Pauldy's House of Geek

It’s been a touch and go couple of weeks with migrating to the new environment. Making sure I didn’t miss e-mails was tough, having to manually deliver e-mails using postsuper -r ALL periodically throughout the day was kind of a pain but that should all be behind me now. The win2k3 VM is running strong in the background and has been up for 1 week solid. It is running Community Server in one virtual host from the fine folks at Telligent. There are various other services running so I’m pretty confident in the setup and if the box gets owned I have my backup ready to restart the VM in a moments notice.

I learned quite a bit in this little test. The most important thing you can never be to prepared. When I started I thought I had everything laid out and I had accounted for all the potential problems. What I ended up with are problems I had never encountered before and could not have predicted. Should there ever be a next time I will simply budget in the time to deal with the unexpected instead of trying to plan for it. It really did nothing more than given me a false sense of security.

I also learned that when moving from one distro to another for many of the configurations. Generally your better off reconfiguring everything from scratch vs. trying to port old configuration to the new system. the only config files that made the migration consisted of key value pairs that feed various features in postfix like the aliases db. Attempting to cut that corner ended up costing me a lot more time and frustration.

Spam assassin under Ubuntu is pretty easy if you know to do the following to the config file.

After the smtp line at the beginning of the file add the following on a new line.

-o content_filter=spamassassin

Then at the very bottom of the file define the filter with the following

spamassassin unix – n n – – pipe
user=filter argv=/usr/bin/spamc -f -e
/usr/sbin/sendmail -oi -f ${sender} ${recipient}

This will get spamassassin processing as expected then you can work with the config files in spamassassin. I’m not sure why it doesn’t do this by default but it didn’t so thats the fix.

Another issue I had with postfix was

warning: connect to transport filter: Connection refused

This is what prevented me from being able to connect. Getting postfix up and running is difficult unless your very methodical with your config. The easiest way to trouble shoot something like this, as I noticed many others with similar issues while trying to figure it out for myself, is to disable configuration options one at a time. Consistently disabling half the remaining config options might be faster but one at a time will help you narrow it and be more certain about it.

My solution ended up being a missing file in the postfix directory for mynetworks. This is what was causing me to have to manually deliver each message only took 7 hours of dedicated reconfiguration to discover this little tidbit.

All in all I’m glad to be done with this I’m excited to play with some of the new technologies this setup will allow me to play with instead of the lost time configuring the day to day stuff it needs to handle.

Oh and if your looking for virtualization solutions VirtualBox seem rock solid, and VM Ware is great. Parallels kind of did a bad thing to their customers this month and while they make a good product its not worth the potential to get burned by a company that has shown they don’t really care about their customers, just their customers money.