Psuedo Guru Blog by a wannabe guru with spelling issues.

Speeding up VMware on my laptop

I've been fighting battles with VMware on my laptop for some time now. Even though I have 2 gigs of RAM, enough to easily fit two VMs fully in memory and still have enough left over for XP, I have been subject to very frequent periods where my disk light would come on, the drive would start audibly thrashing, and my whole computer would freeze for 30 or more seconds.

The solution, it turns out, was an eSATA external hard drive. I picked up a 200 GB 7200 RPM 2.5 inch drive, plopped it into an external eSATA /USB case, got an eSata express card, and copied my VMs over.

They now launch faster, run faster, and I have yet to experience the 30 second total system lockouts that had been the norm for as long as I can remember.

The only downside is the ugly, non-flexible eSATA cable. Man those things suck. The person who figures out how to make a thin-flexible eSATA cable will have my $$.

UPDATE: Be sure to disable Windows write caching...almost lost a critical VM when a cable came loose (had to revert to a backup I had luckily made earlier in the day). You do this my opening My Computer, right clicking on the drive and selecting "Properties", go to the Hardware tab, select your drive again, then click the Properties button at the bottom, select the Policies tab, then FINALLY click the "Optimize for quick removal" radio button.

Postfix whitelist

I had some spam blacklist checking working pretty well with postfix, then an important client got themselves blacklisted. I won't mention names, but they are a big government organization, and while the people we interfaced with daily very trying to be helpful, their IT folks took absolutely no interest in getting themselves off the blacklist ("...they should know we don't spam..." was the attitude).

So I had to dig around for ways to create a postfix whitelist. First, create the file: /etc/postfix/whitelist. Then add your entries as follows:

mailserver.example.com    OK

Next, run the following command:

postmap hash:/etc/postfix/whitelist

Lastly, edit /etc/postfix/main.cf. Go to the smtpd_recipient_restrictions section and add "check_client_access hash:/etc/postfix/whitelist". Below is an example of what it might look like for a minimal set of rules to do whitelist and blacklist checking:

smtpd_recipient_restrictions = permit_mynetworks, permit_sasl_authenticated, reject_unauth_destination, check_client_access hash:/etc/postfix/whitelist, reject_rbl_client psbl.surriel.com,reject_rbl_client bl.spamcop.net,permit

After that, just needed to reboot Postfix and everything was working.

The first time I tried this, I did it without running the postmap command, and I was unable to connect to at all via my mail client, so don't forget that part.