I was trying to add dovecot to my virtualmin setup on slicehost on the weekend. The problem was that virtualmin wrongly detected the version dovecot and wrote the wrong config file. So then I couldn’t get dovecot to start. I ended up following a guide on setting up dovecot to work with ubuntu and postfix using PAM - once I set the userdb and passdb and the sasl config options it all came good. It was pretty straightforward and I can’t really remember the link I used so sorry about not being more helpful – actually it might have been on the dovecot wiki.
To test it I was using mutt -f imap://username.domainuser@localhost/ which started working once I figured out to configure PAM in the dovecot config. However, I still had trouble with pop3. This ended up being because of a thing called uidl which I hadn’t set.
Next step is getting IMP onto the thing. I would like to check out squirrelmail as well to see how it’s looking these days. Does anyone know of any cool rails webmail clients? A gmail knockoff would be cool.
[tags]dovecot, slicehost, imap, pop3, mail, postfix, sasl, virtualmin[/tags]
Linux
I was getting emails all day yesterday complaining about duplicated mail (I run a mail and web server for a small organisation). During the day I couldn’t do much but looking at the logs, I could see google and yahoo were indexing the website and that the number of connections to spamd was really high. I figured that spamassassin was getting a bit behind and that it would all clear up when the indexing finished.
However, later that night the situation prevailed and I was wondering what was taking so long with google and yahoo. Making things worse, I realised that there was a heap of spam getting through the spam filter. The problem was that spamd was running with -m 5 which means it will only spawn 5 processes. Once that limit was reached, the spams would just go through (as far as I can tell). Also many of the spamd processes were dying – possibly from lack of CPU time.
I stopped the mail server and web server to see if things would calm down. With the servers stopped, I could see a bunch of processes called convert running. I have a home grown photo gallery that uses convert (ImageMagick) to resize images. I realised that it was getting stuck on a big tiff that had never been resized (thus preview not cached) which was also hanging convert in a high CPU and growing RAM kind of scenario. So I killed off the convert processes and disabled the gallery.
I also upped the -m on spamassassin for good measure and restarted it all. The mail queue cleared within a few seconds, google and yahoo continued indexing and all ended well. In actual fact, there was a lot of process killing, a reboot and other stopping and starting somewhere in the mix until I worked out what was going on.
I guess it’s something to be aware of – if you are running a mail server and web server on the same box, then you need to keep an eye on CPU and jump on any problems pretty quickly (or let twelve hours of spam through = about 1200 spams)
[tags]linux,hosting,mail,spamassassin,webhosting,server[/tags]
Linux
I use mplayer a bit on my mac to play AVIs and stuff and I find recently that it has broken. I get a Error locating symbol - dlcompat: Symbol "_JVTDecoOpen" not found as the final words. Apparently this is to do with a Quicktime update to version 7.1.5. Bummer.
I am using VLC in the meantime and I’ll have to just resort to linux for my video crunching needs until I find a fix. (Or more exactly, my crappy linux box which runs an excellent OS called linux)
Linux, Mac
Without wanting to install insomiaX or sleepless, I wanted my iBook to wake up for an off-peak broadband podcast run. In the power saving settings there is a scheduled startup but this appears not to be a wake-up so if the computer is on but sleeping, it will remain dormant and not run my podcast cron job.
Last night, I tried doing a scheduled power down at midnight followed by a scheduled wake and it worked! So the trade-off is that I can’t leave things running overnight on my iBook – which I rarely do anyway.
I’m using the old
00 5 * * * osascript -e 'tell application "iTunes" to updateAllPodcasts'
trick to get my podcasts.
Mac
As I mentioned before, I’ve recently migrated a couple of websites including this blog to slicehost. A couple of friends will be working on some different web app ideas but I thought I’d also migrate some websites onto the slice to free up my home PC (which is getting a bit tired).
I also took the opportunity to install the GPL virtualmin / webmin / usermin stuff. It all installed pretty easily on the ubuntu flavored slice after I enabled the ‘universal’ repository in /etc/apt/sources.list.
I tried the point and click webmin install of most stuff and only had to occasionally resort to the command line.
There has been a bit of a learning curve with getting used to ubuntu after using gentoo but I generally feel pretty at home on my slice now.
The only complaint I have about virtualmin is that it insists on stopping you installing an SSL enabled virtual host on name based sharing because it causes warnings in browsers. The thing is that for many of my sites, I just want the SSL for secure logins to some of the apps I run. I don’t care if the certificate will always look dodge to the browser, I tell the browser to ‘always accept’ and then I get a nice encrypted channel for doing the login.
I will have to find a manual override for SSL enabling my virtualmin stuff. Either than or get a block of IPs and look into having virtual interfaces on the slice (which I’m not sure if they do). Slicehost uses xen BTW.
Linux
I’ll post some more details later but I’ve recently leased a ‘slice’ on slicehost and have been installing virtualmin to manage some domains that I want to manage there.
The real point of this post is to remind myself of this handy command
lookupd -flushcache
which tells osx to reread the /etc/hosts file. This allows me to check that my websites are working ok with the virtual domains configured without having to change my DNS settings. Effectively, I put an entry in the /etc/hosts file to override the DNS lookup so that I can check my site out.
I tried using Netinfo Manager to do this but it didn’t seem to want to work. So /etc/hosts and the flushcache thing was the go. (I’m on osx 10.3.9)
[tags]mac, osx, dns, slicehost, virtual domain[/tags]
Mac
