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GRAFFITI -- September 13, 2004 thru September 19, 2004 >> Link to the Current Week << Last Week << Mon   Tues   Wed   Thu   Fri   Sat   Sun >> Next Week Search this site : Welcome to Orb Graffiti, a place for me to write daily about life and computers. Contrary to popular belief, the two are not interchangeable.     About eMail - I publish email sometimes. If you send me an email and you want privacy or anonymity, please say so clearly at the beginning of your message.

MONDAY    Tues    Wed    Thu    Fri    Sat    Sun   
September 13, 2004

0911 - Good morning.Okay, not really, I'm going to the funeral today. I don't much like funerals, but this is the right thing to do. Have a better day, alright?

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Mon    TUESDAY    Wed    Thu    Fri    Sat    Sun   
September 14, 2004

1734 - Good evening. As such things go, the funeral was fine. There were a lot of people there to honor and remember the deceased, and support the family. Still not my favorite way to spend a few hours around good people, though. Marty's daughter played her favorite song, Sarah McLachlan's I Will Remember You. Not a dry eye in the house, I assure you.

Work has been work, and I've been low on energy, not sleeping well due to aches and pains from my fall the other day. I'm clearly on the mend though - feeling much better than I was even yesterday. I'm hopeful of sleeping through the night tonight.

There's not much else to take note of today, so I'll leave you with this thought: "Any sufficiently advanced operating system is indistingushable from UNIX." Thanks to Jim Dennis of the LinuxGazette Answer Gang for coining that one sometime late last century.

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Mon    Tues    WEDNESDAY    Thu    Fri    Sat    Sun   
September 15, 2004

2218 - Good evening. Got lots done today and last night. I spent most of the time today assisting a customer in an accounting system software upgrade and data migration. Yeah, I was backed up 8 ways from Sunday, on tape and three different systems, with a reversion path. But accounting upgrades always make me nervous, because the downside of a failure is so very bad in a time-consumption and effect-on-cashflow manner. It came off without a hitch, and I was glad we spent the larger part of the day preparing for the upgrade, then flawlessly executing it, rather than the alternative.

Last night I spent an inordinate amount of time resolving mailing list issues with virtual hosts on Zidane. That dragon's been slain, hopefully to hide restfully for a number of years until the next forced upgrade. I also resuscitated the webalizer setup for one of Bob's domains. It had flat disappeared. We don't know whether to blame ourselves or FrontPage... Okay, we blame FrontPage, but are willing to make allowances for other possibilities.

Now, the important stuff for today. Daynotes.com is going down. Tom's priorities don't make room for recovering control of the domain before it expires. And honestly, it's a pretty good name when it comes right down to it. I've got the .org and the .net mostly in hand. I'm just not willing to commit the cash to a wait-and-see-if-I-get-it game when it comes up for air after the 30 day grace period (or however long that is, now). So I'm planning a few changes for the latter two sites, to more closely reflect those people who are still A) actively writing and/or B) participating on the mailing list. Either one provides value within the group, that we may provide value to y'all. So some names are going by the wayside, and others may make a comeback. I'll be posting a "Final Days" message at the top of the .com site in the next day or two. I'll be a bit sad to see it go, but I'm pleased that Tom's on a righteous path and getting his priorities right for him. As Don Ameche said in the movie, "Things change..."

Finally, I can't tell you how long this evening posting spate is likely to continue. I've been sleeping badly enough that those last few minutes in the morning have become precious, and better spent in rest than typing here, then. I've taken my naproscin for the evening, and I'll work at keeping my right arm out from under my head (where it kinked up my shoulder something fierce last night) tonight. Have a good day tomorrow if you can, I'll certainly do my best. By the way, if you're still in Ivan's path, it's too late to run. Remember that 50's school schick: Duck, and cover (or if you're on low ground, climb and cover!) Be well.

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Mon    Tues    Wed    THURSDAY    Fri    Sat    Sun   
September 16, 2004

1951 - Good evening. Today was a multitasking day. I achieved all but one of the goals set at two different client sites, then in the office all afternoon. Not much to report, though. Fixing problems created by conflicting Windows programs is nothing new. And if you don't know what the right answer is when McAfee firewall pops up a dialog asking you if you really want to send traffic through your wireless adapter, then you don't deserve to find the Internet until I come along to help you find it again. Really!

