I just had to pass along kudos to APC. I use one of their BackUPS battery backup systems. It’s been flawless for most of the past 3 years. In the past 3 days the overload light has tripped and it shuts off power to everything. Not what you want.
I called tech support. They picked up the phone after only 2-3 rings, ran me through some diagnostics, told me there was probably 18 days left on my warranty. Then they told me they were shipping me a new unit.
They are my customer service heroes.
Well, I finally broke down and started using Tenet’s Exchange Server. First, IS created an Exchange account for me then I tried adding it to my iPhone. After I got the settings right, from someone who’s using it with their iPhone everything works fine.
Here are the settings that aren’t obvious.
Server
mail.etenet.com
Domaintenethealth
Then make sure SSL is on and you should be good to go with your email address, username and password.
Now, if I could just get this working on my Mac desktop. There are clearly some differences in the manner in which iOS 4 and the OS X 10.6.4, and particularly Mail.app, iCal and AddressBook, interact with the Exchange server. I’m still trying to find the secret incantation to make it work on the desktop. When I do a follow-up will be forthcoming.
BTW, the above settings should work just fine for your iPad too.
After scouring through the official documentation, and finding that lacking, Google has found the answers.
Make sure Wiki Server is set to 127.0.0.1 and that Use SSL is checked.
Here’s how I was finally able to get my groups into iCal SL client (no SSL)
userName
password
server.com/principals/__uids__/wiki-groupName/(no http://)
How to edit sieve rules in Snow Leopard by hand. This is not really recommended especially because it seems that SL server does not utilize all the sieve rules and the ones that it does utilize are in a slightly different format than exists in Sieve documentation.
A couple of sources later and a couple of quick lines of code helps to figure out what file to edit.
u="username"; dscl /Search read Users/$u GeneratedUID | awk {'printf "/Library/EmailRules/sievescripts/"$2".sieve\n"'} | xargs -n1 -p sudo cat
u="username"; dscl /Search read Users/$u GeneratedUID | awk {'printf "/Library/EmailRules/sievescripts/"$2".sieve\n"'} | xargs -n1 -p sudo pico
Edit the command to make u equal to the username of the person and you can look at and edit the sieve files. I also don’t know why but I get the following error.
Received SIGHUP or SIGTERM
All you have to do is simply copy the command and it will work. Not sure why it doesn’t work the first time.
I’m quite certain if you go ahead and try to re-edit using the GUI your files might get screwed up. YMMV.
Some say running the following command helps. Again, YMMV.
sudo /usr/bin/wiki_sieve_manager
Finally a real solution to the above. Simply make sure you use the URL https://yourdomain.com/settings/username/emailrules/. Even if the website is not set up to use port 443 in Server Admin it seems you must use https.
Well, I finally bit the bullet and installed OS X Snow Leopard Server. Most of what I absolutely need to get working is mail services. One of the peculiarities of Dovecot is that each users mail folder is owned by that user. I think in Cyrus they were all owned by mail or _cyrus.
Anyway, I found that a couple of my files didn’t have the correct permissions and I found out by trying to open in webmail. It gave me errors I’d never seen before. Where I found better errors was in mailaccess.log where I saw a dovecot service with a failed: Permission denied error.
I managed to find where the files lived and as I have quite a few mail users I didn’t want to go through individually so I figured out a script to do it.
sudo ls -lA /var/spool/imap/dovecot/mail | grep -v total | awk {'printf $3": /var/spool/imap/dovecot/mail/"$9"\n"'} | xargs -n2 -p sudo chown -R
The script will ask if you want to proceed with the chown command for each user.
If you find your logs reporting permissions issues with a specific account or your webmail users have errors opening mailboxes, then the following script when provided with the offending GeneratedUID will reset the permissions similar to the above. Simply replace the GUID in the script with the one listed in your logs.
dscl /LDAPv3/127.0.0.1 -list /Users GeneratedUID | grep GUID | awk {'printf $1": /var/spool/imap/dovecot/mail/"$2"\n"'} | xargs -n2 -p sudo chown -R
They must. Verizon now blocks port 25 and does not allow you to opt out. Why do I care? Well our hospital just opened up free WiFi everywhere and when I found I couldn’t send email I made a couple of trips to the Information Services folks.
They swore up and down that they weren’t blocking anything at the router. An epiphany later and we figured out it was the Verizon DSL they were using for the access points.
Well, the simple solution is to change email to accept SMTP on port 587. This was simple enough to fix on the server. Just uncomment the following line in /etc/postfix/master.cf
#submission inet n - n - - smtpd
Then sudo postfix reload and you’re good to go.
Of course I also had to change my iPhone SMTP to use port 587. The only tricky part was remembering that I have my router set to provide a basic hardware firewall, in addition to the server’s ipfw. I had to open a service and a rule on the router to let TCP traffic on port 587 through.
I think I finally have the automatic updates feature of WordPress working. Previously, when asked for my login info for the FTP connection I would get some vague connection error. It’s a permissions issue. Some permissions for files/folders need to be set for web server user, in my case Apache2, or _www on OS X Server.
The answer mostly comes from looking for why WordPress asks for connection information. Be sure to read the comments.
So far, my solution seems to be something like the following.
sudo chown -R _www wordpress/wp-content*
sudo chown _www wordpress/wp-admin/update*
Where wordpress is the location of the WordPress installation.
It seems to work, however, the information about what should be happening with the update seems to be in an endless loop. I let it run for a bit and when I check to see if the plugin or theme is updated it seems to have the newer version, but I’ve no real way to check or to know how long to let the process run.
