Page 3 - My FreeBSD weblog

i was able to successfully bring up another server on the internet, one of the BIGGEST victories this weekend was able to export the display to my laptop. For those wondering why that is such a big deal, my FreeBSD servers are on the internet with real IP's. my laptop sits behind a windows 2000 server running Internet connection sharing. ICS is a glorified NAT server, the win2k server has 2 NIC's, one internal address with a DHCP server to handle 1 network, the other NIC has an internet address. ICS allows services to be forwarded to internal machines. <br><br>This allows for internal non-routed machines sitting behind this ICS server to host www, mail, ftp or whatever services. this isn't a real scalable solution but works sweet for home usage like i'm doing. anyway 2 things i did on the ICS server, i installed cygwin (http://www.cygwin.com) along with setting up 2 ports on the shared NIC on the ICS server (ports 6000, 6001) forwarded to an internal IP address that points to my laptop. Until i become more experienced in setting up FreeBSD, truthfully i'd like to have a BSD router/firewall/DHCP server to replace the windows ICS machine. This will come in time as i continue to tinker around and become better at doing FreeBSD admin. <br><br>steps to export your display.<br><br>Now what i do is my laptop has an 192.168.0.x address, <br>i fireup my X-Server on my WinXP laptop, <br>launch GNU Putty SSH to the BSD server on the internet<br>authentication and su to root.<br>type export DISPLAY=X.X.X.X:0.0 // THE X.X.X.X is the external IP address on the ICS NAT server<br>startkde & //this exports the KDE 3.0 desktop from the server to my laptop.<br><br>i don't even bother starting X-Windows on the console of the server. I just export the display.<p> </p><p><hr size="1" width="50%" align="left" />*----------------------------------------*<br>* Steve Schofield<br>* steve@aspfree.com<br>*<br>* Microsoft MVP - ASP.NET<br>* http://www.aspfree.com<br>* <br>*----------------------------------------*</p>

the new challenge for the upcoming weeks is to get qmail to not only do smtp but do pop3, imap. another thing that i'm such a newbie is permissions. KDE provides a really nice way to configure perm's for you one file at a time. i know chmod 777 filename.txt will open up everything. one of the quirky things about installing and uninstalling qmail port has not put the correct permissions on the start up shell scripts. after putting execute permissions on the qmail.sh file and rebooting the qmail agents started up just fine. I want to use an external or web-based method to get mail. i'm able to use outlook to send mail through a qmail server using SMTP but retrieving mail i get a -ERR this user has no $HOME/Maildir error when trying to use POP3. if it ain't one thing its another but this is what continues to fuel my thirst to learn more of BSD stuff and open source in general. I hope who ever is reading these notes consider this is just to help express my strong feelings to just do it and have more options when trying to solve problems in my everyday IT career. <br><br>Goals to come are get IPFILTER logging going, Qmail pop3, find a web based admin tool for a mail server (my efforts to get courier failed!), i hate failure and for nothing else i just want to figure it out. and become more efficient at changing permissions. Till next time keep geekin! <br><br>steve schofield<p> </p><p><hr size="1" width="50%" align="left" />*----------------------------------------*<br>* Steve Schofield<br>* steve@aspfree.com<br>*<br>* Microsoft MVP - ASP.NET<br>* http://www.aspfree.com<br>* <br>*----------------------------------------*</p>

over the weekend i brought up a second server using 5.0 FreeBSD. One of the things I realized is the system wouldn't boot up and would stick at a boot: prompt. I was unable to get the system too boot up to a login prompt. Once I changed the mail hard drive type from user type to LBA, the system was able to boot into the OS without having to reinstall. The reason I i know is because i reinstalled BSD a second time and still wouldn't boot. Once I change the drive type to LBA it worked. Another strange option after install the /usr/ports/mail/qmail port. sendmail was still booting up. I had to rename /usr/libexec/sendmail to /usr/libexec/sendmail.bak so the sendmail options wouldn't boot up even after marking in the /etc/rc.conf enable_sendmail="NO". after installing qmail. i had to do a chmod 755 on the /var/qmail/rc for the qmail.sh startup script in the /usr/local/etc/rc.d/ directory to work. The process wouldn't show up in webmin started and wouldn't start only after following the above process was i able to get qmail to work.<p> </p><p><hr size="1" width="50%" align="left" />*----------------------------------------*<br>* Steve Schofield<br>* steve@aspfree.com<br>*<br>* Microsoft MVP - ASP.NET<br>* http://www.aspfree.com<br>* <br>*----------------------------------------*</p>