Tonight, I put on my new boots and took the dogs for a hike. Lucy's got a post-illness clean bill of health from Dr. Patty, so it was walkies all the way, right after their dinner. We walked down to the beaver pond, where it's overflowed the walking path. No one can do anything about the beavers because they're protected. Can't we protect them better as coats and hats, I ask? Then they can stay warm and dry in the closet most of the year. We were also chased by a weiner dog for a while. But that came to a swift end when Molly noticed, turned around and reared up against the leash. Little weiner dog made an abrupt about-face and a rapid advance to the rear. The boots are doing fine, I'll be happy in them when Jim and I do a chunk of the Trail Appalachian sometime next month.

A couple of good things seen/found today include a great new voter's incentive plan: Votergasm. Check it out (but it's not work safe, be warned!). Then a link to an LA Times article apparently has this quotable:

This election is too important to vote your heart and mind. This is such an important election that we must only use our vote against people we hate.

I say "apparently" because the LA Times, like many other papers, thinks that yesterday's news has value besides catching bird crap at the bottom of the page. As Doc often notes, the papers can only increase their authority and reputation by having their material accessible and searchable on the open web. If a Google search doesn't turn up any Times (NY or LA or wherever) results, then how will the data be used or useful? I don't have to register to use the Library ... yet. By the way, thanks to linkage through Doc to the Sex, Drugs & Unix blog run by Jim Thompson.

Noteably, that "use our vote" line resonates with me to a certain extent. I've always been a fan of the "Vote NO, anything else only encourages the bastards!" school of thought. I vote to keep bond issues down. I vote to oust known trouble. Correspondingly, I tend to vote against the incumbent, on the general principle that there's less influence that can be exerted by powerful lobbies against the younger, fresher, more idealistic minds. On the gripping hand, bitter cynicism and a No vote at most roll calls is the best I can hope for from any politician.

Now I'm going to get some food, and a handful of ibuprofen, as my arm is playing up again after letting Molly tug away at it all through our walk. Silly me. Sigh. Have a good evening, and a better day tomorrow.

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September 17, 2004

2233 - Hi. I know it's late, sorry. A reasonably busy day today, and right at this point in time, a distractingly large amount of pain from my arm and shoulder. The shoulder is more a muscle-tension nerve-pinch thing resulting from how I'm holding my arm to keep it from over extending and hurting the sprain in the forearm. Yeah, I've been babying it, but I'm going to try to do virtually nothing of substance this weekend, and let everything rest. If this is a problem for more than another few days, I'm going to have to go see a doctor, and that's never a good thing. Generally, I'm pretty good at standing up under pain and soldiering on, but the constant grind is getting a bit wearing.

One of the little projects I did spend time on is running through the directions found on the Workaround.org site for building a Debian Sarge mailserver. You'll remember I found that link late in the process of writing my own set of directions. They were so good looking I didn't see any reason to continue along my own path - the need was met. Well, it is, nearly. I'm going through those directions and validating the steps and configurations so that I can confirm for you that they work, and very nearly they do. I'll have a little commentary and input, both here and as feedback for the writer of the Howto, Christoph Haas. He's done a great job, and I have only a few minor changes to propose, and one outstanding problem that means either I missed a step, or the configuration's wrong, someplace along the line: Spamassassin isn't working. It's installed, the daemon is running, the configs for calling it from Amavisd-new all look right, but the messages aren't marked. Sigh. More when I know more. Bottom line, forgiving that: Blank disk to running mail server in something under 2 hours. If you've never used Linux before, or configured MySQL (or a couple of other ... little things), then it'll take longer, and a bit more research. I hope to fill in a few of those blanks soon.

Big lightning storm rolling in... I'd better sign off. Have a great day/evening/time-period-of-your-own-choosing. G'night.

