SpamCheetah README for installation

Installing SpamCheetah to disk

We can now install SpamCheetah to a physical hard disk or USB stick.

All IDE,SCSI,SATA hard disks are supported. So are all USB media like pendrives and USB hard disks. You could also install to a Disk on Memory module known as DOM which is a flash type persistent memory that sits on an IDE port.

Please connect the USB media or hard disk to the computer and boot SpamCheetah liveCD/liveDVD in the usual manner.

Please select Install SpamCheetah to disk option from the Curses UI. You have to select the disk on which to install SpamCheetah.

The install script will do the needful once identify the target disk.

Please remember that SpamCheetah will wipe out the target disk completely before installation!

SpamCheetah requires 1G for installation and the only way by which you can identify the target disk is by the size of the disk printed in the installation menu.

Once you are done with installation, please reboot the machine and boot from the hard disk.

Installing SpamCheetah commercial edition on your network

Kindly ensure that you point SpamCheetah to the IP address of your MTA using its point and click web interface

SpamCheetah trial install

In case your enterprise runs multiple mail server like this:

        
    $ dig -t mx zohomail.com
        ;; ANSWER SECTION:
        zohomail.com.           1762    IN      MX      50 mx3.zohomail.com.
        zohomail.com.           1762    IN      MX      10 mx.zohomail.com.
        zohomail.com.           1762    IN      MX      20 mx2.zohomail.com.

then SpamCheetah can give you enterprise grade round robin load sharing between 3 mail servers and also failover between 2 SpamCheetah instances. Please refer to this diagram.

SpamCheetah load balancing failover

While installing you have to take care of two details.

Assigning the same virtual IP address to both SpamCheetah instances in the failover configuration and using that IP address for your external world MX records.
Configuring 1 to 3 mail servers depending upon how many you run in your organization on each of the SpamCheetah instances such that mail handling is shared between the mail servers.

Thereby you eliminate downtimes since you have more than 1 mail server to ensure 100% uptime. Once you install SpamCheetah you get into a single point of failure situation since SpamCheetah's failure means that your mail comes to a screeching halt.

The above configuration will ensure that at least one SpamCheetah instance is always up. In case you have three mail servers and you do not mind SpamCheetah being a single point of failure, then you can always round robin between the mail servers by pointing SpamCheetah to each of the 3 mail servers. But this will only do mail server load sharing and not SpamCheetah failover.

To install SpamCheetah kindly follow the instructions below with the following changes:

Configure one, two or three mail servers in the order given in the install screen of the SpamCheetah web interface. In case you have only one mail server, leave the second and third mail server IP address as blank.
In case you have only one SpamCheetah instance, then you can leave out the Virtual IP address since failover cannot happen anyway. The other configurations remain unchanged and work the same as given below.

Installing SpamCheetah open source edition on your network

Installing SpamCheetah requires certain advanced networking skills though it is quick affair once you know what you are doing.

Since it is a network spam control product, you need to plan the network accordingly. Essentially SpamCheetah will sit in front of your mailserver receiving both legitimate e-mails and spam as shown in this diagram.

Here are the steps to do to install SpamCheetah

We are assuming that your MTA is running on a UNIX/linux clone

Also ensure that you point SpamCheetah to the IP address of your MTA using its point and click web interface

SpamCheetah install

1. First run ifconfig on the MTA(mail server) to identify the IP address and netmask of the interface on which to install SpamCheetah. The MX record of your MTA should point to SpamCheetah instead of your MTA. SpamCheetah will forward mails to your MTA.

 # /sbin/ifconfig

2. Then change the default gateway of the MTA to point to SpamCheetah(eg. IP address 192.168.1.5. In case you have 2 or 3 mailservers behind SpamCheetah, you have to configure the default router of every one of them as SpamCheetah.

# route delete default

# route add default gw 192.168.1.5

3. Please ensure that the TCP connection from SpamCheetah gets redirected to your MTA and that the packets get translated on the way back also. For this we have to access the SMTP port from a machine on the Internet external to our network setup. On that machine type

 $ nc -v 61.1.2.3 25

Here we are assuming that 61.1.2.3 port 25 is redirected to SpamCheetah's 192.168.1.5 IP address. If not you can configure a public IP address for SpamCheetah directly.

This should connect successfully. If this goes through you are done. Otherwise there is something wrong with the TCP connection forwarding. Contact support and we will be glad to help.

SpamCheetah deployment diagram

So you have to deploy in such a way that the TCP connection that delivers e-mail from the Internet gets redirected to the mail server for legitimate mails. For spam senders the connection never reaches the mail server. That necessitates that you configure your mail server's routing table in such a way that the outgoing packets go through SpamCheetah's network interface. Without that, SpamCheetah will not be able to redirect TCP connections properly to the mail server.

Please contact support should you have any problems!

Best of luck and have fun with SpamCheetah!