Ottawa Valley SAGE

Archive for the ‘ovSAGE’ Category

I have uploaded the config files I talked about during the meeting. These files make reference to some extra items such as greylisting and spamassassin, as well as the use of self-signed SSL certificates. You will notice a new menu item on the site under About called ovSAGE Downloads. Go there for the tarball which contains the default and production files as well as diff files for each pair.

The main documents for all of this are located on the CentOS website. The following items describe the docs and their locations:

• If you are starting over, the basic postfix install document is located here: Postfix HOWTO
• In order to do the greylisting under postfix, have a look at the Greylisting HOWTO
• To get spamassassin running, you need the spamassassin rpm installed. There is a HOWTO on using it along with anti-virus software at PostfixMail.com. I believe I just installed the package, enabled it and ran the update rules script to get it working. This site is a little more ambitious.
• One final item is creating and managing self-signed SSL certificates. I normally do this from the command line, but I had heard of a project for keeping track and managing them. It’s called tinyCA and you can find it at sm-zone.net. It uses  X-windows, so you will need to run it on one of your unix boxes. I can go over the usage next meeting after the presentation, but it is pretty straight forward and playing with it should work out OK. Don’t worry if you mess up at first, just revoke and delete any bad certificates. Unless you are a security paranoid and like generating certificates, make your certs longer than one year.

I think that covers everything. I am using all of the stuff we discussed to redo the ovsage mail server and provide authenticated SMTP from outside as well as secure IMAP access for my smartphone and laptop.

A future session will cover setting up squirrelmail as an SSL protected web front-end to your mailserver. As I have not installed this yet, I’ll probably do it live so you can all see it being done.

I’ve been delaying doing an upgrade to the latest-greatest until I had a few free hours. I made all the necessary backups, made a database backup and clicked on the upgrade button (This is a major revision upgrade). less than 2 minutes later, the whole upgrade is complete, the database has been upgraded and it looks like all the plugins are happy as well.

Another ringing endorsement for WordPress.

It looks like my remaining hard drive on the old web server is finally giving up the ghost. I will be migrating everything over to the new server this weekend, so there may be additional outages when I decide to make the cut-over, but this should be a flash cut via a firewall rule change.

I was a bit surprised when I checked the site earlier and nothing happened, attempts to log onto the server were also met with no response. A quick check on the hardware and I saw the message: Disk0: Fail, Disk1: Fail on the RAID enclosure. It’s really too bad the box doesn’t support drives larger than 80GB, but it was made many years ago. It’s also too bad I couldn’t find an additional 20GB disk in my collection with sufficiently close drive parameters to fix the mirror. Oh well, I’ve been putting it off for months now, so this is the best time to do it.

It seems to have propagated rather quickly. I suspect some web-caching devices may take longer, but the three different external sites I have tried all show it as up and visible. That’s rather encouraging really.

For those looking for a web host, I have managed to find a couple of Canadian ones that have reasonable rates. I’ll post some info later, as I’d like to pull a couple of sites I have in the US back to Canada. One looks really good, but doesn’t offer secure connectivity. That I can’t really deal with. Another offers SFTP, so that’s a step in the right direction. Ideally ssh is my connectivity of choice, as it makes editing go so much faster.

As a result of this exercise, I’ll probably post a list of providers and their features that I care about. I don’t know if everyone else is as paranoid as I am, so we will see how it goes.

I’m, changing ISPs and as a result, the site may end up down while I get everything fixed up. Hopefully the changes will occur overnight and it will be quick and dirty, but I am not sure how long it will take for the changes to propagate. The short answer is that I’m expecting it all to be transparent, but you never know.

Before anyone points it out to me: Yes, I am aware the font size is a little small in the forums. I’ll fix it up sometime on Saturday when I feel up with wrestling with CSS and fixing the lines where the designer decided that 85% of any font size is appropriate. I ran across this before, but I have to go searching several sets of CSS files before I find the right one.

Very slowly.

I finally got around to importing the userids from the old system tonight (last night?), but the old passwords will not work, as the storage methods are different. It would be interesting if I had spent time trying to crack them and then install them, but it’s not worth the effort.

You can get a password if you had a prior ID by clicking on the forgot password link. The system will send you an email with a link and you have to click the link, at which time it will send you a password.

I may even get some of the old content installed this weekend. Who knows. Miracles do happen, so they say.

Something I had noticed a couple of posts ago was bothering me today and I decided to search out the problem and see if there was a fix for it.

The problem being the tags for a post were no longer working. I had used them for the first post, but when I decided to use them a couple of posts ago, no luck. I ignored it as something to look at later and when I posted my HDD woes, the tags were still broken. I tried again today and still broken…

However, there was a firebug warning for the page. It was complaining about a JavaScript error. Some problem that I hadn’t seen before. Anyway, rather than wade in, I decided to see if anyone else had the problem and there was a post and a solution. It appears that the event plugin includes a deprecated JavaScript module and if you comment it out, things appear to go back to normal. While this isn’t the official patch – probably because there isn’t one, it seems to work. The URL for the article is: http://wordpress.org/support/topic/326448

Well, registration for the site doesn’t automatically give you the ability to create articles, just to comment. As I didn’t have to register, I didn’t notice. I have upgraded access for the current members and if it doesn’t work, leave a comment for me.

As I have been promising, I have finally pushed the new site live.

Unfortunately, I haven’t had the time to migrate data and users from the old site, so I will be bringing over the users from the old site. If you are impatient, register again and I’ll avoid duplicating you. Due to a difference in the password encoding mechanisms used, you will have to use the lost password feature to get a new one.

The content will migrate over the next week or two, as I get the time. The ultimate goal is to get all the prior content, all the way back to the original content from the first mailing list.

Features will be added as I get a chance and as far as I can tell, this is a much more manageable system for handling upgrades. I have gone with a grittier look for the front page, and some of you might even recognize the background image.

This will be a more open system then the previous one and the content will be readable by anyone who wishes to. Comments and posts will still require registration and the first ones will require approval. That should handle most issues. I will be adding the Creative Commons logos as well.