roundcube webmail software

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…

Add comment February 3rd, 2008

php5 “Unable to fork” on Solaris

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.

9 comments December 6th, 2007

a dearth of packages

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.

5 comments November 23rd, 2007

note to self: read notes to self

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.”

1 comment November 22nd, 2007

new grommit online

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$

3 comments November 17th, 2007