A while a go I blogged about setting up postfix to send email via my ISP

This was to allow the emails to be sent out to a group of people, two weeks ago Sky (my ISP) replace smtp.sky.com with smtp.tools.sky.com - nice of them to tell me.

It was almost inevitable that the new server would be secured.

After some digging - here are the steps to get postfix to relay email to a secure smtp server.

Create this file:
cat /etc/postfix/sasl_passwd
mail.my-isp.org test:testpass
putting your isps smtp server, I used smtp.gmail.com and my gmail account details.

Set the permissions:
chown root:root /etc/postfix/sasl_passwd && chmod 600 /etc/postfix/sasl_passwd

The hash the file:
postmap hash:/etc/postfix/sasl_passwd

Here's the bit where you find a diversity of information on the web...

Add these lines to /etc/postfix/main.cf:
# Added by SAR: SASL SUPPORT FOR SERVERS
#
# The following options set parameters needed by Postfix to enable
# Cyrus-SASL support for authentication of mail servers.
#
smtp_sasl_auth_enable = yes
smtp_sasl_password_maps = hash:/etc/postfix/sasl_passwd
smtp_use_tls = yes
smtp_sasl_security_options = noanonymous
smtp_sasl_tls_security_options = noanonymous


... These settings work for gmail!

Reconfigure postfix:
postfix reload

Try a test message, the log should look something like this:
Feb 11 23:47:59 milhouse postfix/smtp[12622]: 5F213D6607: to=<mytestaccount@mydomain.xyz>, relay=smtp.gmail.com[64.233.183.111]:587, delay=3.8, delays=0.05/0.03/2.1/1.6, dsn=2.0.0, status=sent (250 2.0.0 OK 1202772704 k10sm40977996nfh.17)
Feb 11 23:47:59 milhouse postfix/qmgr[12401]: 5F213D6607: removed

It is grumbling about certificates, but emails are being sent - I'll look into the certs another time.

I was recently performance testing ATM service management software for a "major banking client". We had to simulate a 20000 ATM load on the system.



Left to right: Me and Steve

What do you think then?

Despite being colour blind, Steve Hedley's far more graphically capable than I am!

Cheers for creating the image Steve.

I've setup Izabella's website using WordPress.

We've got phones and digital cameras which support videos, so it's time to start publishing Vobcasts (Video Podcasts). Initially I went for YouTube, but friends complained they couldn't see content from YouTube because it was blocked by their company.

So instead I found PodPress:
http://www.mightyseek.com/podpress/
... which allows me to upload videos (in the same way as pictures) and include them in blog posts.

The PodPress plugin for WordPress was easy to install and has good integration with online services such as Apples iTunes. The only gripe I have is that the interface (whilst writing blog entries) is a bit clunky.... 1. Upload the video (through the normal WordPress interfaces).... 2. Fill in PodPress details about the video... 3. Manually cut and paste [display_podcast] into the post text.

After several security vulnrabilites were highlighed in the previous release of SimplePHPBlog I had to disable functionality. Finally today I decided to upgrade to 0.5.1.

It's great to have the choice of 5 themes along with a really nice menu to navigate to old posts.

The upgrade was fairly plain sailing, and I just copied over the images, content and config folders to the new install.

I noticed a few errors popping up in /var/log/https/error.log:
[Thu Dec 20 12:17:15 2007] [error] [client 192.168.0.4] PHP Fatal error: Call to undefined function utf8_encode() in /var/www/html/new/scripts/sb_formatting.php on line 32, referer: http://localhost:8000/new/index.php

After a bit of googling, this would appear to be a Mandriva related problem, the version of PHP 5 that came with my Mandriva 2007.1 install doesn't have support for the utf8_encode() function.

Usint URPMI I did the following as root:
urpmi php-xml

(I used this page to configure urpmi for my version of Mandriva)

Followed by a restart of Apache:
service httpd restart

All working fine now.