Month: May 2018

Load Balance and Failover Sendmail Mailertable Relays

A coworker asked me today how to get the mailertable relays to load balance instead of fail over. Trick is to think beyond sendmail. The square brackets around hosts tell sendmail not to check for an MX record (you’re generally using an A record, so this saves a tiny little bit of time … not to mention *if* there is an MX record there, it creates a whole heap-o confusion). *But* the MX lookup is right useful when setting up load balanced or failover relay targets.

Single host relay in the mailertable looks like this:
yourdomain.gTLD      relay:[somehost.mydomain.gTLD]

If you want to fail over between relays (that is try #1, if it is unavailable try #2, and so on), you can stay within the mailertable and use:
yourdomain.gTLD      relay:[somehost.mydomain.gTLD]:[someotherhost.mydomain.gTLD]

Or even try direct delivery and fail back to a smart host:
yourdomain.gTLD      relay:%1:smart-host

But none of this evenly distributes traffic across multiple servers. The trick to load balancing within the mailertable is to create equal weight MX records in your domain to be used as the relay.

In ISC Bind, this looks like:
yourdomainmailrouting.mydomain.gTLD     IN MX 10 somehost.mydomain.gTLD.
yourdomainmailrouting.mydomain.gTLD     IN MX 10 somehost.mydomain.gTLD.

Once you have created the DNS records, simply use the MX record hostname in your mailertable:

yourdomain.gTLD      relay:yourdomainmailrouting.mydomain.gTLD

By leaving out the square brackets, sendmail will resolve an MX record for ‘yourdomainmailrouting.mydomian.gTLD’, find the equal weight MX records, and do the normal sendmail thing to use both.

Retainers And Loans

Giuliani’s assertion on Hannity’s show: When I heard Cohen’s retainer of thirty-five thousand, when he was doing no work for the President, I said, ‘That’s how he’s repaying it, with a little profit and a little margin for paying taxes, for Michael.’

I don’t care to dig into the nuances of loan repayment, but I’ve paid lawyers retainer fees for doing no work. A retainer is money paid to ensure you have a lawyer on-hand to provide legal advice and services if you need them. Should your requirements exceed that which the retainer contract permits, you get billed extra. But I’ve never seen a retainer contract that had stipulations in case the client ended up *not* needing services during the period. If you pay 35k for a one-year contract that provides up to 40 hours per month on assignments determined by the client … well, zero is “up to 40” and you’ve paid 35k for no work. You paid for the willingness to provide work and for the work should it be needed. Which is why people who do not routinely require legal assistance don’t tend to keep a lawyer on retainer: no point dropping a couple grand a month every month you don’t need a lawyer. Wait until you are, say, writing your will and hire one for the specific task.

Reality and the Law, An Ongoing Saga

Sayeth Trump

Some legal infractions are straight-forward. Speeding — there is empirical evidence that the vehicle which you were driving was moving at 63 miles per hour. The posted speed limit for the road, again empirical evidence, is 45. The line of questioning in this case may be “Were you speeding?”. It’s a lot quicker than asking what speed you were travelling, what the speed limit is on the road, and if your speed exceeded that limit.

Many infractions are not this distinct. Driving too fast for road conditions — that’s a matter of opinion. In fact, a decent argument could be made that someone involved in *most* traffic accidents was driving too fast for road conditions. I had a friend wipe out his motorbike on highway gravel. He was abraded but fine. A cop drove by as he was righting his motorbike, and stopped to help. Eighteen year old kid with a grudge against pretty much everyone mouthed off to the cop sufficiently to be cited for driving too fast for road conditions. Because gravel? That’s a road condition.

