Silence - finaly

It's set up, it's running and you cannot hear it!
My cube is working. It now functions as a dhcp and dns server for my local Network, downloads stuff via BitTorrent and burns DVDs via a network connectio to my PowerBook. Great.
After installing a frash copy of Panther on the Cube the basic user stup was really simple - just copy the applications, the ~/Libary/Preferences and the ~/Libary/Application Support Folders and everything feels like it is on the PowerBook. I then only copied over some other things I needed: QuickTime Extentions for DivX/Xvid/OGG Playback, my iCal Calendars and my iTunes folder.
Then I instsalles Fink - and learned the you have to respect their installation instructions precicely.
Then I installed Ruby to get my scripts working.
After having a working system I copied over my bind and dhcpd settings from my SuSE Linux box, which served as the dns/dhcp server before and ran #apt-get install dhcp - I didn't need BIND, bacause OS X already has BIND installd.
After copying named.conf and my zone setup files into /etc/ and /var/named/ I activated bind by changing DNSSERVER:-NO- to -YES- in /etc/hostconfig. So named was up and running after hacking sudo SystemStarter BIND start into a Terminal window.
As I mentioned before there is no dhcpd installed in OS X by default. After installing it via Fink and placing my dhcpd.conf in /etc I had to set it up to start at system startup. In OS X/Darwin Apple advises you to use SystemStarter for this purpose. as man SystemStarter told me it executes starup scripts from two locations: /System/Library/StartupItems which contains the ones Apple provides and you should not mess with and /System/Library/StartupItems user (e.g. admin) defined startup items from /Library/StartupItems. Those Startup items consist mainly of a directory which contains an execuable (a script in most cases - same name as the dir [eg. .../DHCP/DHCP]) which gets the arguments start,stop and restart passed on by the SystemStarter application during bootup/shutdown - much like /etc/init.d/ in the LSB (Linux Standard Base - rules for things that most Linux distris have in common - least common denominator for Linux you could call it), but whats different is the .plist file in the directory, which contains some infos for the SystemStarter - the name of the service, the required services for this sevice/deamon to run, an optional precedence (should it be started early or late...) and the services it uses (but are not essetial).
So by using /System/Library/StartupItems/BIND/ I created a Startup Item for my DHCP which is launched if DHCPSERVER:-YES- is configured in /etc/hostconfig:
BIND - the startup script

#!/bin/sh

##
# DHCP service - using Fink
# by Toto (MrToto[ÄT]gmx.net)
##

. /etc/rc.common

StartService ()
{
if [ "${DHCPSERVER:=-NO-}" = "-YES-" ]; then
ConsoleMessage "Starting dhcpd"
/sw/sbin/dhcpd
fi
}

StopService ()
{
ConsoleMessage "Stopping dhcpd"
kill -TERM `cat /var/run/dhcpd.pid`
}

RestartService ()
{
if [ "${DHCPSERVER:=-NO-}" = "-YES-" ]; then
ConsoleMessage "Restarting dhcpd"
if [ -x /var/run/dhcpd.pid ]; then
kill -HUP `cat /var/run/dhcpd.pid`
else
/sw/sbin/dhcpd
fi
else
StopService
fi
}

RunService "$1"

and the StartupParameters.plist

{
Description = "DHCP server";
Provides = ("DHCP");
Requires = ("Network");
Uses = ("Network");
OrderPreference = "None";
}

Feel free to use those for yourself it should work seamlessly if you use Fink in /sw and type sudo apt-get install dhcp. Just place the two files in /Library/StartupItems/DHCP (if it's not there create it) owned by root. The startup script should be execuable and named DHCP and the .plist file has to be named StartupParameters.plist.
Have fun and welcome to Darwin! ;-)

By mrtoto at 17:42h| 0 Kommentare | Comment this

 

Mail me if you can

I finally found some time to configure my exim SMTP server. As I mentioned before I wanted secure connections to the Server. For that reaseon I told my Debian apt-get install exim-tls. This packege has (as you of course have guessed by it's name) TLS support compiled in. I still havn't unserstood where exactly the difference between SSL and TLS is; both are always mentioned together and sometimes even used as synonym (in Mail.app for instance where you can check the "Use SSL" Box for SMTP servers, but it does TLS). Both methodes (SSL and TLS) reliy on a Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) with the common CA model, the same thing you need when you use https.
OpenSSL is, as I mentioned in another posting, relatively complex, to say the least. I already have a certificate for the IMAP server, but I cannot use this one, because is has a diffent fomat - grr.
When you use the Debian tool for configuring exim (eximconfig Who would have guessed that?) and you got the exim-tls package installed it offers you to create a certificate for you, wich is a Good Thing^TM - but for some reason the certificate is only valid 30 days, which is just a little bit to short for my tase.
Well, it seems I need to fiddle a little bit with OpenSSL before I can really use the server in daily buissenss.
Another problem if you want to setup a mailserver, which sends mail for each of your mail adresses, because all of those freaky little freemail providers an even my university mail server do not offer encrypted mail transfer (which is a real problem if you are in a lot of untrusted networks) is relaying. Normal people (even with static IPv4 adresses - Want IPv6. Want it now) are considered as possivble spammers by a lot of ISPs. Well you cannot really blame them, but with more than 60% (!) of al email communication being spam one could argue that it doesent really matter and that the real time blacklists and dial-up list etc. don't stop any spamer who really wants to spam, but makes a lot of internet peer a kind of second class internt peers. The problem is that most people don't care - as usual.
There are a lot of good exim tuturials and mailsever tuturials around the net - the ones which helped me most are:
http://www.debianhowto.de/howtos/de/exim3/index.html and http://sites.inka.de/~gaetano/exim4.html

So much for today - stay tuned I'll talk a little bit more about the exim configuration in the next couple of days and post the final configurations in a little howto when everything is done.

By mrtoto at 16:40h| 0 Kommentare | Comment this

 

Get out of the Outlook trap

For everybody switching from Windows to Mac (or any other OS or even to another Windows Mail client), transferring mails (with attached files) from Outlook to Mail.app, Entourage or Thunderbird or whatever they like to use has always been difficult at least (yes, I did it several times).
The great Mac OS X Hints website had very usefull tip today wich could ease this pain a lot.

By mrtoto at 19:02h| 0 Kommentare | Comment this

 

IMAPSSLMD5CRAM - Huh?

I found a neat howto about configuring a imapd for SSL & MD5CRAM, the only question is why isn't the SuSE 8.2 binary compiled with

make lnp PASSWDTYPE=pam SSLTYPE=unix

By mrtoto at 21:41h| 0 Kommentare | Comment this

 

One for the night - CCC and Networks

Was origially posted at bitfever.blogspot.com on Wed Jan 07, 08:5

So I tried to clone my boot volume.
Well, if you should ever try to clone anything using the CarbonCopyCloner make shure that you disconect from any network before you do that. Otherwise it will copy all data that it can accsess via smb-sharing volumes, because those seem to be mounted in

/private/var/automount/Network

I think this is strange ;-)
Good night.

By mrtoto at 17:52h| 0 Kommentare | Comment this