HA! I was able to figure out how to make the webadmin tool to use SSL. This is http://www.webmin.com/ssl.html document.<br><br> If installing from the source, you will need to compile and install it with the commands :<br> tar xvzf openssl-0.x.y.tar.gz<br> cd openssl-0.x.y<br> ./Configure (or ./config in new OpenSSL versions)<br> make<br> make install<br><br><br>Download the Net::SSLeay Perl module<br> Net::SSLeay is a module that allows Perl scripts to call the functions in the OpenSSL library. It is available in .tar.gz format from the Webmin site or from the CPAN Perl module archive. <br>Alternately, you can use the Perl Modules module in Webmin to download an install Net::SSLeay from CPAN. If this works OK, the next step can be skipped. <br><br>Install the Net::SSLeay module<br> To install the module, use the commands :<br> tar xvzf Net_SSLeay.pm-x.yy.tar.gz<br> cd Net_SSLeay.pm-x.yy<br> perl Makefile.PL<br> make install<br> If you have installed OpenSSL from the RPM, you may need to run perl Makefile.PL /usr in order to find the OpenSSL library properly.<br><br> <br><br>Test the SSL install<br> If the command perl -e 'use Net::SSLeay' doesn't output any error message, then the SSL support that Webmin needs is properly installed.<p> </p><p><hr size="1" width="50%" align="left" />*----------------------------------------*<br>* Steve Schofield<br>* steve@aspfree.com<br>*<br>* Microsoft MVP - ASP.NET<br>* http://www.aspfree.com<br>* <br>*----------------------------------------*</p>

http://forums.bbresource.com/index.php?s=2d4e8482e66aba3fbaf62dca84cd71b4&act=SF&f=5<br><br>link to a bunch of free discussion boards<p> </p><p><hr size="1" width="50%" align="left" />*----------------------------------------*<br>* Steve Schofield<br>* steve@aspfree.com<br>*<br>* Microsoft MVP - ASP.NET<br>* http://www.aspfree.com<br>* <br>*----------------------------------------*</p>

http://www.de.freebsd.org/de/gif/bsd/userfriendly.html <br>cute jokes comparing linux and BSD<p> </p><p><hr size="1" width="50%" align="left" />*----------------------------------------*<br>* Steve Schofield<br>* steve@aspfree.com<br>*<br>* Microsoft MVP - ASP.NET<br>* http://www.aspfree.com<br>* <br>*----------------------------------------*</p>

You could also find the daily strip for User Friendly at <a href="http://www.userfriendly.org/static" target="_blank">www.userfriendly.org/static</a>. Definitely worth the daily dose of humor.<p> </p><p><hr size="1" width="50%" align="left" />dotNetBB Forum Developer<br><b><i>Building A Better Community, One Post At A Time</i></b><br><a href="http://www.dotnetbb.com" target="_blank">www.dotnetbb.com</a></p>