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September 18, 2004

1414 - Good afternoon. I've finished up tweaking a mail server installation based upon the Haas HOWTO I noted yesterday and a couple of weeks back. Here is my short list of additions/errata for the tutorial:

• I installed Debian Sarge (the release expected to become the new Debian "Stable" in the next few weeks) with an ISO image from the Debian Installer page. You can use either the "netinst" image or the "businesscard" image. I pulled the latter just for fun, but in the end, you'll pull down about the same amount of bytes, either all at once in the ISO, or during the install, to get the base installation Debian done, so you might as well use "netinst".
• At the end of installation, there's an installation target sort of dialog box that permits pulling and installing all the packages needed to make the box into a web server, or a mail server, or whatever. I selected none of those items, and continued. At the end of the install, I had a base Debian Sarge install and nothing else.
• I installed first ssh, vim and less. The Debian base install really is minimal
  

  
  apt-get install ssh vim less	
    

• I edited the /etc/apt/sources.list file to include other repositories than just Debian main. Note that I did not change the source (URL) of the repositories, just added the contrib and non-free trees, as well as changing testing to sarge, which prevents the box from becoming a "testing" box once again, when Sarge goes stable in a little while. Here's my modified sources.list:
  

  
  #deb http://mirrors.rcn.net/debian/ sarge main
  
  deb http://mirrors.rcn.net/debian/ sarge main contrib non-free
  deb-src http://mirrors.rcn.net/debian/ sarge main contrib non-free
  
  deb http://security.debian.org/ sarge/updates main contrib non-free
  	

• Remember to run apt-get update after modifying the sources.list file.
• Then I pulled all of the packages recommended in the HOWTO in one whack, letting the dependencies (and there are a lot of those) come in automagically. I only added one of the recommended (by apt) packages, unzoo:
  

  
  apt-get install courier-authdaemon courier-authmysql courier-maildrop courier-pop \
  courier-pop-ssl courier-imap courier-imap-ssl postfix-tls libsasl2 libsasl2-modules \
  libsasl2-modules-sql openssl amavisd-new spamassassin clamav clamav-daemon \
  zoo unzip unarj lha sqwebmail phpmyadmin unzoo
    

• Haas doesn't say how to create the initial root password for MySQL. There's a lot to be learned about MySQL and you won't learn it from him or from me (at least today). But I always have to go looking to remember how to protect the root user immediately after installation. Here's how to do that:
  

  
  mysqladmin -u root password <GoodPassword>
    

  
  Then with little effort, you can use phpmyadmin (web interface, http://IP.OF.THE.BOX/phpmyadmin/, login as root with the password you just set) or the command line:
  

  
  mailbox2:~# mysql -u root -p
  Enter password: 
  Welcome to the MySQL monitor.  Commands end with ; or \g.
  Your MySQL connection id is 20 to server version: 4.0.21-log
  
  Type 'help;' or '\h' for help. Type '\c' to clear the buffer.
  
  mysql> 
    

  
  ... to execute the configurations that Haas specifies in the HOWTO.
• Haas doesn't use the mysql socket connect method for Postfix SMTP authentication because it's a righteous PITA. That can be worked around by modifying the Postfix and MySQL init scripts, but then you're at risk for things breaking when you upgrade later. My preference (which Haas doesn't discuss) is to limit the TCP listening address to the localhost, 127.0.0.1. Do this by modifying the file /etc/mysql/my.cnf, adding the line
  

  
  bind-address            = 127.0.0.1
  	

  
  ... to the section [mysqld], just below the skip-networking line. Needless to say, you'll want to comment out the skippage by putting a '#' in front of skip-networking or a unix socket is all you'll get, and no TCP port to bind to, even on localhost. When you're done with that, then restart mysql:
  

  
  mailbox2:/etc/mysql# /etc/init.d/mysql restart
  Stopping MySQL database server: mysqld.
  Starting MySQL database server: mysqld.
  Checking for crashed MySQL tables in the background.
  	

