October 2006


29
Oct
2006

Just upgraded my production blogs to this new release without a problem. It’s easy and painless as every upgrade of WordPress is. You can read Mark’s blog on the biggest bug fixes. Mark has also provided a zip file with all the changed files so you don’t have to upload the whole distribution, which makes it a lot easier. This release was called Ronan in honor of Ryan Boren’s new son. I guess I’ll call my next release of the documents Anna ;-)

If you run WordPress on your server you should upgrade as well…

29
Oct
2006

MySQL Community Server has been updated to a new release which is mostly a bugfix release for an ABI incompatibility with earlier releases. This bug hasn’t affected me and it doesn’t really have to affect you if you don’t use this functionality, check the bug report to make sure that this is the case.

Please not that if you run the binary installer it’s still necessary to compile the source afterwards because the shared library bug isn’t solved yet. Also don’t forget to copy the data directory to the new version of MySQL or it might look like you lost all your databases.

Please note that MySQL has created a fork for the distribution. The paying customers get MySQL Enterprise Server which has been updated to 5.0.28 (don’t know why there is the difference in versions). To read more about the differentiation between the MySQL Enterprise Server and the MySQL Community Server, read Kaj Arnö’s blog.

As an added bonus I would like to point out that if you are still using the mysql extensions instead of the mysqli extensions (i stands for improved) you should take a look at the MySQL wiki article which will help you convert your application to the new module. They even got a script which will convert your source for you. If you still need convincing why you should convert please read this old article on the Zend site.

24
Oct
2006

I’m working hard on the spamfilter setup using DSPAM got a basic setup working and some people are currently testing my documentation for inconsistencies or errors. When they are finished checking it all I’ll make it publicly available.

I’m a bit stuck with getting the Web GUI to work, well not exactly, it works but to know which user is using the web interface he/she needs to login. The preferred way in this setup is to use the Apache authentication methods. I tried to use mod_auth_imap which I got working on one mini but can’t get it to work on another. I really liked to use this one as it promises all the users of my server to be able to use the same user/password combination for all the services. I’ve tried mod_auth_mysql to use the postfix admin database username/password but it looks like the md5 hash encoding of the password that’s used is not the normal md5 hash one would expect. It’s not compatible with the PHP5 md5 function or anything. Courier-auth is able to handle it, I’m wondering why. If anyone has any suggestions how to tackle this issue I would be happy to hear about it.

As a bonus, I found some nice blog posts where people switched from POP3 to an IMAP mail server. Read PC World, Geir’s blog at Codehaus and Rourke McNamara’s weblog. I always liked IMAP as it stores all your email in a central location accessible from anywhere using any mail client or Roundcube.

17
Oct
2006

I’m posting to let you know that I’ve updated the installation page of Postfix to include support for perl regular expressions in the use of tables also know as PCRE. This enables you to filter table entries you might use, if you’d want to. You can read more on PCRE and Postfix here and here.

I found out I needed it when I wanted to do some fancy stuff in my DSPAM setup. I’m almost there in releasing the documentation, still looking for more volunteers to beta test for me. The DSPAM filter is running as a content filter in Postfix and I’ve got a shell script running daily that empties my Junk folder and trains DSPAM to learn to be a better filter. More about this subject later…

10
Oct
2006

MySQL logoJust installed MySQL 5.0.26 on my new Intel Mac mini after I just installed version 5.0.24a on it to create a new Intel based test environment. It was a good exercise to see if the update of the packages works as advertised. The binary installation package, which I installed first, creates a new symlinked directory and leaves the previous version intact. After that I still needed to compile from source as the shared library issue isn’t solved and I think it won’t be solved for some time as I found some info that the error is still there in the beta of version 5.1.

As you might notice MySQL skipped another release version, again, version 5.0.25 was only released to paying customers. Go figure… The announcement solved so many bugs they used two emails on the announcement mailinglist ! Here is the first and the second.

I must say the Intel mini is a dream to use, compilation is much, much faster. I also found out that I really need the memory upgrade as I can’t run to many applications at the same time as the memory swapping onto the slow hard-drive is really killing all performance benefits. The GUI sometimes responds much slower than on a G4 with 1Gb of memory.

9
Oct
2006

Some of the users of my mailserver setup noticed a problem with postfix, they where unable to receive mail. When investigating the problem I found out that MySQL dictionary type was not supported by postfix. You can find this out by running 'postconf -m', mysql should be in the list.

It looks like the software update replaces our postfix binary with the original one. This is not listed in the knowledge base article so I didn’t know beforehand. I can’t confirm this problem is caused by the update, I need to research this or get more confirmations about it.

The problem is likely to only affect Intel macs, I haven’t installed everything on my Intel mac yet so I hadn’t noticed the problem yet but I didn’t have any problem on my G4 mac minis.

To solve the problem you need to reinstall postfix. If you still have the source tree intact on your harddrive you can do it quickly with just running a 'sudo make install'. If it’s no longer there then you need to recompile the source again from scratch.

Your existing configuration files won’t be touched so no worries there. Sorry I had not noticed this problem earlier. I’ll install my Intel mac mini asap to better understand what’s happening here and prevent any further problems with software updates.

1
Oct
2006

This morning I had some issues again, this time not my fault. It looks like the take over of my DSL network provider is causing some problems while they migrate the infrastructure. A lot of customers had a problem getting a new ip-address via DHCP on the network. Even though I’ve got a fixed ip-address the lifetime is set less then an hour and the computer needs to refresh. I was out for about 6 hours. From 04:50 CET till 11:10 CET. Sorry if you had any problems due to the outage, this is one of the things I don’t have any control over…

The biggest issue for me was that for the first time I found out that I could not reach the help-desk of my provider (Demon). It normally was one of the best providers with a tech-savvy help-desk. But that’s history now with the takeover by our national telco KPN. There is currently a shortage on good quality ADSL broadband providers due to the consolidation that is going on in the consumer market. I still can’t afford a business DSL line, that is very expensive. It’s cheaper to co-locate a mini and get a cheap, unreliable broadband connection at home. I wonder how many mac-mini’s, external disks, routers and power-supplies I can fit in a 1U 19″ rack.