This is a copy of the original article, see it here

With this new dedicated server, I chose Plesk as a control panel solely because I hated it less than Ensim or cPanel. Normally I’d do all the installation, configuration, and tweaking of a server myself, but I just don’t have time for that anymore. The biggest problem I have with control panels is that they make it very hard to do manual configs the normal Linux way: changes either get overwritten or ignored. Plesk is a little easier to live with in this regard; what follows are my last mile tweaks.

While Plesk allows you to create a chrooted FTP user for a domain, it doesn’t have a front end for adding another, much less one constrained a particular subdirectory of that domain. Plesk’s configuration of ProFTPD chroots any user with a group of psacln. Via the shell, just useradd a new user with the desired home directory, use /bin/false for the shell so they can’t SSH in, and add them to group psacln. You’ll also need to make sure that the httpdocs directory is 751, not the default 750.

Plesk charges \$49.00 to provide a GUI for SpamAssassin configuration. While I didn’t save any money doing this myself, maybe you will: here’s how to get SpamAssassin going with Plesk’s qmail implementation. If you have the Plesk SpamAssassin RPM installed (usually available in /root/swsoft), it provides a spammng command line utility for tweaking the SpamAssassin configuration. This utility appears to work without checking your license information: you can run /etc/init.d/spamassassin stop than spammng -c -C start. This restarts the spamd daemon with the proper command line flags for Plesk’s qmail install.

Going a bit further, try spammng -c -C -e –mailname “user@domain.com” start: this will enable SpamAssassin for the specified mailbox by editing the .qmail file in the relevant directory. For my install, this was /var/qmail/mailnames/domain.com/user. With these two bits of information, we can combine Plesk’s qmail with the default SpamAssassin installation without spending any cash. I have not yet figured out how to do this server wide (every incoming piece of mail is processed) or domain wide (every mail for a specific domain is processed). You?

In the .qmail file, Plesk writes the following:

| /usr/local/psa/bin/psa-spamc accept
| true
./Maildir/

psa-spamc is a shell wrapper around the SpamAssassin spamc utility and allows one argument: whether to “accept”/deliver mail that is flagged as spam based on the /etc/mail/spamassassin/ configuration, or whether to “reject” it. It’d be nice to have some granularity to say “reject everything over score 10”, but eh, not a biggie.

The last thing is to reteach the /etc/init.d/spamassassin startup script. Since we haven’t paid Plesk to fiddle with SpamAssassin, we have to teach our default install how to interact with Plesk’s qmail without their help. If you’ve started the spamd daemon from Plesk’s spammng, run the following to capture the startup configuration: ps auwx | grep spamd. You’ll get something along the lines of:

/usr/bin/spamd --username=popuser --daemonize --nouser-config --helper-home-dir=/var/qmail --max-children 5 --create-prefs --virtual-config-dir=/var/qmail/mailnames/%d/%l/.spamassassin --pidfile=/var/run/spamd/spamd_full.pid --socketpath=/tmp/spamd_full.sock

Open up /etc/sysconfig/spamassassin and make it look like:

SPAMDOPTIONS="-d -c -m5 -H /var/qmail --username=popuser --nouser-config
--virtual-config-dir=/var/qmail/mailnames/%d/%l/.spamassassin --socketpath=/tmp/spamd_full.sock"
SPAMD_PID=/var/run/spamd/spamd_full.pid

SPAMDOPTIONS is one line. Restart spamd with /etc/init.d/spamassassin restart and check Plesk’s qmail log at /usr/local/psa/var/log/maillog. If everything goes right, you should be able to send yourself a piece of mail and notice two things: spamd will process each incoming message and report the results and a .spamassassin directory will show up in the right domain and user directory under /var/qmail/mailnames/. Done.

Plesk’s licensing is annoying in other ways: I can only use 30 domains within my current install. Thankfully, domain aliases don’t count against this limitation and, with Drupal’s multisite capabilities, I can run any amount of domains on one code base with multiple databases. Unfortunately, this is a problem when it comes to logfiles and analysis: I’m not entirely sure if Apache’s ServerAlias is considered %v for split-logfile. Needs more testing before I can fully implement domain aliases.

