I have been in a really crappy funk for the past few days, today being one of the worst days yet. Thankfully tonight was a nice change of pace. Tonight I met up with Juli, Bob, and Dave for dinner and a concert. The concert was Bryan Bowers, it was his yearly show held at the Folk-Lore Center in Warrenville, IL. I first had the priviledge of hearing here there last year, and despite his recovering from a cold, this years show was again wonderful.
Upon arriving back home I found the kids in bed, asleep. My aunt wasnt here, and my mother was winding down here evning quietly on her computer. That allowed me the pleasure of enjoying the peace, and quiet without loosing the happy mood I left the show in.
Thank’s gang for a great night.
Month: November 2005
Postfix + CYRUS + SASL + TLS + PAM
After the death of my former mail server I have been tweaking its replacement. The new box is running SuSE 9.3 and instead of Sendmail + UW IMAP it runs Postfix and Cyrus. I setup the Cyrus authentication to use PAM. The PAM authentication is then using ‘pam_winbind.so’ to authenticate to my samba domain. Everything seemed to be working well for the past few days. Seemed to be, that is until I attempted to send mail away form home via my mail server. Due to mail security to prevent spammers from using me as an open relay sending was of course blocked. I did some more configuration and went through every HOWTO I could find. Every time I tried connecting I would get errors from the client and the following in the ‘/var/log/mail.warn’ file.
postfix/smtpd[11633]: warning: SASL authentication failure: Password verification failed
postfix/smtpd[11633]: warning: (remote hostname): SASL PLAIN authentication failed
postfix/smtpd[11633]: warning: (remote hostname): SASL LOGIN authentication failed
I finaly ran across a posting on a message board describing this problem. Their resolution was to edit the file ‘/etc/sysconfig/saslauthd’ and change the line:
SASLAUTHD_AUTHMECH=pam
to
SASLAUTHD_AUTHMECH=shadow
that change would negate the use of PAM authentication when relaying mail. This was not an option for me. It then occured to me that what was needed was a coresponding PAM entry in ‘/etc/pam.d/’ to handle SMTP. To that end I copied my ‘imap’ file to ‘smtp’ so that the resulting file contained the following:
#%PAM-1.0
auth include common-auth
account include common-account
password include common-password
session include common-session
After that file was created I tried sending my message again, and it worked perfectly.
The best HOWTO I found, aside from the one on the PostFix website, was one located on HOWTO Forge. It is a subset of an overall SUSE Perfect Setup . By following it I was able to setup TLS in minutes.
So long, Farewell…
Tonight a long standing fear of mine came true. I have been running the wohlershome mail on an old Pentium 133 PC I have had running for at least 7 years. The box, named Sydney, has been humming along all that time with hardly any complaints. It was tossed together out of spare parts in an attempt to have a working computer that I could use during a very low point in my life. Sure the processor fan has died 4 or 5 times, and it has gone through at least 2 cd-rom drives. But the Seagate hard drives in it have been running like champs all that time never complaining. I can only pretend to know how those poor drives must have suffered over the years but they never complained. I have had a sinking feeling in my gut for months that it might be time to put the poor guy out to pasture, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I even sat down in july and built its replacement, but just couldnt put it in service. It has survived countles power failures, thanks to the trusty UPS that kept it happily humming along. Tonight we lost power for well over an hour. I headed up to check on it when I got home, which was about 40 minutes into the outage. To my happyness the UPS was still going and my little workhorse was hapily chugging along aware of the power outage, but not yet worried. Unfortunatly the outage lasted about 20 minutes to long, and Sydney as expected shutdown unatended all safe and sound. Ahh but nature has a cruel sense of humor and when power was finally restored, my dear old friend, my very first linux box ever had suffered a drive failure. 😥 No more will he happily serve up my email, no more will I see loving status logs telling me all is well in Sydney’s world. Sigh… It’s the end of an era. I will do my best to once again breathe life into his hard drives for one final logoff, but my hopes are not high. I still remember laying in my bedroom terribly depressed listening to the only MP3 I had at the time, the first MP3 I ever downloaded via linux on a 56K modem. (Tommy Henriksen – I See The Sun) I still remember the 1st time I got the matrix screen saver working on you. I remember the time spent trying to get diald to work. I still remember all of the fun I had creating a LIRC IR driver for him, and them using him to automatically set the clocks on the VCR. How sad that tonight the VCRs still sit here waiting for Sydney to reset them, a wait that may never end. Goodbye Sydney, you will be missed… Thank you for all the data, and the memories.
Chicken Little
I went and saw Chicken Little tonight. I enjoyed it. It was a fun movie and if the kids are good I may even consider taking them. I love some of the little hidden jokes. In one scene there was a bull helping some sort of bird who kept running into the window of the bulls shop. When I looked a little closer I discovered the bull was the proprieter of a china shop. 😀
John's Musings 