* * * * *

                    Postfix, Dovecot and Ravencore! Oh my!

I think I've finally calmed down.

Rough day at “The Office” (even if it was from home). SMTP (Simple Mail
Transport Protocol) [1] authentication [2] problems, control panels [3] and
horrible [4] documentation [5].

Let's see … can't uninstall the control panel probably because I modified it
so that it would actually work with the Apache [6] installation, which means
I couldn't reinstall it with the updated versions of Postfix and Dovecot
since the system installed versions do not support SMTP (Simple Mail
Transport Protocol) authentication (with Postfix providing the SMTP part, and
Dovecot providing the authentication portion). Finally had to upgrade to the
latest version, uninstall that, upgrade Postfix and Dovecot, reinstall
Ravencore and still have it fail (although I figured out the immensely
bizarre method Ravencore uses to store the Postfix configuaration file, and
the cached copy of the Dovecot configuration file so at least using Ravencore
won't break SMTP authentication).

Then there was getting Dovecot to authenticate not against /etc/passwd but
another password file. Turns out you need to specify the file twice under
different options:

> auth default {
>
>   passdb passwd-file {
>       args = /etc/dovecot-passwd
>   }
>
>   userdb passwd-file {
>       args = /etc/dovecot-passwd
>   }
> }
>

Yeah, I don't understand it either.

Postfix wasn't a problem—good documentation there. The only problem with it
was Ravencore overwriting the configuration file with its own copy without
the proper SMTP authentication settings. It was just a matter of tetting the
proper settings into the bizarre format Ravencore uses to store the Postfix
configuration (each line gets its own file—sigh).

Hours! (You paying attention, Smirk? Hours!)

Update on Wednesday, July 19^th, 2006

Smirk just called to remind me that I was the one that picked Ravencore. So
there you have it.


[1] http://www.postfix.org/
[2] http://www.dovecot.org/
[3] http://www.ravencore.com/
[4] http://wiki.dovecot.org/
[5] http://www.ravencore.com/faq.php
[6] http://httpd.apache.org/

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