====

• in order to process spammassassin the email we need a .qmail file like this:

bijoux# cat /var/qmail/mailnames/domain.com/user/.qmail
| /usr/local/psa/bin/psa-spamc accept
| true
./Maildir/

for every user.

to obtain this you can edit the file or you can try next command, to update .qmail file for specific user.

bijoux# /usr/local/psa/admin/bin/spammng -c -C -e --mailname user@domain.com start

• if you want to start SpamAssassin correctly at boot, put next lines in /etc/init.d/rc_local:

/etc/init.d/psa-spamassassin stop
/etc/init.d/spamd stop
/usr/local/psa/admin/bin/spammng -c -C start

Yesterday a colleague pointed me to the Simpson the movie website. One of the coolest things of it is the possibility to create your own Simpson avatar.

How to resist?! :)

After some clicks I made this beautiful avatar:

{% img /images/avatar_simpson.jpg %}

Isn’t it amazing? :D

  ycpc -c -x file.ycp -o file.xml

  cd yxmlconv
  ruby src/converter.rb file.xml > file.rb

{
module "Arch";
// local variables
string _architecture = nil;
string _board_compatible = nil;
string _checkgeneration = "";
boolean _has_pcmcia = nil;
boolean _is_laptop = nil;
boolean _is_uml = nil;
boolean _has_smp = nil;
// Xen domain (dom0 or domU)
boolean _is_xen = nil;
// Xen dom0
boolean _is_xen0 = nil;
/* ************************************************************ */
/* system architecture                                          */
/**
 * General architecture type
 */
global string architecture () {
    if (_architecture == nil)
        _architecture = (string)SCR::Read(.probe.architecture);
    return _architecture;
}

...

module Arch
  require 'ycp/SCR'
  _architecture = nil
  _board_compatible = nil
  _checkgeneration = ""
  _has_pcmcia = nil
  _is_laptop = nil
  _is_uml = nil
  _has_smp = nil
  _is_xen = nil
  _is_xen0 = nil

  def architecture(  )
    if ( _architecture == nil ) then
      _architecture = Ycp::Builtin::Read( ".probe.architecture" )
    end
    return _architecture
  end
...

In the last days I got an exponential grow of spam messages into the guestbook. Since drupal’s guestbook module has some problems with spam- prevention components, I’ve disabled anonymous posting.

I’ll enable it again as soon as possible.

BTW: I don’t know who will care about this limitation ;)

• Allow for in-place editing of input field (turn off pop-up)


• allow use of different fonts within one field


• Nested Fields support on Write and allow nested conditions when using conditional fields
  


• ...

Last friday evening I made a party in my new house. We celebrated my birthday and also the “opening” of the new house.

Many thanks to Roberto for the photos (made with his mobile phone!).

Michael Schröders hackweek project is based on using well-known mathematical models for describing and solving package dependencies: Satisfiability - SAT
Apparently, some research on this topic was done before. The oldest mentioning of SAT for packaging dependencies I found is a paper from Daniel Burrows dating ca. mid-2005. Daniel is the author of the aptitude package manager and certainly knows the topic of dependency hell inside out.

However, the most interesting link Google revealed, was the one to the EDOS project.
EDOS is short for Environment for the development and Distribution of Open Source software and is funded by the European Commission with 2.2 million euros. The project aims to study and solve problems associated with the production, management and distribution of open source software packages.
Its four main topics of research are:

• Dependencies With a formal approach to management of software dependencies, it should be possible to manage the complexity of large free and open source package-based software distributions. The project already produced a couple of publications and tools, but I couldn't find links to source code yet.
• Downloading The problem of huge and frequently changing software repositories might be solvable with P2P distribution of code and binaries.
• Quality assurance All software projects face the dilemma between release often - release early and system quality. One can either
  • reduce system quality
  • or reduce the number of packages
  • or accept long delays before final release of high quality system
  EDOS wants to develop a testing framework and quality assurance portal to make distribution quality better and measurable.
• Metrics and Evaluation The decision between old, less features, more stable vs. new, more features, more bugs should be better reasoned by defining parameters to characterize distributions, distribution edition and distribution customization.