Collusion and obstruction of justice both fall into the “not clear cut” category. An unemployed guy notices a business district has a problem with vandalism and offers to patrol the street from 8p-6a for ten dollars an hour because they seem to have a vandal problem. That’s not extortion or racketeering — that’s someone who needs work offering to provide a service someone else needs. An unemployed guy starts vandalizing the business district, then offers to patrol the street from 8p-6a for ten dollars an hour because they seem to have a vandal problem … that’s a protection racket. The prosecution may not directly ask “are you running a protection racket?”. They could delve into how the guy noticed the vandalism problem on multiple occasions, ask questions show how desperate he was for money, ask the guy where he was during the vandalism. That line of questioning doesn’t mean the prosecution doesn’t think he’s running a protection racket. It means they’re asking questions that address all of what differentiates the perfectly innocent first scenario from the criminal second scenario.

In the NYTimes list of questions Mueller is said to have for Trump, there’s a whole section titled “Campaign Coordination With Russia”. Surely not Mueller’s title, but how can anyone reading this list say there are “no questions on collusion”? Because the word doesn’t literally appear!?!

Technicalities of Legalities

Anyone else glad the head of the Executive Office of the United States has such a firm grasp on the law?

Obstruction of justice is corrupt interference in the proceedings or people serving at a proceeding from doing his duty. Nowhere in the US Code does it say “assuming, of course, the proceeding leads to a conviction”. If you are found guilty of a crime you didn’t commit, sentenced to five years in jail, escape jail, are subsequently found to be innocent and your initial conviction vacated … you can still be charged with escaping jail and sentenced to jail time for the offense. Now you might get time served, or a reduced sentence … but you still committed the crime of escaping the jail when incarcerated. Same deal-e-o here. If I didn’t commit a crime but was being investigated, and tried to influence witnesses or stop police from investigating the non-crime … that is a crime.

18 U.S.C. § 1503: “Whoever corruptly, or by threats or force, or by any threatening letter or communication, endeavors to influence, intimidate, or impede any grand or petit juror, or officer in or of any court of the United States, or officer who may be serving at any examination or other proceeding before any United States magistrate judge or other committing magistrate, in the discharge of his duty, or injures any such grand or petit juror in his person or property on account of any verdict or indictment assented to by him, or on account of his being or having been such juror, or injures any such officer, magistrate judge, or other committing magistrate in his person or property on account of the performance of his official duties, or corruptly or by threats or force, or by any threatening letter or communication, influences, obstructs, or impedes, or endeavors to influence, obstruct, or impede, the due administration of justice, shall be punished as provided in subsection (b). If the offense under this section occurs in connection with a trial of a criminal case, and the act in violation of this section involves the threat of physical force or physical force, the maximum term of imprisonment which may be imposed for the offense shall be the higher of that otherwise provided by law or the maximum term that could have been imposed for any offense charged in such case.”

Political Pragmatism

This is a difficult one for me — totally un-democratic, but I can also see the point. The general election isn’t about picking a guy to represent the Democrats of the Sixth Congressional District of Colorado, it’s about picking a guy to represent *all* of the Sixth District. I’d generally prefer to be represented by a less progressive Democrat than a less conservative Republican.

 
The salient questions are *does* the candidate need to appeal to some percentage of swing voters (i.e. what is the electorate split)? And do those swing voters really care about that which the Democratic Party sees in the candidate they support? The DCCC is making what they believe is a pragmatic choice. Without proving reality bifurcates at infinite junctures and visiting alternative timelines … really no way to *know* if they are right or not.
 
In a district where 80% of the electorate are Democrats, the primary can figure out which guy those people want. But in a district that’s, say, 45% Democrat / 45% Republican / 10% swing voters … winning the general election requires nominating someone who appeals to that 10%. Coffman won in 2016 by 8% (30k votes). This *particular* district seems like one where the Democratic candidate needs to appeal to those who voted Republican for the last decade. Clinton won the district, so there’s some empirical evidence to support a belief that enough voters in the district *can* be swayed.
 
What I see wrong with it is not being up front about the pragmatic reasons for supporting the individual and allowing voters in the District to decide if *they* want to nominate a less progressive candidate.