ISP Issue

I heard this week that Insight Cable here in the Lafayette area may be offering local telephone service within the next year. They will most likely offer a package deal for the customer that gets digital cable, broadband, and voice service. Another advantage that I would have is that our cable TV line is buried underground, while the phone wires are up on poles. We lose service several times each year when a wind storm knocks branches down.

My dad uses a similar service from Cox Cable in Arizona, and he is happy with it. His phone number followed him from the RBOC. He has a converter box outside the house that converts the cable signal to an analog signal that hooks to the existing phone wire in the house. Pretty easy.

I have one issue (and I always have an issue) with using cable broadband instead of the ADSL line procured through work. I have no restrictions on how I can use my connection, including setting up web connected services. Long time readers will remember that I have setup an IMAP service that I can access over the 'Net, and that I have a PHP program that provides webmail running on a University server. I've been told that most commercial broadband providers, including Insight, filter incoming traffic to block web servers and other servers. I guess that I could try using an outside server for email (such as my domain provider), but we like having the email server in the room. Luckily I have time to think about this

Mail All Setup

I setup the email configuration for my wife and kids. Each has a mailbox with the new domain and a gmail account. My wife and I also have addresses with HotPOP and Softhome - a couple of free POP3 sites.

Here are the steps:

Set the passwords

All of the passwords were different for each account, and we are having a tough time remembering them all. I changed all for each person to the same password. Probably not the best security plan, but I really doubt that if someone breaks into my little daughter's gmail account, they will be interested enough to try her other account.

Make entries in /root/.fetchmailrc

Just like I did for my accounts (I have 9 setup. Talk about overkill!)

Stop and start fetchmail

fetchmail -q
fetchmail -d 900

Setup Thunderbird on each computer

My wife has been using Outlook Express, so she will have a slight adjustment period.

Setup the IMAP account in T-Bird

We are all using the SMTP server at work. The new domain also has one available. I also added extra identities to allow them to use any address as the FROM: address

Not too tough!

Browse Master Problem Solved

I solved my recent Samba problem after referring to this site. Even though I can't read what I think might be Russian, I saw that one of the poster's suggestions was to add this line to the [global] section:

domain master = yes

The error is gone!

Today's Fetchmail is Different Than Yesterday's

Just when I think I have the fetchmail configuration figured out, I hit another bump in the road.

We had a 2 day power outage this week, and I was checking the syslog after the server came up, and found a fetchmail error complaining about the permissions on /etc/fetchmailrc. It wanted it to be 0710. I fixed it, and restarted fetchmail. Next, the error was "no mailservers specified". I messed around with different things for a bit, and finally found that if I included the daemon setting (set daemon=900) in /root/.fetchmailrc and got rid of /etc/fetchmailrc that things would work.

I'm tempted to reboot the service just to be sure that it works as I think it will.

Browse Master - Something to Look Into

I'm getting this error in my syslog:

Jan  2 18:40:29 server2 nmbd[6945]: 

 [2005/01/02 18:40:29, 0] nmbd/nmbd_browsesync.c:

 find_domain_master_name_query_fail(350)

Jan  2 18:40:29 server2 nmbd[6945]:   

 find_domain_master_name_query_fail:

Jan  2 18:40:29 server2 nmbd[6945]:   

 Unable to find the Domain Master Browser name HOMENET<1b> 

 for the workgroup HOMENET.

Jan  2 18:40:29 server2 nmbd[6945]:   

 Unable to sync browse lists in this workgroup.

Must be something wrong in my Samba config.

UPDATE: Problem solved! See this post.

Backup Directories

When I'm ready to tackle the backup phase of this project, I can reference this page from Peter at Napier.

Mail Setup - Part 2

(See Part 1)

It seems that postfix is not installed on the new server. It's tough to remember now what I installed back when I loaded Mandrake. I used this command to check:

rpm -qa | grep -i postfix

I used urpmi to load the program:

urpmi postfix

Next, I modified /etc/postfix/main.cf to include a fully qualified hostname by adding:

myhostname = (insert host here)

The page that I am using for reference asked me to restart the program using postfix reload, but I received message saying that postfix was not running. I guessed and tried to start it:

postfix start

It fired right up.

Now, I'll try fetchmail again in verbose mode... Sure enough, it is receiving mail (although it seems to be kind of locked up after three messages). We'll see what happens.

UPDATE: Fetchmail has timed out. I'm going to blame GMail for the delay, start fetchmail in daemon mode, and not worry about it. I should have a bunch of messages soon.