July 2004 Archives

     The name of this post may be a little misleading. Once I get it up and running on my OS X and FreeBSD machines, I plan to do little beyond letting it run. If you are using this howto to help you in installing and configuring Amanda, please be sure to also take a look at the Amanda website hosted by SourceForge and the AmandaMacOSXCompileNotes at Brandeis.edu. There is a part to the OSX Compile Notes that will completely hose your password file, however, if you are running OS X Panther Server (10.3.x). Be very cautious in following the add user portions of the OSX Compile Notes - in fact, I would recommend not following them at all.
     This HOWTO was written based upon my installation procedure with a Pentium 150 with a 40GB hard drive and a DLT IIIXT SCSI tape drive. I started with a vanilla installation of FreeBSD 4.9.

Chapter 1 - Install Amanda

     Lately, I have spent a lot of time trying out new software products for Anywhere Technology and with those downloads comes the inevitable email from the developer reminding me of login information & tc. In other cases, I have gone through registering for online financial services or using web interfaces to access account information. one of the issues of late that I am surprised by is the number of email servers (used in automatic responses or other automated services) whose time is wrong. In many cases, the time stamp shown on the email is Unix Genesis (1969).      I really would like to know how difficult it is for an administrator to have the time on his/her server properly set. There are a great number of utilities out there that can even take care of this for you. On Unix and *nix systems, you have ntp/ntpd (and the various offshoots) - very trivial to configure, by the way. On OS X you have a setting within System Preferences that will automatically do this for you - even more trivial than *nix systems:

For Windows there are a host of options out there. My favorite has always been Atomic Time Sync from AnalogX. I have not worked enough with Windows 2003 Server to see whether there is an option in the system settings/configuration that now takes care of this automatically.      While this may seem like a minor issue to some out there, it is actually a big deal. The most problematic of which has to do with spam detection. One of the methods I employ in detecting spam is forged time stamps - i.e. time stamps that don't make sense. When an email arrives in my inbox that is either 30 years old or from the future, it is unlikely that it is a valid email. On top of this, with the amount of email I receive, those with the wrong time stamp will often go unread for days because I don't see them in the pile of mail that has already been read. There are a number of other reasons one should have the proper time set on an internet server. Many of those reasons are more critical than the ones I listed above. For example, if the time is off on your server, remote backups may be off sync with the intentioned schedule or may not get done at all.      It amazes me that I continue to see this on a regular basis - even from large financial sites like eFile - so I repeat the plea of the title: Hostmasters: Please Set Your Server's Time!

While I have spent a lot of time managing and tweaking different qmail implementations - the last of which dealing with smtp-auth and tls - I have also found a good number of sites who do a better job at providing some information that I either don't understand too well myself or I haven't had the time to digest. If you are using my site as a guide to installing qmail with imap and virtual domain support, PLEASE take a look at the original sites from which I have based quite a bit of my work:

- Oliver Lehmann's qmail HOWTO - this is the beginning of qmail for me - the genesis of it all, if you will. With Oli's help, I got my first well functioning qmail server going. Of course, you need to be able to read German, but even if you can't, it is likely that you could stumble through his command line examples. Anyone who has used my HOWTO owes Oli a lot of credit.
- Qmail Rocks dot org - this has been my latest weapon of choice as it is obvious that Eric Siegel has done his research in compiling an extensive and powerful qmail installation. His site goes quite a bit beyond what I would have expected and helps do a lot of the work for you.
- Shupp.Org - Bill Shupp is the source of my last modified howto. Unfortunately, this howto no longer works - actually, everything works except the smtp-auth portion. I have spent the past two days trying to figure out why and can't... Alas, this is likely NOT BILL'S FAULT, but something that I am not doing correctly. I am going to add a disclaimer to the top of my recent howto for that reason. Still, Bill has come up with a fantastic patch that worked on one of my machines and is the one having allowed me to do smtp-auth in the first place.
- Dan Bernstein's Page - of course, this list would be without merit if I excluded Dan's site. He is the reason we are even here. I honestly considered changing to Postfix recently because of my problems with smtp auth, but I would have thrown away years of work in understanding how qmail works. Plus, there is one fact that remains - I have NEVER had a qmail installation fail. NEVER. I have also NEVER had a qmail installation get hacked. Never is quite powerful considering I have been using qmail for 4 years on 10 different servers. Some of those servers have been heavily punished by my ineptitude... but qmail has continued to run as advertised. So, while I have my complaints (i.e. the necessity of patches upon patches in order to get certain services to work), I couldn't have done it better and am not about to take the chance that Postfix will set up the need to spend yet another 4 years learning another system.

I thought Windows tended to have a convoluted manner in which one sets the default browser, but I just found out OS X/Panther does, too. I've finally given up on Safari and the constant minor bugs that one has to deal with. One of the things that I demand of most of the programs I use that deal with generic web surfing and email use is that they are available across a good number of OS platforms. Sometimes this is feasible and other times it isn't. In the case of web and email related work, this is definitely feasible through the set of programs that the Mozilla Foundation has come up with. I recently quit using OS X's Mail in favor of Thunderbird (I found that I could even sync my imap cache across the different platforms I use by copying some key files) and now I'm making Firefox my default browser. There used to be a menu item under the System Preferences called web whereby one could change the default browser. No longer is this the case. Nowadays - with Panther - you need to do this through the Safari preferences pane. How ridiculous?!? Why would anyone think of looking under Safari preferences to set the default browser for your user account in Panther? My biggest complaint about Windows was that items just like this were impossible to find - i.e. they were far from intuitive. Shame on Apple for pulling this little shenanigan.
So, for those of you wanting to change your default browser under OS X/Panther, open Safari, go to Preferences under the Safari menu. Under the General tab you will find the option to change to your favorite browser.
If you know of a better way of doing this, by all means, please let me know.