geek ramblings

I think I’m almost ready to let some other people bang on SpamValve. I want to get a closed group of users to try it out and give me some feedback before I release it to the general public. If you’re interested in testing it, and meet the requirements below, contact me.

Requirements:

• Requires root access on your server.
• Currently requires the ‘ipfw’ firewall system (I’m on FreeBSD). But if you think you can modify it to work with ipchains or some other firewall, feel free to give it a try. Familiarity with regular expressions will probably get you through.
• Perl, with the DBI, Date::Manip, and Config::IniFiles modules.
• Advanced users only. You must be able to modify this stuff yourself, with minimal assistance from me.

Eventually, I plan to make SpamValve more general, with support for IP filtering systems other than ipfw, perhaps a python version, plugins for various blog systems, and instructions on how to hook it into other services, such as email. Well, actually, I don’t plan on doing all that. I plan to let other coders bang on it, and let them do all the hard work

For a little more information, you can read the prototype README file.