How to Install ASSP 2.x on Debian 7 Wheezy

ASSP is an SMTP proxy than runs infront of your mailserver to filter out all the spam email. Despite being implemented as a monolothic, indecipherable perl script, it is actually very effective and runs with very little intervention once you have it configured correctly.

Download

Get the code from assp.sourceforge.net and extract it to /opt/assp-2.4.3 or wherever you would like to deploy it.

Install dependencies

The README has some details about downloading dependencies from CPAN, however my preference is to use the Debian packages wherever possible, so I figured out which packages those were and came up with this list:

# apt-get install libnet-dns-perl libauthen-sasl-perl libmail-spf-perl \
          libregexp-optimizer-perl libfile-readbackwards-perl \
          libnetaddr-ip-perl libnet-cidr-lite-perl libmail-dkim-perl \
          libnet-ldap-perl libunicode-string-perl libemail-send-perl \
          libemail-mime-perl libtext-unidecode-perl \
          liblingua-stem-snowball-perl libsys-cpu-perl libthreads-perl \
          libschedule-cron-perl libdigest-sha-perl libmime-types-perl \
          libclamav-client-perl libarchive-zip-perl libberkeleydb-perl \
          liblingua-identify-perl libsys-cpuload-perl \
          libthreads-shared-perl libunicode-linebreak-perl

Missing dependencies

The following dependencies aren't available as debian packages and you can install them from CPAN if you want. ASSP handles missing dependencies quite well so it will work fine without them if you don't want to go the CPAN route.

    Tie::RDBM
    Mail::SPF::Query
    Sys::CpuAffinity
    Thread::State
    File::Scan::ClamAV
    Sys::MemInfo

Install startup scripts

The distribution comes with come handy startup scripts, just cd into your ASSP base dir and copy them to the system directories.

    # cp rc/_etc_default_assp.debian /etc/default/assp
    # cp rc/_etc_init.d_assp.debian /etc/init.d/assp
    # chmod +x /etc/init.d/assp
    # insserv assp

You will need to update the BASE and PIDFILE properties in /etc/default/assp.

    # vim /etc/default/assp

    BASE=/opt/assp-2.4.3
    PIDFILE="$BASE/pid"

Configuration

Now you can start ASSP and configure the spam filter via it's web interface.

    # /etc/init.d/assp start

The configuration out the box is pretty good, although you'll most likely was to set 'AsADaemon' to 1 and give some though as to what user you want to run the application as. The URL to configure ASSP will be something like:

    http://root:nospam4me@localhost:55555

Happy Despamming!

About Roger Keays

Roger Keays is an artist, an engineer, and a student of life. He has no fixed address and has left footprints on 40-something different countries around the world. Roger is addicted to surfing. His other interests are music, psychology, languages, the proper use of semicolons, and finding good food.