[Rspamd-Users] Raspberry Pi 64 bit Bullseye rspamd package

[G.W. Haywood]

Hi there,

On Sat, 14 Jan 2023, Martin Brampton via Users wrote:
> On 13/01/2023 16:26, G.W. Haywood via Users wrote:
> 
>> The build produced rspamd_3.4_arm64.deb which is about 3.3 MBytes.  If
>> you were crazy enough to want to try to install it you'd be welcome to
>> have a copy of it but I'd recommend that you try to build it yourself,
>> and ask for help here if you run into any trouble.
> 
> Thanks Ged. Am I to conclude that attempting to run rspamd on Raspberry
> Pi is crazy? It's certainly cost me quite a lot of hassle so far.

No I wouldn't necessarily say that at all, it's just that you'd be
installing smething from an unknown, untrusted source (me).  Maybe try
it on a scratch system to see if it's worth putting any more time in?

> That would seem a pity as an 8gb RPi is quite powerful enough to run a
> mail server for a small group of people, and much cheaper than any
> practical alternative.

You're right as far as you've gone, and we use Pis (many descriptions:
several Zeros, a Pi2, half a dozen each Pi3B+ and Pi4 4G, and three of
the Pi4 8G - plus we've been trying to get more of those for ages) for
quite a number of things.  But experience here would suggest that they
may not be reliable enough for something like a group mail server [1].
My feeling is that there are some design problems with both the power
supply arrangements and the USB circuitry which haven't been bedded in
the earlier models.  We've developed an aversion to plugging in *any*
USB device while a system is up, unless it's something like a keyboard
which draws less than 10mA.  For some examples we won't even do that.
On some devices, network over USB has been an unqualified disaster.

> Why the hostility to Debian packages - most software in Debian repos is
> very robust.

Maybe more pragmatism than hostility.  I use the packaging system for
a great deal of routine stuff, but once you get away from the core OS
and utilities it seems the wheels easily begin to fall off.  Like the
rspamd downloads page, smoe other projects put out warnings not to use
distro packages (and not necessarily just the Debian packages).  In my
view if security might be a concern, which means anything mail-related
of course, then it's preferable to build from source.  Sometimes it's
essential, for example I build Debian kernels which perform a thousand
times better on some hardware than the stock version, and nobody seems
to care[2].  Of course if you build from source you take on the burden
of keeping up to date with security issues yourself, but ever since I
found one of our private keys published I've been happy to do that[3].

HTH

[1] The jury's still out on the 8G Pi4B but it looks a lot better than
anything else so far.  We use a Nagios server (a Pi3B+) to monitor the
network, amongst other things for device uptime.  An expectation of a
few weeks is considered a failure here.  A couple of years wouldn't be
thought remarkable.  Here's a firewall (an Alix SBC, amongst the most
reliable devices we've seen (it's not running one of the big distros):

# uptime
  07:41:20 up 481 days, 22:55, load average: 0.04, 0.03, 0.04

[2] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=953545

[3] https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2008-0166

-- 

73,
Ged.