Symbol Heavy
Warning: Loads of fuh ahead. If you want to ignore it and just skip to the good part, then go check out the good part.
Yesterday was good times. I started the fun by grabbing the source packages for the Cyrus email server from the ‘experimental’ debian repository and building them (with native debian tools to make native debian packages) for the server. I couldn’t use the existing packages because they were all built for the ‘unstable’ system and i am using the ’stable’ system.
Now the Cyrus server itself isn’t actually unstable or even experimental. Version 2.2.x has been the recommended current software by the developers for quite a long while, while the 2.1.x versions are just in security update mode. Still, the architecture changed enough between the 2.1 branch and the 2.2 branch that getting 2.2 into debian stable just wasn’t going to happen. Anyways, 2.1 worked fantastically well for everything I needed up until yesterday.
What changed yesterday was that my friend Boyd asked if I could host the web site he’s been working on for a long time now. The group of people he is working with wanted to get the site launched and they were having trouble getting any sort of response from the person who was originally going to host for them, so he approached me about possibly doing it.
Now hosting a web site was and is cake with the system setup I had. It only took a couple minute to get everything set up and ready to go. The hitch was email. The group was hoping to get email accounts for a dozen or so people. My options were to just forward those to other addresses like Google Mail or Yahoo! accounts, give everyone unix accounts (which they wouldn’t even use), or get a virtual mail hosting setup going. Cyrus 2.1 doesn’t understand virtual mailboxes (i.e. logging in as someone@host.com rather than just the unix account someone). Cyrus 2.2 does, and does it very very well (a side effect of it’s already highly structured storage backend).
So I built and installed Cyrus 2.2, almost had a heart attack when it looked like all my mail was gone, figured out what was wrong, and then got symbolheavy.com email set up and running. It worked great but no one could log in. You see, I was checking access against PAM (pluggable authentication modules; google it if you even care) and PAM was only looking in the unix accounts and the symbolheavy.com addresses did not have unix accounts.
After a lot of mucking about I finally got it to where PAM checks for a unix account when people try to get or send email. If that works, hey great! If it doesn’t work it goes on to check a mysql table that has all the email users with out unix accounts in it. If that works, everything is kosher.
I plan to write up a howto on exactly how to set up the hybrid system I have going in the near future. It’ll go along with my old ‘how to do email with postfix and cyrus on debian’ howto.
If I was setting up a new box I would probably go with all email login information being held in a database of some kind and just skip unix accounts for mail entirely, but part of the goal for this project was to not disrupt any of the current users (including myself).
OK, this was a long boring and rambling post. Let me finish it up with the fun. Symbol Heavy has a bunch of art, zines, and music from mostly local (KC) people. It’s pretty cool and you should all check it out.
steve :: Feb.23.2006 :: Uncategorized :: 10 Comments »