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Installing Netatalk from the repositories means that when you connect using a Mac client you will be warned that you are going to send your password in the clear. Obviously this isn’t great for security, and being prompted every time you want to connect is annoying. This occurs because Netatalk in the Ubuntu repositories is compiled without SSL support (SSL is what handles the encryption).

The key to getting this to work is to get the Netatalk source code and compile it yourself. Don’t worry, it’s been done hundreds of times before and if you follow this tutorial closely you should be fine.

The commands written always start with a dollar sign ($), you should not type this, it just indicates the commands should be typed at a standard user prompt in the terminal.

First off it’s a good idea to switch to your home directory:
$ cd ~

Make a new directory to hold the hundreds of small Netatalk files:
$ mkdir netatalk

Ensure you have essential development libraries and tools installed:
$ sudo aptitude install libdb4.2-dev libslp-dev autotools-dev devscripts cracklib2-dev dpkg-dev libssl-dev

Change in to the newly created directory:
$ cd netatalk

Install the netatalk source code:
$ sudo apt-get source netatalk

Install all required dependencies for netatalk:
$ sudo apt-get build-dep netatalk

A new directory called netatalk-2.0.3 should have been created, change in to that directory:
$ cd netatalk-2.0.3

Compile Netatalk with the SSL option:
$ DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS=ssl sudo dpkg-buildpackage -us -uc

Install the finished product!:
$ sudo debi

Initially I had set a mail account with a quota of 200000, or roughly 200MB. The user complained of a full mailbox, despite using Plesk to up the limit to 2GB, and then unlimited the account continued to bounce emails saying:
"Recipient's mailbox is full"

I found people complaining of a bug in version 7.5 of Plesk, but it seems this is also present in 8.3. The problem, I discovered after nosing around the config files of the server, was that any changes I made in Plesk weren’t saved. Ultimately I found the limit in the config file remained at 200MB, despite numerous changes. The quota config file is located at:
/var/qmail/mailnames/example.com/username/@mbox.quota

Manually edit that file so it has the quota you want. I like to use vim:
vim /var/qmail/mailnames/example.com/username/\@mbox.quota
(run this as root)

After editing, save the changes, and you won’t need to restart any services or the server. Changes should take effect.

Note, that this was performed on a CentOS 5 installation, so paths and instructions may vary slightly on other systems.

I recently found that sending emails via my server was painfully slow. After further invesitigation in to this issue I discovered that the server was performing reverse-DNS checks on client IPs. These were slow because they often didn’t work and had to wait for a timeout. The solution is to turn of reverse-DNS checking on the server by editing a config file as follows…

The modification must be made to the /etc/inetd.conf file:

smtp stream tcp nowait root /path/to/qmail/bin/tcp-env tcp-env -Rt0 ...

smtps stream tcp nowait root /path/to/qmail/bin/tcp-env tcp-env -Rt0 ...

It is necessary to restart inetd in order for the changes to take effect:

# kill -HUP `cat /var/run/inetd.pid`

Note, /etc/inetd.conf may be overwritten and the options you added will be removed if you make certain changes through Plesk CP, for example add MAPS server.

Recently, I had to setup a production environment for Rails applications at work. I encountered many difficulties, including problems with permissions on client/server computers, and not least because the documentation I had was out of date (Agile web dev and The Rails Way). Online tutorials were helpful but incomplete. I have compiled all that I discovered here. (more…)

It wasn’t exactly trivial installing and configuring Apache 2 on FreeBSD. Much of the configuration had to be done manually, which depending on your point-of-view is good or bad. This describes how I went about getting Apache 2 with SSL support up and running on FreeBSD 6. I did this on 6.2 but it should equally apply to  6.x. (more…)

If you are a beginner with DNS then you might find this quick article useful. Recently I have had to play with various DNS records to get mail servers and web servers working. (more…)

MySQL is a very popular relational database. It can be used by many different applications and thankfully the installation procedure is a snap. For this tutorial we will be compiling MySQL 5.0.45 from ports with some custom options. I did this on FreeBSD 6.2 release but it should work on FreeBSD 6.3 and 6.x. (more…)

Firstly let me just say that I had quite a few problem with Lighttp (aka Lighty), and some of them related to PHP. However, I now have Lighty, PHP, and MySQL playing nicely and… it’s fast! This was tested with: Lighty 1.4.18 and PHP 5.2.3_1 on FreeBSD 6.2. (more…)

I have recently had a hard time getting FreeBSD to ‘play ball’ by sharing it’s resources via AFP. I have compiled this guide to help others through the traumatic experience. I was using FreeBSD 6.2 release and Netatalk 2.0.3 from ports. Though I have heard it works on 6.1 and 6.3. (more…)