Very confusing.
When I encounter more updates I’ll see if this really does work. BTW, updated to WordPress 3.0 for all the new goodness.
Update
This works fine for plugins and themes but not for the actual WP updates. Also, I just let it run until the browser doesn’t seem to be loading the page any longer and the updates are done. Something’s clearly not working as expected with this and OS X Server but I don’t know what it is.
OK, I was sent a nice, likely canned, email asking if I’d point to Kimberly-Clark Health Care’s Healthcare-Associated Infection website. It seems to have a bunch of information.
Remember to use your Kleenex™.
Another post for the peripheral brain.
When I first set up my own server lo these years ago, I never really thought about email message filtering. After all, I had rules in Mail.app that would send my incoming message to wherever I wanted them. Besides, I was much more concerned with eliminating spam.
Well, that was then and spam seems under control. I was prompted to look at server-side message filtering mostly to help out my mother, who seems determined to have every single store, travel and other consumer site that will happily take your email address and send you messages daily — or more often, have a more controllable experience on her iPhone. When we originally set up her iPhone she told me she didn’t want to use it for email. Silly me, I listened and set her up with a POP account. Well now she wants email. What’s a good son to do. 
I changed her POP account to IMAP, copied over all her messages to her new IMAP folders and thought I’d need to solve her impending problem of 100 or so messages every other day choking her inbox.
After a bit of Googling I found Sieve. I’d actually heard of it before but never really thought about it. The Apple Discussion Forum had a nice start and pointed me on to sources I used to set it up.
Here are the salient points. From the terminal…
Add the following lines to /etc/services
sudo pico /etc/services
Insert the following lines.
callbook 2000/udp # callbook
callbook 2000/tcp # callbook
+ sieve 2000/udp # sieve mail filtering
+ sieve 2000/tcp # sieve mail filtering
You can check to see if it’s running by running
netstat -an | grep 2000
with results
tcp4 0 0 *.2000 *.* LISTEN
tcp6 0 0 *.2000 *.* LISTEN
Create /usr/sieve
sudo mkdir /usr/sieve
sudo chown _cyrus:mail /usr/sieve
Restart mail services
sudo serveradmin stop mail
[ some stuff ]
sudo serveradmin start mail
[ some stuff ]
I really did try installing the latest development version — 1.9.9 alpha. That should have been a clue. After spending way too much time with it I installed the stable version - avelsieve 1.0.1. Once copied into /usr/share/squirrelmail/plugins run sudo perl /etc/squirrelmail/config/conf.pl and activate the plugin.
Then it’s back to the terminal. These instructions are from AFP548.
cd /usr/share/squirrelmail/plugins/avelsieve
sudo cp config-sample.php config.php
Now set the correct authentication matching SquirrelMail.
Edit /etc/squirrelmail/plugins/avelsieve/config.php and change:
$preferred_mech = "PLAIN";
to
$preferred_mech = "CRAM-MD5";
You should be running SquirrelMail with CRAM-MD5 authentication anyway.
Finally, edit the /etc/squirrelmail/plugins/avelsieve/lib/sieve-php.lib.php file.
Find the line:
fputs($this->fp, "PUTSCRIPT \"$scriptname\" \{$len+}\r\n");
and change it to :
fputs($this->fp, "PUTSCRIPT \"$scriptname\"".' {'."$len+".'}'."\r\n");
This fixes an error in the script allowing you to save your changes to the filters. Now go login to webmail and click on the Filter link to start creating your Sieve filters.
Just a personal reminder to keep in the memory bank.
When running OS X Server and SpamAssassin, if you have spam set up to be quarantined it gets stored in /var/virusmails. A method of viewing and releasing quarantined mail mostly from the command line follows.
First, to do anything with the quarantined message you need to know it’s mail-file. That’s usually something like spam-kFLGPbnGHO3a.gz.
Using TextExpander’s snippets and the clipboard I have the following snippets.
To view the quarantined message I copy the quarantined file to /Users/Shared/ and then unzip it, read it into a new mail message to me. If it looks OK then I release it. I delete the file from /Users/Shared/ when I’m done.
To send it myself I have the following snippet. The snippet begins by copying the mail-file to the clipboard. If you don’t have TextExpander just replace all instances of %clipboard with the mail-file.
sudo cp /var/virusmails/%clipboard /Users/Shared/;gunzip /Users/Shared/%clipboard;/usr/bin/mail -s “%clipboard” me@example.com < /Users/Shared/`echo %clipboard | sed ‘s/.gz//g’`;rm /Users/Shared/`echo %clipboard | sed ‘s/.gz//g’`
If I want to release the file from quarantine and send it to notjunkmail.
sudo amavisd-release %clipboard ; sudo amavisd-release %clipboard “” notjunkmail
I did have to do a few things to get amavisd-release working. First, it was looking for amavisd.sock in the /var/amavis/home directory and it’s really located in the /var/amavis directory. It was simple to create a new directory and then create a symlink to the amavisd.sock file.
sudo mkdir /var/amavis/home; sudo ln -s /var/amavis/amavisd.sock /var/amavis/home
Now, using only the command line and a mail app, I can check on quarantined email and release it. All this just so I can make sure that I can do this task from an iPhone or iPad.
FWIW, I have amavis-blocked (by Uwe S. Fuerst)
a log file parser for amavisd-new 2.x, written in Perl set up to send me logs each night at 23:59. That’s where I get the mail-file from.