  
  Thereafter, you can check to be sure that MySQL is only listening on localhost port 3306:
  

  
  	mailbox2:/etc/mysql# netstat -an | grep tcp | grep LISTEN | grep 3306
  tcp        0      0 127.0.0.1:3306          0.0.0.0:*               LISTEN  
  	

  
  If that first IP:Port string were to read 0.0.0.0:3306 instead, then you're listening on all ports, try to limit it again, something's typed wrong in the my.cnf file.
• Once that's done, just follow along with the HOWTO, configuring services and testing as instructed, until you reach the section on AMaVIS. There, almost everything's right. I did all of the steps right, as documented in the howto. But when I was done, there were no traces of SpamAssassin having touched the email. Two tweaks fixed that.
• First, SpamAssassin doesn't get started as a daemon automatically. I needed to edit the /etc/default/spamassassin file, changing the value of the ENABLED variable to 1. Then I could type /etc/init.d/spamassassin start, and it would actually start, instead of silently exiting. I found that by reading the init.d file.
• The second gotcha was this: In the HOWTO's table for the amavisd.conf file settings, there's a Setting that reads: @local_domains_acl = ( "" );
  I didn't catch this at first, but only local domains get scanned (protecting your users' incoming mail). The first time I tried this, I actually left the space between the parens blank, figuring that would just scan everything, in and out bound. In order to have it work the way I wanted, including scanning the mail for the mysterious [email protected], my working configuration for that setting looks like this:
  

  
  @local_domains_acl = ( ".", 
          ".virtual.test"
          ); 
  	

  
  So, add a line to this config for every virtual host that you add to the MySQL domains table. Alternatively, there may be a way to do a mysql query with amavis, or use an external query to generate a file that Amavis reads, but for my purposes, just knowing that it needs to be in both places is good enough for now.
• A final hint: When you muck up the amavisd.conf file and amavis won't start properly, the correct tool to use is from the command line:
  

  
  amavisd-new debug
  	

  
  The output from that command will tell you where in the amavisd.conf file the error seems to be, and certainly gave me enough information to find and correct my problem (one issue was the trailing comma outside the quotes in the domains list - it needs to be there).

Now that seems like a lot of effort to go through. You might say to yourself that it seems that the MS tools are much, much easier. In a sense, they are. OTOH, they work great for users who are AD users, where the authentication is tied into AD. If I had just installed Postfix and Courier on a stock Debian Sarge box without all the mysql stuff, then I still could be doing email, just only for shell users of the system in question (people with logins, neh)? The goal here is database-backed virtual domains that are virtually numberless (depending on load and system resources, yes?). How much does that cost in Windows? Free (and effective, I might add) tools for antivirus and antispam are here. How much does that cost in Windows? Per year? Okay, enough evangelizing... there's enough computing space for all of us to play in. You know which side of the sandbox I like. 'nuff said! Oh, and all this functionality is running on an install that is now topped out at 359M for everything. All the other room on the disk(s) is for data.

The arm is getting better, thanks for asking. The shoulder still rakes me if I sleep with my right arm up under my head, I hope that will improve with time. The real problem still is in the forearm, although it's ... um, changing. The tearing feeling in the upper portion is now down to a dull ache, clearly healing. But what came up yesterday turns out to be a spasming muscle that's clenching around a nerve bundle. I can tell from the origin of the pain, and the numb strip down the under-forearm. That, with anti-inflammatories for the next two or three days, should mend itself.

Okay, time to rest for a while. Have a great day!

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September 19, 2004

1906 - Good evening. Not much to report. I was up before 0400 with pain in the shoulder. I took some non-aspirin PM stuff, and (mucking about with the computers in the meantime) by 0630 was able to go back to sleep, where I stayed until past noon. Then we went for the weekly shopping run, I tried to install a couple of Win98-only games in a VMware machine (and got nowhere, I might add. DreamCatcher can bite my ass!), and put up a couple of replies over on the LinuxMuse messageboards. That brings us up to the present. Now I'm going to go have some dinner, and read. Have a great evening, see you tomorrow.

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Visit the rest of the DAYNOTES GANG, a collection of bright minds and sharp wits. Really, I don't know why they tolerate me <grin>. My personal inspiration for these pages is Dr. Jerry Pournelle. I am also indebted to Bob Thompson and Tom Syroid for their patience, guidance and feedback. Of course, I am sustained by and beholden to my lovely wife, Marcia. You can find her online too, at http://www.dutchgirl.net/. Thanks for dropping by.

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