Forgetting why you replaced hardware

Personal, ,

A month or so with nothing to say is not really what’s been going on, lets try to get caught up. Over the Christmas / New Year holiday I decided to move my Fetchmail/Dovecot/LDAP installation to a different machine. Now the machine I had in mind I retired back in March of 08 after having some problems when adding memory. For what I remember it was two of the three DIMM slots were bad. So when it booted fine and loaded Lenny without a hitch I figured we’re good since I didn’t intend to add any memory. Not so.

The point of the move was that box had a mobo with a small form factor their was no room for expansion and I didn’t want to do it with USB. So after getting everything moved adding Squirrelmail, Spamassassin, and Procmail I was ready to tackle the wireless card and firewall rules. That’s when I was reminded why I replaced the box in the first place.

The wireless card worked under Ubuntu and used the MadWifi drivers so getting the same result with Lenny wasn’t going to be a big deal. Unfortunately I could never get the system to boot with the wireless card in it would just stop pre-post with a long beep. That is a memory issue but when pulling the wireless card out and reseeding the memory no problems. Sigh …

So I was stuck. I suppose I could stay with wired but that would bring other challenges into play that I’ve long since put behind me with wireless. In hindsight it was not the best project to start but it was nice to go through the motion. I think the moral here for me is older hardware is good for somethings but if you’ve once diagnosed a problem don’t go back to it …. let it be !!!

Laptop woes, again

Personal,

Sigh …. a few hours ago I plugged the power cable into the laptop and the battery continued to drain. It didn’t stop until the system shut down. I don’t have any testing equipment but if I had to guess it’s the power connection on the motherboard, again.

It was about a year and a half ago that I replaced the motherboard after debating on getting a new one…. when that very problem occured. It seems like replacing the motherboard then may not have been the best choice. The original plan was to get a machine that would last about five years. In the beginning of 2005 that’s what I was shooting for with the v2000. So for now I’ll pull out the old i200 that it replaced until I can verify that it’s really the motherboard. If it is, it’s time for a new one.

Update: Good news after some testing with a ohmmeter, thanks dad, determined it more the likely was the power cord. After getting a replacement we are back to normal.

Fetchmail, Dovecot and OpenLDAP

Technology, , , ,

The last few weeks I’ve been working on a server that I can access mail from regardless of which machine I’m on, what OS I load or where I’m at. Now yes the thoughts running through ones head is you can also do it with about any of the major email hosts google, yahoo, hotmail, not to mention a number of ISP’s. The difference is I wanted to have the data in a place that I could physically touch on my own equipment to modify as I see fit. Not to mention it sounded like a decent challenge too. Applications already exist to do this and since I’m not going with an all in one solution I’ll need a few separate programs to do the job. That’s where Fetchmail, Dovecot and LDAP will do all the work.

I’ve read about Fetchmail for years but never took the time to put it to work. The same would go for Dovecot (IMAP) and LDAP.

How they all work is Fetchmail will “fetch” mail from the various addresses I have and store all the messages in one place. To read the mail with a standard client I needed IMAP, this what Dovecot will do. Lastly, which is a bonus, is LDAP for contacts and for this we can use slapd to implement OpenLDAP.

Fetchmail

Their is plenty of resources on the net for this already one that helped me was this post, simple and straight forward. My setup barley scratches the surface of what this app can do, but for now simple does the trick.

Dovecot

Dovecot is an IMAP and POP3 package it will take care of the access, it can be configured for unsecure, secure or both. This setup was a little more tricky for me. After installing I was able to get access but no mail or folders would show up. It took me a little time, in the end it was this that solved the problem. I enabled the following line in dovecot.conf

default_mail_env = mbox:~/mail/:INBOX=/var/mail/%u

.. and I had access. What’s nice here is all I have to do is create a folder on the IMAP side and copy / paste the messages from the folder on my machine. Now they are all on the server and I can access them from any machine / device on my network or if I’m travelling.

OpenLDAP

The most challenging of these has been LDAP. This is another protocol I haven’t had an opportunity to do much with. For this I installed slapd and immediately began fighting with the setup. LDAP is one of those apps that is very robust and with so many options and ways to do things it’s difficult to weed your way through. This article was very helpful. When I got to the section that talks about ldapadd I could not execute it, that app was not part of the slapd package. It took me a little time to figure that out and once I added it, and loaded the ldif file things were better.

But then the problems started with Evolution and accessing the LDAP directory. Response was slow and would only work a few times until I restarted. I was hoping this was a configuration issue but then I found this bug and was immediately disappointed.

However I figured their had to be a resolution and since I was using version 2.22 I thought maybe 2.24 had a fix. Both Ubuntu Intrepid and Fedora 10 come with 2.24 and I have a drive that I just loaded F10 on. Before swapping I did some more googling I found reference to a patch that recently had been applied so I was hopeful 2.24 was ok. Unfortunately I can’t find the reference and didn’t make note of it at the time. But I believe it was a thread on the Gnome Evolution Hackers list and the fix is included in this release. So after putting in my drive with F10 and adding the LDAP address book response was much better and no time outs. So far it’s looking good.

That leaves me with a question, move to 2.24 or live with 2.22. I’d like to keep all contacts in a central location so I’ll have to look into upgrading Evolution to 2.24 on Lenny. Regardless I’m pleased and it was an excellent learning experience.

Site Upgrade

Personal

With the new version of WordPress out last week figured I should upgrade. Been reading lots of good things about the UI on the back end. I took a little extra time for this one, 1/2 hour instead of 15 minutes, making sure I had correct backups of everything.

All went smoothly and I’d have to agree with the other blogs I’ve read the UI is nice. I haven’t found any theming problems but looks like some plugins have upgrades available. Wouldn’t it be nice if all upgrades went like this, uneventful.

Cheers !!!

Comcast using Zimbra

Technology, ,

A hockey buddy sent me a email recently where the mailer was reported as.

Mailer: Zimbra 5.0.9_GA_2533.RHEL5_64 (zclient/5.0.9_GA_2533.RHEL5_64)

I’ve always found it interesting what others use to manage their mail but I didn’t think he used open source, not to mention Red Hat Enterprise Linux with Zimbra. So that got me thinking he is a Comcast user and so am I, does Comcast use Zimbra ? I sent a message from my Comcast account then checked the mailer, nope it was AT&T Message Center. So I did some googling and sure enough I missed this one late last year.

The reason he has it and I don’t is it’s a feature of their Triple Play package, we only use TV and Internet. Regardless it’s pretty cool for open source software. I’ve been reading good things about Zimbra and was thinking about installing it on a test server about a month ago but never got to it. Five or six years ago when I was hosting my own mail server a product like this would have been sweet. Guess if I get crazy and want to go back I know now there’s a good option that’s free.