that’s whacked

Dovecot 1.1.11 + managesieve + CMU Sieve Solaris pkgs

Wednesday, Mar 11. 2009  –  Category: Grommit, OpenSolaris

I’d been looking for a good way to do server-side mail filtering with client side configuration… and short of some lame CGI interfaces to editing your .procmailrc, I hadn’t found much until I discovered Sieve a few days ago.  To skip a long and boring story, I rebuilt a bunch of packages (yay for JDS’s spec build system) for the following:

• Dovecot IMAP server (1.1.11)
• Dovecot’s CMU Sieve plugin (1.1.6)
• Dovecot’s managesieve plugin (0.10.5)

I use Roundcube Webmail on my server, and there is a super-nice Roundcube Managesieve plugin available.

So I built and installed my Dovecot packages, installed the Roundcube Managesieve plugin, and I’m off and flying with awesome client-configurable mail filtering while allowing the mail filtering itself to be done server-side.

I’ve made the packages available here (14 MB download).  This SVr4 pkg contains SFEdovecot, SFEdovecot-cmusieve, SFEdovecot-managesieve, and the SFEdovecot-root (configuration files) packages.

photos and re-designs

Wednesday, Nov 26. 2008  –  Category: Grommit, Photos

Personal stuff first: On a whim, I bought stevel.me and decided to keep a photoblog using WordPress and YAPB. I also reorganised my photo gallery.

Stuff for the other grommit residents: I installed a bunch of new themes to the grommit gallery, as well as turning on a bunch of new Gallery plugins. None of the defaults have changed, but if you play around with the album settings you should see some new features.

For some reason or another, I’m quite fond of the square thumbnails plugin. I notice between my new blog theme, my photoblog theme, and my new gallery theme… I seem to really be into grids, squares, and lines… the square thumbnails must fit nicely into those in a uniform space sort of way.

whacked gets fatty

Sunday, Nov 16. 2008  –  Category: Grommit

I just installed a new WordPress theme (Miniml). It’s considerably fatter (as in ‘wider’) than my previous theme… so hopefully all y’all who complained about the previous one being too skinny will stop hassling me now.

It also integrates my photo gallery and Twitter stream below. This is a half-assed attempt to keep my blog looking active even when I’m lazy and not blogging.

200 days of uptime, yay!

Thursday, Jun 12. 2008  –  Category: Grommit

grommit just passed 200 days of uptime! (please don’t take this as an invitation to attack my machine now. it’s been a fairly cruddy day otherwise, and i have no energy to fend off an attack at the moment)

roundcube webmail software

Sunday, Feb 3. 2008  –  Category: Grommit

hrm… stumbled across roundcube tonight.

have to admit, i’m interested. it’s a helluva lot prettier looking than squirrelmail. the fact that it’s a 0.1 rc2 scares me a little… but hey, i’m working for a startup that’s at 0.4 after 3 years.

i might try setting it up as a parallel webmail system for people to check out…

php5 “Unable to fork” on Solaris

Thursday, Dec 6. 2007  –  Category: Grommit, OpenSolaris

I was battling with inconsistent behaviour for grommit with PHP5 periodically (50% of the time, roughly) throwing the dreaded “Unable to fork” error (seen on both exec() & passthru() calls). Googling for it gives tons of great info for what causes this problem on Windows; but virtually none on Solaris.

Finally after some truss and DTrace-fu, I saw what was happening. exec() was calling open(), and since httpd is a 32 bit process, it was hitting the 256 file descriptor limit.

Booooooo.

A quick modification to /lib/svc/method/http-apache2 to do a:

ulimit -n 65535 LD_PRELOAD_32=/usr/lib/extendedFILE.so.1 export LD_PRELOAD_32

before the line calling apachectl at the end fixed the problem for me.

Seems like other people should have hit this problem though; which makes me curious why I don’t see any other hits on Google about it.

a dearth of packages

Friday, Nov 23. 2007  –  Category: Grommit, OpenSolaris

This Thanksgiving I give thanks for all the packaging work underway in OpenSolaris. I look forward to a day in the future where I don’t have to spend so much time building out packages for all the updated software I need.

I’m building out the new Grommit machine, and part of what Grommit hosts is a whole bunch of Zones. I like to try to keep everything clean with pkg installs, so I’ve spent a good part of the past two days building Solaris (snv_75a) packages for Dovecot, PHP5, and Postfix.

Yes, I realise that packages for these already exist on Blastwave and elsewhere, but I want ones that leverage the Apache2, MySQL, and OpenSSL that Solaris already ships with. Anyway, thankfully the software all built fairly straight-forward which made my life a lot easier.

About the only thing left that I need is SpamAssassin and I’m hoping to use Eric B’s package that he put together for the OpenSolaris mail server for that. Eric passed me the Postfix package they use but unfortunately I ended up needing to rebuild it anyway since I wanted it to have TLS + SASL and authenticate against the Dovecot SASL.

I’ve done migrations of all the ZFS data for the home and web directories (yay for zfs send | ssh zfs receive), and I’ve installed Mailman (which I didn’t bother putting in a package since it cleanly separates itself in its own directory). I did a test migration of the MySQL database (which seemed to barf only on a field named ‘key’, which fortunately was easily worked around by escaping it with backticks). I’m pretty happy with the general build out of the machine so far. When I built out grommit last time it was early on in my days of using Solaris, so in general I’d made a mess of installing software all over the place, some in Blastwave, some from source, and things poorly and sloppily done everywhere. I’m trying to do things properly this time to make it easier to quickly commission zones that don’t require a whole bunch of finangling to get running cleanly.

I wonder if I can get grommit migrated by Sunday. That’d be a nice Thanksgiving surprise.

note to self: read notes to self

Thursday, Nov 22. 2007  –  Category: Grommit

Urgh. Just spent 45 minutes trying to debug why my Postfix + Dovecot SASL setup wasn’t working. Reading the (very concise & well written) HOWTO on how to test it, it still wasn’t working. I knew how to do it, so I totally ignored reading my ~/Documents/Grommit/POSTFIXREADTHIS_IDIOT doc I wrote to myself last time I did this.

Finally, after 45 minutes – I gave up, and read my note to self I wrote 3 years ago. A very important line at the bottom said:

“If you have Perl special characters ($, &) in your password, don’t forget to escape them or the password base64 encoding won’t work. You just wasted an hour on this, dumbass.”

Sigh. I just updated it to “You just wasted an hour and 45 minutes on this, dumbass.”

new grommit online

Saturday, Nov 17. 2007  –  Category: Grommit

yay, the new grommit machine is up and running…

[stevel@animalfarm:~] 507$ psrinfo -vp
The physical processor has 4 virtual processors (0-3)
  x86 (GenuineIntel 6FB family 6 model 15 step 11 clock 2400 MHz)
        Intel(r) Xeon(r) CPU           X3220  @ 2.40GHz
[stevel@animalfarm:~] 508$ prtconf | grep "^Memory"
Memory size: 4095 Megabytes
[stevel@animalfarm:~] 509$ uname -a
SunOS animalfarm 5.11 snv_75 i86pc i386 i86pc
[stevel@animalfarm:~] 510$