Community Matters

Wow, now that I have the blog at Intel, I seem to be writing less here again. Go figure…

As I mentioned in my personal blog, my Mac Mini died a sudden and untimely death yesterday morning. And that Mini (Intel based, of course) has been the server for both email and blogs here at hohndel.org. Oops.

While I wait for the Mini to be fixed, I decided to migrate everything to my desktop system (a G5 Dual-Core PowerMac). Getting the web server up and running was almost trivial: make the system have an alias on the correct internal IP address (the one that the firewall sends all external traffic to). Since I used that system as my internal “staging area” for the blogs everything else was already there.

Getting the mailserver set up, however, was a different experience. For the Mini I had simply paid ten dollars for the very well done Postfix Enabler. That sets up both postfix and an imap daemon. But since this was going to be a very temporary solution, I figured I’d just hack it myself (after all, I had set up postfix on Linux many many times).

Since anything on the web tends to stay around, let’s start pointing out that these comments are about Mac OS X 10.4.7 (the latest version of Tiger as of this writing).

The oddities begin with the firewall setup in the System Preferences. There are no default settings to allow smtp through (nor domain name service, which was the other internal service I had to enable, but after opening that port in the firewall that was fairly straight forward). Adding them isn’t hard, but it seems like something Apple should add a default for.

In order to set up postfix as a simple recipient for my domains and as a simple forwarder using my ISP’s relay-host was easy (just a few edits to the postfix/main.cf file) and worked right away on the localhost interface. But any connection attempt to one of the external addresses of the system failed. I checked and re-checked postfix/main.cf. And it literally took me an hour to figure out that there was a second set of entries at the very end of the file for some of the key variables under the heading THE FOLLOWING DEFAULTS ARE SET BY APPLE. And those overwrote the setting for inet_interfaces that I had changed earlier in the file (at it’s normal place in the file).

I already complained to an Apple software developer whom I know, but please, if any of you know someone inside Apple’s software team… please tell them to fix this (or at least add a pointer to that location at the end of the file in the part of the file that documents each of these options).

Needless to say, after that change everything worked smoothly. I’d just like to prevent anyone else from having to waste their time.

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