Mando.org

So I installed samba on my iBook today. Pretty simple installation via Fink, but I learned a couple of things.

OS X’s startup scripts are located in /Library/StartupItems. When you install samba via fink, fink creates a /sw/share/samba directory. Inside, there’s a StartupItems directory with all the appropriate stuff. Just copy that over to /Library/StartupItems and you’re half-way there.

After that, edit the /sw/etc/smb.conf file accordingly. There’s tons of docs on this, so I won’t go into particulars. Once edited, start up smbd and nmbd (/usr/sbin/smbd -D; /usr/sbin/nmbd -D;) and Bob’s yer uncle. Or, you can reboot the machine and let OS X do the starting for you. Nice, simple and easy.

My main work machine is a 700 Mhz Apple iBook running Mac OS X 10.2.5. One of the first things I did when I got the machine was configure Sendmail. I move from network to network quite a bit and switching between SMTP hosts quickly became tiresome. But there were two problems with Sendmail :

1. Sendmail has a long and checkered history when it comes to security. I’m not too worried about someone hacking my machine through Sendmail, but it’s a valid concern.
2. Every OS update from Apple broke the Sendmail installation in a new and different way. This was unacceptable.

Because of these reasons I decided to turn off Sendmail and look for a different MTA. My first thought was to go with the tried and true Qmail. I’ve installed, configured, and administered Qmail lots of times, so I figured it would be a piece of cake. It turned out to be an old, dry and nasty piece of cake on OS X.

The normal installer scripts blew up on me as I tried to install it on an HPFS (or whatever OS X’s filesystem is called), and I got quickly frustrated. So I gave up for a couple of months.

Today, I decided to give it another go. A friend of mine, Mr. Bill, pointed me to Postfix, and when I saw that it was installable via Fink, I figured my prayers had been answered. And they were.

Postfix installed beautifully. Here’s what I had to do to make it work:

1. Install Fink if it’s not already installed. If you have it installed already, update it to the latest version with the command fink self-update. I’m not sure if the latest version is required or not, but that’s how it worked for me.
2. Install Postfix with fink install postfix-release. There’s supposedly a version of the new experimental version of Postfix available via fink but I couldn’t find it anywhere.
3. All of the configuration files for Postfix are in /sw/etc/postfix. You’ll need to edit /sw/etc/postfix/main.cf. I set myhostname = lappy.mando.org, mydomain = mando.org, myorigin = $myhostname, inet_interfaces = all, mydestination = $myhostname, localhost.$mydomain, and mynetworks_style = host. Now, lappy.mando.org isn’t a valid DNS entry, but it is the local name of my machine, so that’s apparently good enough. The file itself is well documented, so just read through it and see what you need to do.
4. Replace Sendmail with Postfix with the command sudo mta-switch postfix. This is the only part that might get busted with new updates from Apple, so keep that in mind. If you update and Postfix doesn’t work, re-run this command to put Postfix back.
5. Run sudo daemonic enable postfix. This creates a Postfix startup entry.
6. Run sudo postfix start. This will startup postfix.

After this, just set your SMTP server to localhost in your mail application and you should be good to go. I got these configuration steps from Google’s cache of an html version of a japanese mailing list that doesn’t seem to exist any more, so hopefully this’ll help out someone.

I just found out that Mr. Noodle’s brother Mr.
Noodle has passed away. Of course, if you’re not a fan of Elmo’s World or don’t have a child that’s a fan, you probably have no idea what I’m talking about.

That’s okay. Michael Jeter is famous for a bunch of other stuff, but my family knows him best from Elmo’s World.

Now don’t get me wrong: I love Mr. Noodle. But his brother (who is, by definition, also Mr. Noodle) was my favorite. He wasn’t quite as silly as his brother, but perhaps a bit more lovable. He’ll be sorely missed by many. I’m just glad Aiden isn’t old enough to realize that he’s gone.

Geez. First Mr. Rogers and now this.