HYPERAXE

While monitoring my cPanel/WHM server for the past few days, I noticed that my cPanel related services including the monitoring daemon “chksrvd” suddenly dies. It seems like only the LiteSpeed web server survives the problem and thus continues to serve my user’s requests. All other services such as Mail, DNS, etc. fails. What’s weird of it all is that my Server Status page states that all services are up and running, when the truth is almost all of them have died. Well, I suppose this is due to the “chksrvd” daemon not running, which is by the way the service monitoring app of cPanel. So this is probably why the Server Status page doesn’t give an accurate report of what services are really up or down.

I tried to investigate the problem and so I discovered that I am hitting the wall on memory allocations. Even the burstable RAM allocated to me doesn’t seem to help since it’s not always readily available on the server. Looking deeper into the problem, I discovered that it’s SpamAssassin that’s hogging my memory resources thus causing the other services to crash. Well, instead of upgrading my server for more memory which is pretty expensive by the way, I decided to use another small VPS I have to host SpamAssassin and just do spam filtering remotely from my web host.

So I tried setting up the following on another VPS which would act as a spam filter server:

• SpamAssassin
• Rules Du Jour
• DCC (Distributed Checksum Clearinghouse)
• Razor
• Pyzor

For some helpful hints on how to install the said app, just click here. It may not be complete so you have to figure out some installation issues yourself, but more or less it’s pretty helpful. Personally speaking, it also seems to be quite paranoid to set all these things up to fight spam, but just thinking of saving my clients some efforts on fighting spam themselves, then its kinda worth it after all.

Since I am using Exim Mail Server, pointing onto a remote server is as simple as finding the following lines on exim.conf and let spamc do the rest:

spamd_address = 127.0.0.1 783

and change it to:

spamd_address = <remote spamd server IP> <remote spamd server listening port (Default: 783)>

e.g. spamd_address = 1.2.3.4 783

As soon as I had completed the setup, my cPanel services stopped dying in the middle of the night and somehow had given me some peace of mind (for now).

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