Installing Dovecot and sieve on a vpopmail + qmail server

Submitted by roberto puzzanghera on Mon, 05/20/2013 - 16:19

The dovecot-2.2 has been released and the vpopmail driver is still broken. As Mike has already commented below, it is not worth sticking with the vpopmail authentication backend, when we can easily configure the sql driver via mysql. In addition, the sql driver also provides the iteration feature, which is not implemented by vpopmail, which is needed when purging the Track and the Junk mailboxes.

The sql driver (as far as my configuration is concerned) requires that the password is transmitted as plain text. This is not a problem because we are going to enable only SSL/TLS remote connections. Anyway we have to adjust roundcube so that it will not pass the password as CRAM-MD5.

Overview

Dovecot is an open source IMAP and POP3 email server for Linux/UNIX-like systems, written with security primarily in mind. Dovecot is an excellent choice for both small and large installations. It's fast, simple to set up, requires no special administration and it uses very little memory.

And I can say that this is really true, it's simple to configure, the project is alive and the documentation is exhaustive. In addition there is the support for vpopmail (while Courier IMAP no more).

Roundcube webmail

Submitted by roberto puzzanghera on Sat, 05/18/2013 - 17:15

Roundcube is a full featured webmail with a nice interface.

RoundCube 0.8 showing its new skin

Running two php/mysql/mariadb versions on the same apache web server

Submitted by roberto puzzanghera on Sat, 04/13/2013 - 23:02

In a web server  very old applications must coexist with new ones. Usually old applications are no more mantained and still use old versions of php and mysql, while recent apps claim to use the latest features of your apache, php and database servers. In addition you may want to switch from MySQL to mariaDB, which is going to quickly supersede its progenitor program.

That said, how to build a web server which mounts on the same apache a variety of php/mysql/mariadb configurations? Let's suppose to have an apache 2.4.x already installed and two database server, let's say mysql-5.5 and mariadb-5.5, listening on two different IPs. We would like to have two separate php versions available, let's say 5.3.x and 5.4.x, living together and connecting to mysql and mariadb respectively. Of course this procedure can be modified as you like for any number of configurations you like.

I will show how to achieve this configuring php in the usual mod_php manner and and by means of mod_cgid, an apache module which starts php requests as a CGI program, delivering very similar performance as mod_php. I will show how to select the proper php.ini file as well.

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 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 qmailtoaster, 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.

Building your own mozilla-sync server

Submitted by roberto puzzanghera on Tue, 12/25/2012 - 16:56

More info: 

File synchronization (or syncing) in computing is the process of ensuring that computer files in two or more locations are updated via certain rules.

In one-way file synchronization, also called mirroring, updated files are copied from a 'source' location to one or more 'target' locations, but no files are copied back to the source location. In two-way file synchronization, updated files are copied in both directions, usually with the purpose of keeping the two locations identical to each other. (from wikipedia)

This note serves to remaind the steps to build a sync server of your own so that you can safely save your passwords and bookmarks, share them between all your mozilla devices, and sleep peacefully.

Syndicate content