Andrew and Karla's Place

Well today is the first day of our holiday to Forster, where we are staying at the Sevan Appartments.

I was checking the car before the trip on Thursday morning and while doing the tyre pressures I found that our front passanger side tyre was low and after stopping at work to pick up some ebay purchases for Karla. I saw that we had another nail stuck in the front tyre, this one being the second one in that tyre and the third one overall. So I had to spend an hour or so getting another plug put in the tyre. Not how I had planned to spend the morning before going away.

So tyre fixed and everything else ok with the car, I dropped the cats off at the vets for boarding on Friday morning and we left the house around miday.

We stopped around Newcastle for some lunch and I kepted on getting some calls that I had trouble receiving, but I finally managed to call them back and it was the vets. It turns out the poor Sammy has mouth cancer and another mouth infection. We knew he had been off his food and had lost a little bit of weight and thought that maybe he might have had a mouth infection but not cancer.

They are giving him some drugs to clear up the mouth infection and some pain killers so he is comfortable but with out kemo he will only last a month or two. From what the vet has said it appears the cancer has spread quite a lot, so we will have to see what the story is when we get back.

Anyway a good start to our holiday, no one was very happy.

We arrived in Forster around 6.30pm and the appartment is really nice and in a great spot.

Food and bed time for the little ones.

Every time I go to the carpark near work I always get caught behind some driver who goes 5 k’s an hour, stops at every turn or ramp.

The carpark near my work get’s full very early so when people come in late why would you expect there to be any spots on the first couple of levels.

Also the operator has made some deal with a local company and the top 2 or 3 floors have reserved parking only for them. So the noobs who come in get all excited and see the empty spaces and try and go in to them. Then they see that oh!, I can’t park here then they reverse out at you.

People pull over and let me through or go to another carpark. I’m sick of losing 15 minutes in the morning watching you trying to find a spot. Just go to the roof and be done with it.

If you’ve been following the site lately you would know that I have been moving from a Windows Server to a Linux one and while most of this has been fairly smooth, try to get an email solution has not been one of them.

I initally tried to get Postfix going but found that my first attempts were unsuccessful to say the least. (I need multiple domains and users etc.) Then I tried sendmail for just sever out email from the sites, this did work but didn’t give me a full solution. So I removed it and tried my next option.

Citadel and Zimbra I looked at next.

I would have liked to use Zimbra and one day I might but there was no version for my current OS and the hacks to get it working are still outside of my Linux experience level. So I install Citadel, it worked had a few strange quirks when I used it with Roundcube, but it did most of what I wanted. I upgrade me OS to the latest release and then Citadel stopped working and a reinstall would not fix the problems.

So I removed it completely and went back to Postfix, with MySQL,SASL, TLS, AV and Grey listings. This time I was able to get it installed and working for sending mail from the server along with multiple domains and receiving emails. I just wasn’t able to send emails from an external clients. (Outlook, Roundcube etc.)

I was having problems with the SASL and SMTP athentication from external sources, I checked everything recreated certificates, googled like mad to find a solution. Even did reinstalls of certain parts.

After checking all of the logs, I decided to have a look at the syslog and there I saw a different error and this lead me to a new Google search and the answer to my problem. One of the config files for pam didn’t like the “#” I used for the database access password, so it would read half the line but then stop at the “#” so the SASL didn’t know the database to access for the user details.

Spent a few nights trying to work this one out, so a change of password for the db user fixed the issue and now all seems to be working ok.

I just have to set up getmail to fetch my external emails then I’ll be able to shutdown the email server on the windows server, which means it can be turned off during the day and used for backups at night and media sharing when were all home. This leave the new quieter box running 24/7 for hosting, email, etc.

Happy 60th Birthday

Dad

Yes, Karla was playing / doing Cafe World on Facebook and now I am hooked as well.

Our children at home have to suffer otherwise my food will spoil in the cafe. Currently I am trying to get to the same level as Karla but this is proving to be difficult as I have to work and cant’ spend my time looking after my cafe.