Jim Plumb

(This is a reminder for next lifetime when I have to come back and do the same thing.)

So I’ve been gradually doing a Linux server install in my office. It’s Mepis 7 and for a mail transport I decided to use Postfix as it seemed to be the least complicated to set up and maintain. I also wanted something that would work well with Mailman, the open source mailing list software. Over the past month through various fits and starts I finally appeared to get Postfix running. To make things simple, Postfix is the program that communicates with other email servers and delivers and receives the mail. Other popular choices are Sendmail and Exim. I’m a relative newby when it comes to this. I use the Synaptic package manager to download and install these software packages. I also use Webmin and a great GUI system management tool. Some of the packages I installed, I did through Webmin and not Synaptic or by using the apt-get method.

I did have a problem using Webmin to install the Postfix package as it went into some kind of infinite loop upon install. I had to clean up the install and ended up installing Postfix via apt-get. Getting Postfix to work wasn’t too hard after that. Had a problem with some permissions on one user account but that’s about it.

I installed Mailman once I felt I got all the bugs worked out with postfix (i.e. I could send and receive email!). When it failed, it came down to going through the logs, googling the error messages and then hacking the configs until it worked.

Here are some of the issues I came up against trying to get Mailman to work with postfix.

1) One thing suggested after mailman is installed is to run /var/lib/mailman/bin/check_perms to make sure all permissions are correct and fixing any by running check_perms -f. I couldn’t get the symbolic link group permissions correct with this (and don’t know if it would have made a difference had I left them), but changed them by hand by using the chgrp -h command.

2) Mailman has a built-in web-based GUI but I couldn’t get it to work. The link is usually http://www.domain.com/cgi-bin/mailman/admin/ where you can start to create your mailing lists. I was getting page not found errors until I went through some mailman tutorials and I found that I hadn’t set up mailman as an Apache2 mod. Found some easy-to-understand instructions at http://www.tectonic.co.za/wordpress/?p=537 and http://wiki.kartbuilding.net/index.php/Mailman.

3) Creating a mailman list and getting the message:
Error: Unknown virtual host: domain.com

Resolved:

add_virtualhost('www.example.com','smtp.example.com')

in mm_cfg.py

Projects:

I need to keep track of my various computer projects. I’ve recently installed a Solaris 10 server and set up a wireless network.
I need to write these up so other folks can A) get a cheap chuckle and B) hopefully learn from some of my mistakes and C) try these projects too.

Solaris 10
For anyone who doesn’t know, Solaris is the name of Sun Microsystem’s unix operating system. They have, for several years now, put out a variation of Solaris that runs on intel-based personal computers, as opposed to running on their own Sparc-based computers. The current version is Solaris 9 and can be freely downloaded here. If you’re using a PC, you want the one that says x86 platform. There is also a new beta for Solaris 10 that can also be downloaded. These downloads are fairly huge. The files you download are actually ISO files, which are CD images. Take the files and burn them to CD as CD images, which you’ll see somewhere in your burning software.

I first downloaded Solaris 10 a couple of months ago. In my office I have a Win2K server and I have a problem with the licensing. It won’t allow more than 5 connections and I find it pretty ridiculous that I would need to go out and buy more licenses to connect other computers. What I should do is just install Win2K Pro as the server and not worry about licenses. Well, I decided to see if a Solaris server would work. Many moons ago, I was a system/network administrator for a company with a strange mix of computers, all tied to Sun Sparc servers running solaris. I don’t remember the version, but I think it was 5. Solaris was a rock compared with the Windows and Mac OSes of the time (mid 90s), so I thought I might remember enough of it to get it running here.

I have a bunch of old computers computers lying around but wasn’t sure if solaris would be compatible with any of them. The first one I tried had a Soyo 5EH motherboard with an AMD 500 mhz chip, and a 3com 3c905 network card. What you do, is, after downloading the files from Sun, unzip them to become ISO files and burn the images to CD. The first CD is a bootable Solaris install CD. In any case, the CD booted up and things started to proceed, but I was getting a lot of read errors. I looked up the errors online and found two things: possibly bad CD-ROM or bad burn. I found that I was burning the CDs too fast, in other words, at a higher speed than the CDs were rated, to I burned to a higher-rated CD and tried again. Fewer read errors, but they were still there. I tried another CD-ROM. Ah ha! No read errors. The install started to move along well now, but when the OS was ready to be installed I started to get write errors. Arrrgh! Had to look up those errors. It seems that there may be problems with the ACPI settings in the computer bios. I try setting the BIOS to it’s failsafe settings, disable ACPI and other things: still getting write errors. I come to the conclusion that this system is just too old to work with solaris 10.

I tried the same thing with Solaris 9 and had the same result. I thought, that maybe, since 9 is in production and 10 is in beta that it was possibly something wrong with 10. No such luck. 9 would not install either. So I went and fetched another computer, one I was putting together for my daughter. Oh well, I guess she’d have to use the other one. This computer has an Epox motherboard and a 1.2 ghz AMD chip. And guess what? Installation went fine, not a hitch. The only problem, was that at the end of the installation of solaris 10, it wanted to install the Answerbook. Well, it just so happens that the beta version doesn’t have an answerbook. So after more online looking around I find out just that answer and tell solaris to abort the install at that point.

One thing you need to watch as you install, after disk1 it reboots the system and just starts up again and will restart the installation if you don’t switch to CD 2. I found that out after leaving the install unattended and came back to find it wanting to start the install again. I thought the install had failed. I went through the install and this time watched it go through to the end. It rebooted and started the disk 1 install again. This can’t be right. I rebooted the computer and quickly switched to CD 2 during boot up and held my breath. YES, the install continued on disk 2.

After 10 was installed, it was time to get re-acquainted with my old pal. I looked online for help in getting the system set up to run properly on my office network. Solaris on Intel - x86 is a great resource. An extensive FAQ with good links to other resources. Sun also has their own forums.

More to come…