Welcome again to the "Blog" for me sharing my FreeBSD experiences and frustrations. Hi-light since the last post was i got Qmail POP3 agent working, I can now send and receive mail using Eudora, Outlook Express. There were a few configuration settings in order to get this to work. Qmail POP3 agent requires a few modules before the mail is actually processed. I installed a few tools Checkpassword, <br>http://cr.yp.to/checkpwd.html, daemontools (/usr/ports/sysutils/daemontools) in the ports. The big things were the inetd.conf directive and the second ./maildir/ in the qmail.sh file. <br><br>'I put this into the inetd.conf <br>pop3 stream tcp nowait root /var/qmail/bin/qmail-popup qmail-popup mx.bgeek.com checkpassword /var/qmail/bin/qmail-pop3d Maildir 2>&1<br><br>'This is Qmail.sh script<br>'The other thing was the second second / for maildir. <br>'Maildir process each mail individually and places in users directory vs putting into mailbox which is one file.<br><br>#!/bin/sh<br><br># Using splogger to send the log through syslog.<br># Using qmail-local to deliver messages to ~/Mailbox by default.<br><br>exec env - PATH="/var/qmail/bin:$PATH" <br>qmail-start ./Maildir/ splogger qmail&<p> </p><p><hr size="1" width="50%" align="left" />*----------------------------------------*<br>* Steve Schofield<br>* steve@aspfree.com<br>*<br>* Microsoft MVP - ASP.NET<br>* http://www.aspfree.com<br>* <br>*----------------------------------------*</p>

the second to last thing i want to do on my BSD journey is to get IMAP working along with my SMTP, POP3 BSD mail server. I've been on and off for a week or trying to get Courier-IMAP working. I again turned to install it from the ports. Configuring and getting the IMAP working has been another challenge. Bottom line, I can get courier-imap to listen on port 143, this is the port IMAP listens however when trying to use Outlook Express configured as an IMAP account. It hangs on authorizing the request. The error in the /etc/var/maillog shows Login Failed. However when i do a network trace, the id/pwd are transmitted. It just hangs on authorizing. I'm not sure how to tell for 100% sure what i'd tell the primary authentication scheme but reading the docs on the website is setup to the tee. Everything in the groups.google.com with the same error has brought no luck to help solving the issue. <br><br>I've also tried various things in the /usr/local/etc/courier-imap/authdaemonrc, this has had various degrees to cause different errors when authenticating. The one opinion i have is when using the ports collection to install stuff, it doesn't necessarily follow the configuration docs as outlined in the docs. The almost certain answer i'd get from a BSD geek is hire a consultant to help you configure this then. this BSD world isn't for the weak at heart, its been vary frustrating because the last but not least will be to configure Horde or courier Web mail to have a complete free solution for a mail server but before i get this going, IMAP should be configured and working. According to the docs, using IMAP is more efficient than using mbox method to access the mail. The version of courier-imap i'm using is 1.5 something. Oh well, this weblog is my method of sharing the pains of learning something that has no support but for the docs from the creator of the product and an open source community. Lord only knows why this is in my blood but i crave to figure this out. I will get it sooner or later. <br><br>'The IP changed to protect the innocent<br>Feb 15 00:14:04 mx imapd: Connection, ip=[::ffff:127.0.0.1]<br>Feb 15 00:14:09 mx imapd: LOGIN FAILED, ip=[::ffff:127.0.0.1]<br>Feb 15 00:14:14 mx imapd: DISCONNECTED, ip=[::ffff:127.0.0.1], headers=0, body=0<br>Feb 15 00:50:34 mx imapd: Connection, ip=[::ffff:127.0.0.1]<br>Feb 15 00:50:39 mx imapd: LOGIN FAILED, ip=[::ffff:127.0.0.1]<br>Feb 15 00:57:37 mx imapd: Connection, ip=[::ffff:127.0.0.1]<br>Feb 15 00:57:42 mx imapd: LOGIN FAILED, ip=[::ffff:127.0.0.1]<p> </p><p><hr size="1" width="50%" align="left" />*----------------------------------------*<br>* Steve Schofield<br>* steve@aspfree.com<br>*<br>* Microsoft MVP - ASP.NET<br>* http://www.aspfree.com<br>* <br>*----------------------------------------*</p>

