Setting up Tex on Mediawiki (Slackware)

Submitted by roberto puzzanghera on Mon, 04/30/2012 - 18:32

Texvc allows to insert Tex formulas into your page dinamically creating PNG images for you.

This note tries to remaind the required packages and the main steps to follow to have Tex working inside a MediaWiki and a Slackware OS. At the end I will present some troubleshooting.

This howto was tested on Slackware versions 12.0 and 13.37.

Patching qmail

Submitted by roberto puzzanghera on Wed, 04/25/2012 - 12:42

Changelog

  • 2012-04-25
    -added qmail-remote CRLF (thanks to Pierre Lauriente for the help on testing and troubleshooting)
    The qmail-remote CRLF patch solved a problem of broken headers after sieve forwarding that was caused by a bad handling of the CR (carriage return) by qmail-remote. The issue is also reported here http://www.dt.e-technik.uni-dortmund.de/~ma/qmail-bugs.html
  • 2012.04.16
    -added qmail-tap
  • 2012.02.08
    -added smtp-size patch
  • 2012.01.29
    -added doublebounce-trim patch
  • 2011.12.12
    -file update_tmprsadh modified to chown the .pem files to vpopmail to avoid hang-ups during the smtp conversation on port 587 caused by permission problems.
  • 2011.10.06
    -qmail-remote.c: fixed. It was not going into tls on authentication (thanks to Krzysztof Gajdemski)
    -force-tls now quits if the starttls command is not provided when required (thanks to Jacekalex)

I have created a combined patch which contains the latest versions of several commonly-used qmail patches. It includes:

[Follow the patch details here]

Other patches:

Testing ESMTP-SIZE patch for qmail

Submitted by roberto puzzanghera on Tue, 02/14/2012 - 23:30

The patch allows the qmail-smtpd to reject the message if it's too big according to its accepted databytes before it has been received.

qmail + vpopmail + Dovecot | Roberto's qmail notes

Submitted by roberto puzzanghera on Sun, 01/29/2012 - 19:42

Quoting D. J. Bernstein definition

qmail is a secure, reliable, efficient, simple message transfer agent. It is designed for typical Internet-connected UNIX hosts

References

You can find a comprehensible introduction on how a mail server works in this page of the Dovecot site. The qmail newbie's guide to relaying The qmail newbie’s guide to relaying by Chris Johnson is very clear. It’s very suitable reading material for someone who’s just getting started.

Disclaimer

The aim of this short guide is NOT to teach you how a mail server works, even though by the time you’re finished reading it you will hopefully have a working e-mail server. These notes just serve as a reminder of the main steps to follow in order to build a quick installation of qmail and related software. I published them because of the lack of any up-to-date documentation concerning the qmail “distributions” I was familiar with, hoping that these notes could be useful to others out there. And I created this guide partly just because I enjoy doing this kind of thing.
Therefore, to learn in depth how a mail server works, you are invited to read carefully at least the references I will mention in each page.

Secondly, I am NOT responsible for what you do with your server ;-). Use my guide at your own risk.

Finally, comments, criticisms and suggestions are always welcome! :-p

Which distro?

These notes have been written without a specific Linux distribution in mind. I tested them on my Slackware virtual mail servers, both 64 and 32 bit, and a number of guys out there can confirm that it works with other common distributions.

Is this a toaster?

According to the DJB's definition of a toaster, the answer would be yes. I personally consider a toaster something a la Bill Shupp or qmailtoaser, which comes with the packages included. Since I prefer to let you check for the latest versions of everything yourself, strictly speaking this shouldn’t properly be considered a toaster. I would simply call this site “Roberto’s qmail notes” instead. At any rate, I’ve included a paragraph about qmail toasters here just to satisfy the search engines -as most people come here actually looking for a toaster :-). Sorry about that :-).

Before we start...

As I am not  a native english speaker, I will gladly accept every hint to improve the understanding of this guide.

Roundcube webmail

Submitted by roberto puzzanghera on Sat, 01/21/2012 - 22:16

Roundcube is a full featured webmail with a nice interface.

Roundcube

Slackware guest on Linux-Vserver

Submitted by roberto puzzanghera on Sun, 01/15/2012 - 19:53

Update Thu apr 28 2011: The patch and install script was updated the day after Slackware 13.37 release :-)

Linux-Vserver is an open source software which acts as a virtual private server implementation done by adding operating system-level virtualization capabilities to the Linux kernel.

This means that all guests share the same kernel and they don't need to provide hardware support.

The purpose of this note is to setup a guest based on Slackware. What follows was tested on Slackware 13.37 and 13.1 (both 32b and 64b). I will assume that you have a Linux-Vserver box working. You can find here a quick and easy howto concerning Linux-Vserver installation and configuration (patching the kernel + utils-vserver installation).

Configuring proftpd with mod_tls (ftpes) and/or mod_sftp

Submitted by roberto puzzanghera on Thu, 12/08/2011 - 22:36

This is how I have setup mod_tls (ftpes) and mod_sftp inside proftpd. Finally I managed to make them live together in two separate daemons.

First of all, here is speed tests (ftpes seems a bit faster in upload mode):

ftpes
upload: about 22.4 K/s
download: more than 800 K/s

sftp
upload about 18.2 K/s
download: more than 800 K/s

smtp-auth + qmail-tls (starttls) + forcetls patch for qmail

Submitted by roberto puzzanghera on Thu, 10/06/2011 - 23:26

I have put into a package the latest version of the following patches for netqmail-1.06. You may be interested to the combined patch I have put together here.

qmail-smtp

Provides cram-md5, login, plain authentication support.

qmail-tls

Implements SSL or TLS encrypted and authenticated SMTP between the MTAs and from MUA to MTA.

force-tls

Optionally gets qmail to require TLS before authentication to improve security.

Expunging expired Junk and Trash emails with dovecot

Submitted by roberto puzzanghera on Sat, 08/20/2011 - 17:43

More info: http://wiki2.dovecot.org/Plugins/Expire

Of course we want to delete old Junk and Trash emails to save hard disk space. To do that, with dovecot 2.0, you don't have to enable the expire-plugin, unless you have to manage a very big server, in which case you may consider to enable it in conjunction with the dictionary service, to store the timestamps in a database.

This command

doveadm expunge -A mailbox Junk savedbefore 60d

will do a connection to the userdb, vpopmail in our case, and iterate in all (-A option) user's mailbox looking for expired emails, moved to the Junk folder more than 60 days ago. Be aware that the messages saved to Inbox 60 days ago and moved to Junk today will not be deleted.

Unfortunately, the vpopmail's APIs seem not to provide an iteration feature. The good news is that Costel Balta has a brilliant solution. You can download his script here.

qmail-inject sieve vacation/reject messages trouble

Submitted by roberto puzzanghera on Sat, 07/30/2011 - 10:00

Last week me and a couple of friends/visitors of this pages dealed with a bug (?) which engaged us for many hours, until Stéphane Cottin sent me this patch after 3 minutes from my request!

Syndicate content