to their nearest computer shop and ask if they’ve “registered for WEEE”. Photos of the resultant facial expressions should be sent to me. Prizes awarded.

The versions are coming thick and fast. Seems I’m not the only one who was busily working through the holidays. This time its listed on the the exim site. A few bugfixes from 4.64 & 4.65.

I’m up to my elbows in various projects at the moment, rebuilding my MTAs being one of them. I’m converting my old sendmail/postfix MTAs to exim and separating out the functions onto different Xen virtual machines. Where possible, for maintainability, I like to stick with pre-rolled Debian packages unless I have a reason not to do so. Exim is one case where I like to roll my own.

Much of the exim config is best built into the binary at compile time. One example is logging. Exim needs to know where to write logs before it reads its config (in case it needs to log the fact that it can’t read its config). If you want to log to a non-standard location (or use syslog), then you need to tell exim at compile time. You will also need to compile from source if you want to specify which user exim runs as or if you want to compile out unused transports and lookups for security/performance reasons.

Fortunately, exim is pretty easy to put together, and local makefiles are mostly transferable from one version to the next so its easy to maintain your own package. I run three separate daemons for the external mail exchanger (mx), local delivery (mailstore) and outgoing smtp. Building and maintaining these is straightforward - I’ll be putting a how-to up on this site in the next week or so.

Philip Hazel announced a new release of Exim a week ago:

The Exim website still says 4.63 is the current version, but the mirrors seem to have 4.64 in stock.

I’ll get busy building a deb package for Xen/Debian Etch.

Gladserv’s new server is live. It will be about a week before is it fully configured and ready to come into service. It is being set up using Xen, with separate virtual servers for each major service.

Presently we run a primary server and a backup server, both installed without the benefit of virtualisation. Once the new box is in service, each of these servers will be rebuilt using Xen so that services can be separated, both for security and flexibility. We can then share the load evenly between the servers and ensure that any single server outage will not be noticable to our clients. A full backup is not the same as full redundancy. I’ll definitely sleep easier when this is all in place.

I’ll document this process more fully in a separate article.