after 2 weeks i can do SMTP, POP3, and IMAP the kicker was 2 things, going into the /usr/ports/mail/courier-imap/Makefile and not compiling without IPV6 support and adding imap auth required pam_unix.so try_first_pass to the /etc/pam.d/imap conf file<br><br><br><br># $Id: imapd.authpam,v 1.2 2001/02/02 05:42:57 mrsam Exp $<br>#<br># Copyright 1998-2001 Double Precision, Inc. See COPYING for<br># distribution information.<br>#<br># To use the authpam authentication module with imapd, you must<br># configure your PAM library to authenticate the "imap" service.<br># See your system documentation for information on how to configure your<br># PAM services. In most cases, all you need to do is to install this file<br># as /etc/pam.d/imapd, but check your system documentation to make sure.<br><br>imap auth required pam_unix.so try_first_pass<br>imap account required /lib/security/pam_pwdb.so<br>imap session required /lib/security/pam_pwdb.so<p> </p><p><hr size="1" width="50%" align="left" />*----------------------------------------*<br>* Steve Schofield<br>* steve@aspfree.com<br>*<br>* Microsoft MVP - ASP.NET<br>* http://www.aspfree.com<br>* <br>*----------------------------------------*</p>

create a shortcut or symbolic link in BSD terms<br>then symlink /usr/share/squirrelmail as a subdirectory under<br>your regular HTML area:<br><br><br>ln -s /usr/share/squirrelmail /var/www/html/webmail<p> </p><p><hr size="1" width="50%" align="left" />*----------------------------------------*<br>* Steve Schofield<br>* steve@aspfree.com<br>*<br>* Microsoft MVP - ASP.NET<br>* http://www.aspfree.com<br>* <br>*----------------------------------------*</p>

http://poprelay.sourceforge.net/poprelay.html to relay authenticate.<p> </p><p><hr size="1" width="50%" align="left" />*----------------------------------------*<br>* Steve Schofield<br>* steve@aspfree.com<br>*<br>* Microsoft MVP - ASP.NET<br>* http://www.aspfree.com<br>* <br>*----------------------------------------*</p>

http://matt.simerson.net/computing/mail/toaster/ <br><br>popb4smtp<p> </p><p><hr size="1" width="50%" align="left" />*----------------------------------------*<br>* Steve Schofield<br>* steve@aspfree.com<br>*<br>* Microsoft MVP - ASP.NET<br>* http://www.aspfree.com<br>* <br>*----------------------------------------*</p>

what i did to get qmailadmin and vpopmail working together<br>1 - install /usr/ports/mail/qmailadmin port<br>2 - move the /usr/local/www/data-dist.default. to /usr/local/www/data-dist<br>3 - move the /usr/local/www/data-dist.default/images/qmailadmin to /usr/local/www/data-dist/images/qmailadmin<br>4 - install vpopmail from /usr/ports/mail/vpopmail<br>5 - in order to get ~vpopmail/bin/vadddomain mxbackup.bgeek.com<br>to work, i had to open /var/qmail/users/assign file and put a dot "."<br>at the very end of the file before running the command to add<br>the domain.<br>6 - i was unable to login to http://yourdomain.com/cgi-bin/qmailadmin/qmailadmin<br>after adding the domain. the permissions on<br>-r-xr-xr-x 1 root wheel 107948 Feb 22 11:36 qmailadmin<br>it needs to be using chmod u+s qmailadmin<br>-r-sr-xr-x 1 root wheel 107948 Feb 22 11:36 qmailadmin<br><br>i still can't login from squirrelmail or sqwebmail but i'm working on that!<br><br><br>what i did to get courier-imap work<br>open /usr/ports/mail/courier-imap/Makefile<br>add --without-IPV6<br>if the port is compiled with IPV6, you'll get an error or it hangs<br>on authorizing IMAP requests.<p> </p><p><hr size="1" width="50%" align="left" />*----------------------------------------*<br>* Steve Schofield<br>* steve@aspfree.com<br>*<br>* Microsoft MVP - ASP.NET<br>* http://www.aspfree.com<br>* <br>*----------------------------------------*</p>

Good work with the Freebsd server - It seems you've come a long way.<br>I've just started learning freebsd as well - its a tedious process - <br>right now I'm trying to figure out how to get sendmail going without <br>creating a black hole <br><br>-good luck.<br>mike2