I've been looking for some home backup solutions over the past couple of months. This has led me down both the do-it-yourself route and buying a ready-made solution.

One of my requirements was that I wanted the solution to be more than just storage - otherwise I would have purchased a straight NAS box from the likes of Qnap, Netgear or if feeling rich Drobo. Most of these dedicated NAS boxes can be "rooted" to allow ssh access , however their CPUs are generally underpowered for general purpose use.

Other requirements were that I wanted a reasonably small form factor and to be able to use at least 4 SATA hard drives, preferably with hot swap ability. Hardware raid was not a requirement because I intended on using a Linux distribution with mdadm software raid.

In the end, I ended up building two boxes.
The first, a home build, based on the CFI A7879 chassis with a Gigabyte GA-D525TUD Dual Core Atom Mini-ITX Board.

I totally missed this one until a few days ago, but VMware has released the ESXi Hypervisor free of charge.   They obviously see the pending challenge from Microsoft, Xen and Virtualbox and are hoping to gain traction and mindshare in the community - but I have one piece of advice for VMware.

If you want to regain the "developer" mindshare - those evangelists that sponsor VMware in their corporations - then restore the VMTN Subscription.

VMTN was my affordable way in to VMware - and because of that and my persistence in my current workplace, VMware now has over 20 ESX Enterprise license sales.

Last week I set-up a Postfix+MailScanner+ClamAV anti-spam and anti-virus mail relay server. Testing seemed all good, except that it was scanning lots of bogus email addresses, e.g. to nosuchuser@pgregg.com

Postfix provides a relay_recipients file (at least thats what the MailScanner setup called it) where you specify the specific email addresses that you are prepared to accept email for.

In the old days we used SMTP VRFY - which people dropped because it was a way to verify good email addresses and clean spam lists.   However, by dropping it it seems the spammers just ignored cleaning and just blast out to any and all email address they could find.  The irony being that the problems are now worse because we are constantly being bombarded by spam to bogus addresses.

As my primary email system is (still) qmail I needed a way to build a list of valid emails that qmail would accept - so I set about writing a perl script that would process the control/virtualdomains users/assign and dot-qmail files in the same way that qmail would.

The result is here:
  http://www.pgregg.com/projects/qmail/makevalidrecipients/MakeValidRecipientsList.pl

Feel free to make use of the script - hopefully it can help others too.   Note that it doesn't handle ~alias users, nor if you have a database backed system - but manual and vpopmail setups should be just fine.  No warranty implied or given though Use at your own risk.

Once I added the relay_recipients file to the postfix relay and waited a few days, awstats reported that 99.8% of all my email was to bogus addresses - wow!  That is a massive saving on CPU (antispam/av scanning) and traffic.

Enjoy.

I have released a script, vmclone.pl, to assist in the cloning of full Virtual Machines within an ESX Server box.  This came about because of a gap in functionality between replicating individual hard disks and the clone option in the VI client that was mostly missing from VMs.

The tool will replicate and rename all the files in a VM with a single command line execution and optionally allows you to tweak (using regex) some of the options such as changing the memory size of a VM.

The tool is available here: http://www.pgregg.com/projects/vmclone/

I would appreciate any feedback or suggestions on it.

Thanks.