So long and thanks for all the fish…

Today I’ve shut down my last linux server.

Linux mail.begeleidingentraining.nl 2.4.20-31.9 #1 Tue Apr 13 18:04:23 EDT 2004 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux
15:32:17 up 131 days, 5:39
Broadcast message from root (pts/0) (Sat Jan 29 15:37:31 2005):
The system is going down for system halt NOW!


It was an redhat 9 release, and has served very well as a sendmail / imap server. The mailserver has been relocated and this DSL line will be shut down at the end of this month.
Another DSL line is already in place and this machine will be squid/dns/dhcp/public shell box running freeBSD.

Mail.app and multiple IMAP accounts

My new mailserver is up and running. I like slow migrations and just migrated one of my last domains.
The total number of imap-accounts in mail.app reached 4. For every account I selected “Automatically synchronize changed mailboxes”.
And at every start of mail.app, the application comes to a complete deadlock.

I was afraid it showed up to be an incompatibility with courier-imap, mail.app and synchronizing subfolders.

It took me a full day googling, hoping and lucky guesses.
The solution:

Max. of three accounts for a full sync. of all subfolders.
So you can add more accounts, but just take care that you not select “Automatically synchronize changed mailboxes”

With four mail.app stalls. Period.
I hope this will be solved in Tiger’s version of mail.app.

Postfix, Virtual Domains, OS X etc.

pfew.

Hacking, hacking and hacking.
The last weeks I spent my time with debugging, configuring, screaming and jumps of joy with Postfix.
The good news: Virtual domains working with postfix, courier-imap, mysql, amavisd-new, spamasassin, TLS/SASL is working.
The bad news: I can’t get sasl working with mysql, still working on that one.

More for my own reference:

Jan 19 18:12:30 mail postfix/smtpd[81211]: OTP unavailable because can’t read/write key database /etc/opiekeys: No such file or directory

fix: add the follwing line to /usr/local/lib/sasl2/smtpd.conf:

sasl_auxprop_plugin: mysql login plain crammd6 digestmd5

OTP is btw: One Time Passwords. (for mail?!)

Multiple accounts in mail.app with SSL to your imap.
Only one at a time is able to connect.
Mail.app is quite stupid. It opens up at least 3 connections at a time to your imapd.
Courier has a default of 4 connections / ip.
Hack your /usr/local/etc/courier-imap/imapd and change connections/ip to a reasonable ballpark figure (I entered 50).

Convert mbox to Maildir?
Forget it. Do it by hand, the tools don’t work.

The most usefull howto’s I could find:
http://www.marlow.dk/site.php/tech/postfix
http://www.gfxcafe.com/Mail%20Howto.htm Seems dead :(
http://workaround.org/articles/ispmail-sarge/
http://ezine.daemonnews.org/200308/courier-imap.html
http://ezine.daemonnews.org/200306/postfix-sasl.html
http://ezine.daemonnews.org/200309/postfix-spamassassin.html
http://www.asyd.net/docs/cyrus-options.html
http://www.akadia.com/services/postfix_amavisd.html

Mail server on freeBSD

The last weeks I’ve been struggling with freeBSD.
Building a nameserver worked within a day. A mailserver on the other hand…Is a lot of work. All new things…
Postfix, sasl, tls, courier, amavisd-new etc.
Most of the things start working now…googling has become hourly routine.

As virusscanner I’m using uvscan from macafee/nai. It has a freeBSD version, which install without problems. However, it’s statically linked against the older BSD4 libraries. You will have to install the 4.x compatability port. The resolves 2 out of three broken libaries. T0 solve the final third one:


ln -s /lib/libc.so.5 /lib/libc.so.3

-su-2.05b# ldd /usr/local/bin/uvscan
/usr/local/bin/uvscan:
libbsdfv.so.4 => /usr/local/lib/libbsdfv.so.4 (0x2808b000)
libm.so.2 => /usr/local/lib/compat/libm.so.2 (0x2835c000)
libc.so.3 => /lib/libc.so.3 (0x28377000)


Thoughts on freeBSD

A very busy week, but during my activities I found the time to experiment with freeBSD.
First on a very old IBM pentium 166mmx, but later this week on a unexpected present, a compaq PII 266 mhz.

I’m impressed.

The install process is , well, like going back in time, but quite simple. Not the fancy dandy RedHat install screens (let alone OS X) but nice ASCII screens. I did an FTP install, maybe the full iso’s do have graphical setup screens.

I like the total control feeling of the freeBSD install proces. Clear questions and good documentation in the install screens.
And after the first boot, the netstat -an command, shows, well., basically nothing.
How different from a default redhat or fedora install.

Only port 22 and udp 514 (syslog) open. wow.
No RPC, portmap or NFS bollocks I ever use.

freeBSD has a new addict.

I’ll post my further findings on gargleblaster.
In the next weeks I’ll migrate my mail and dns server from RH9 and fedora to freeBSD.