I know a lot of you are awaiting news on Snow Leopard! The early release has put me into a tight spot as I’m on holiday now (I’m typing this in an internet cafe paying a ridiculus rate per hour). Snow Leopard is lying in my mailbox at home and I didn’t bring any Mac with me. So bear with me untill the next weekend when I’ll be back home and will post updates.

Postfix has released a new version 2.6.5 as well. Usually they are installable without problems so feel free to update and I will test is soon!

Sorry about this!

Recently I got some remarks from a user who asked why he was not able to compile 64 bits on the PowerPC platform. My notes and instructions did not mention this and I must confess that I had forgotten this as I could not see a PowerMac or iMac G5 as your basic mailserver.

But I’m wrong, as my basic goal was to provide you with a complete mailserver solution, I have to acknowledge that the most polular pages are on installing Apache, PHP and third MySQL. The popularity of the mailserver instructions comes way lower then these three subjects.

So therefore I’ve updated all the 64 bit instructions with how to compile on a 64 bit PowerPC platform. You have to forgive me for not being able to test this (no G5 at my place!) I’m using the input of someone else who told me this. It was a very simple change as you only need to change the ‘x86_64‘ bit into ‘ppc64‘ and that’s it.

If someone else could verify that this works it would be grand!

There is already a new version of the Dovecot IMAP and POP3 server released. It’s a bug fix release that where discoverd since the last release a short time ago. I’ve updated all my test servers without any issue. Here is a list of issues fixed:

• acl: When looking up ACL defaults, use global/local default files if they exist. So it’s now possible to set default ACLs by creating dovecot-acl file to the mail root directory.
• imap/pop3 proxy: If proxy destination is known to be down, fail connections to it immediately.
• imap/pop3 proxy: Added proxy_timeout passdb extra field to specify proxy’s connect timeout.
• Fixed a crash in index file handling.
• Fixed a crash in saving messages where message contained a CR character that wasn’t followed by LF (and the CR happened to be the last character in an internal buffer).
• v1.2.3 crashed when listing shared namespace prefix.
• listescape plugin: Several fixes.
• autocreate plugin: Fixed autosubscribing to mailboxes in subscriptions=no namespaces.

Sometimes it’s difficult to send email as some providers block port 25. They will force you to use their mailserver for outgoing mail. I recently encountered this phenomenon when I spend some time in a hotel for work. Their setup blocked port 25 and there was no way around it sending email directly. I was forced to use my webmail solution (Roundcube) for sending mail. Which is a bit awkward as I was able to read and receive mail using Mail.app.

I started digging around for a solution that might work and I found the most simple and elegant solution that was already available in Postfix. It was called submission (port 587) which only allowes access by authenticated users.

To enable this ready made configuration in Postfix you will need to edit the ‘master.cf‘ file in ‘/etc/postfix/‘. You need to uncomment the following lines and save the changes.

submission inet n – n – – smtpd
  -o smtpd_enforce_tls=yes
  -o smtpd_sasl_auth_enable=yes
  -o smtpd_client_restrictions=permit_sasl_authenticated,reject

Then reload the changed configuration files into postfix with the command:

sudo postfix reload

Most mail clients like Mail.app and Thunderbird are able to use this port without any extra configuration. The only thing you will notice that you are able to send email which would otherwise be blocked.

Hope this will work as well for you as it did for me. I’ve also updated the regular documentation set to include this setting. Also don’t forget to open up this port in your firewall/router configuration.

I’ve just finished updating all my servers with Security update 2009-004. Experience from the last updates made me check the postfix config for changes and no it looks like they are leaving the postfix configuration alone. Maybe because this update patches a single vulnerability affecting the BIND DNS server only.

If you want to read more on what is affected in the updates I would suggest reading the Apple support site for the 2009-004 security update.

In case of doubt, please make a full bootable disk image backup with Cabon Copy Cloner before you start.

I got an email today from the unreliable Apache announcement mailing list (somehow all releases are not emailed out) that a new version was released yesterday. I’ve downloaded this version 2.2.13 and compiled it right away on my test machine as a user had indicated a problem with 2.2.12 earlier last week.

It looks like the option “-enable-layout” does not work as we once expected. There are now 3 different config.layout files which we need to edit to use our own layout:

• ./config.layout
• ./srclib/apr/config.layout
• ./srclib/apr-util/config.layout

Each will have the same content. I can’t find out why this change has been made and why we need to do this. I hope someone can explain this to me and how to resolve this.

Beyond this issue I could not find a problem with this new version on my test servers. therefore I even tried it on my production server to see if that would work properly and it did.

This version is a release with a small security problem so please upgrade if you want to. Read all about the changes in the 2.2.13 changelog.

If you’ve forgotten how to upgrade your Apache installation in the least painfull way with a possibility to go back if something goes wrong: Upgrading Apache

There is a new version of the Dovecot IMAP and POP3 server released. It’s a bug fix release that where discoverd since the last release. I’ve updated all my test servers without any issue. Here is a list of issues fixed:

• Mailbox names with control characters can’t be created anymore. Existing mailboxes can still be accessed though.
• Allow namespace prefix to be opened as mailbox, if a mailbox already exists in the root dir.
• Maildir: dovecot-uidlist was being recreated every time a mailbox was accessed, even if nothing changed.
• listescape plugin was somewhat broken
• Compiling fixes for non-Linux/BSDs
• imap: tb-extra-mailbox-sep workaround was broken.
• ldap: Fixed hang when >128 requests were sent at once.
• fts_squat: Fixed crashing when searching virtual mailbox.
• imap: Fixed THREAD .. INTHREAD crashing.

I’ve just finished updating my test and production server with Mac OSX 10.5.8. The update went without any problem and my setup was not affected in a negative way. Even postfix kept working without a problem.

If you want to read more on what is affected in the updates I would suggest reading the Apple support site for the 10.5.8 update and the Security Update 2009-003.

In case of doubt, please make a full bootable disk image backup with Carbon Copy Cloner before you start. There are some people having reported problems with previous update so better be safe then sorry!

Good luck

For everyone who has upgraded to a 5.1.x version. This is again a bug fix release like 5.1.36 and it is up to you if you want to upgrade. There are no apparent security issues solved in this release.

Check all the fixes and changes that are listed on the release notes to see what issues are resolved and if you are affected.

I’ve compiled this version and did some simple tests on my test servers and it worked without any problems.

Read the documentation on how to ugrade MySQL.

Amazon is always one of those companies who wants to help people to be the first to receive new products with their ability to pre-order. The release of Snow Leopard is almost there and Amazon is allowing pre-orders now. If you want to be sure you are one of the first to receive Snow Leopard you can order it on-line at Amazon. If you use any of the links provided you’ll be supporting this blog as we get a small commission as affiliate.

I will be ordering a family pack myself as I have more than one Mac in the house

I’m already testing the DIYMacServer setup on a beta version of Snow Leopard and I hope to have all the instructions ready before the official launch of Snow Leopard. I’ll try to include some migration strategies as well, although I firmly believe in doing a clean install of a new OS and not to perform an upgrade. It helps you in cleaning all the old stuff, all the apps that you no longer use and are still lingering on the HD.

Select your product from here:

• Snow Leopard (Upgrade from Leopard): $29
• Snow Leopard Family Pack: $49
• Mac Box Set, Snow Leopard Edition: $169 (including iLife and iWork)
• Mac Box Set, Snow Leopard Family Pack: $229 (including iLife and iWork)