Just a simple mail server installation

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So, the mail server at work died on Wednesday. It was running Microsoft Exchange and died so utterly completely that even with several hours of premium support from Microsoft, they were unable to get it up and running again. Being one that comes in fairly early in the morning, and already am managing a few internal servers, I was asked to set up a new box using Linux or whatever.

Can’t be too difficult, huh?

Well, that depends. In this case, I needed to have it authenticate users against an Active Directory server and support mail aliases set up in its user database. After doing a fair amount of googling around, I found a few guides that helped me along the way. I started out with iRedMail and continued by configuring it to talk to the Active Directory server. Never having worked with AD or Kerberos before, it took me quite some time to get Kerberos working (tip: have a look at what the DNS thinks is the domain name of the KDC, in our case it was “BT.LOCAL” in all uppercase; use anything else as the Kerberos realm and all I got was cryptic error messages).

I had some hurdles to overcome, getting postfix to authenticate with Active Directory’s LDAP server was fairly easy once I a) had the unprivileged account that could do LDAP lookups (using the “Administrator” account for that does not work), and b) reduced the LDAP query so that it would actually find the users I was looking for (tip: make a dump of the LDAP directory and look at the lowest common denominator for the lookup keys).

Then I had the problem of Dovecot, which handles local mail delivery and IMAP/POP, could not read the mail that it had stored in mailboxes. It turned out that since I had set up Kerberos so that the AD users were available as Unix users, and had the recipient domain (“bt.local” from above) in “mydestination”, Postfix would always setuid the LDA. I had to remove the domain from there and add it to the list of virtual domains for that to work.

All in all, it took me about a day and half to get the thing set up. Not bad for the first time. I did set up Git to version-control all the important configuration files so that I can track my future mistakes and revert to a working configuration.

Now to get the SMTP SASL configuration working…

Not quite there yet

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As I mentioned before, I recently got an LG smartwatch with Android Wear. While I do find it kind of useful to be able to see what is happening on the phone without having to unlock its screen, it is also fairly obvious that the technology behind all of this is still in its infancy, and has its flaws.

One of the things they tout is the voice-control functionality. Just say “OK Google” and what you want it to do, and it is supposed to do it. I write “supposed to” as it doesn’t work that well for me. I do find that it more often than not understands the words I speak to it, even if I have to speak in English, which is not my native language (I remember back when OS/2 Warp 4 came out with voice recognition in 1996, it took quite a lot of training for it to understand my accent). Swedish is simply not supported by the voice recognition. Although it sometimes seems to understand some Swedish words, it seemingly cannot be commanded in Swedish. But then again, English doesn’t always work for me either. When I try to ask it “Show me the weather”, I more often than not get a Google search with “weather.com” as the top result. Not very useful. Every now and then it does actually show me a five-day weather forecast, but then with temperatures in degrees Fahrenheit, which is obviously completely useless (and there is nowhere to configure the units; according to LG support, it should follow the phone settings, but my phone is set to the Swedish locale, which uses Celsius, and the watch is set to UK English, which does the same).

I installed RunKeeper again, and at one time I did manage to get it to track a bicycle ride for me, although I do think it got categorised as a (very fast) walk. After that, I haven’t been able to get it to track anything, at least not by voice commands.

The watch is supposed to have a step counter, and while it does show me the number of steps for the current day, it always seems to forget the number of steps from days before. They are (almost) always listed as zero. And the pulse monitor thing always shows me the exact same pulse.

So, there are quite a lot of bugs in it. But I do like the general idea. Hopefully, there will be software updates to fix these bugs. Then I might get a smartwatch that is useful for more than just checking who is calling or who just sent that last text message or placed that last Wordfeud word.

Does anyone have any better experiences with these smartphones? Any tips on what I should do to make it work better.

Singing to a new tune

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Back in 1995, when I got access to the Internet for the first time, the dominant web browser was Netscape Navigator. While it had its flaws, its main audience were power-users, much because only power-users had Internet access at that time. It had its flaws, and in 1996 I found a small Norwegian browser called Opera. I came in at version 2.12, one of the first public releases, and was hooked from day one.

I continued to use Opera for quite some time, especially while working for the company that made it for over ten years (first from 2000 to 2007, and then again from 2009 to 2012). During this time, Opera was the choice for power-users, but this all changed when they switched rendering engines in 2013 (which was also the reason for me leaving the company at that time). I was happy with the decision to switch engines, as Presto did have some architectural issues that were different to overcome, what I didn’t like was how they killed off almost all the power-user featured creating a “simple” browser.

There are enough of the simple browsers. I use them from time to time, like Google Chrome, which still feels like I’m waiting for it to become a proper browser with a proper UI (and it’s up to version 40-something already), like Firefox, which keeps losing UI elements for each new release, and like the new Opera, which fortunately did get bookmarks back recently. I have not really tested the new Opera that much, and I must confess I am still using Opera 12 as my main browser, despite it starting to show its age.

Enter Vivaldi. Established by one of the two co-founders of Opera Software, Vivaldi started out with a community, to coincide with Opera Software shutting down their My Opera community. Recently, they also announced availability of the Vivaldi Browser, a new browser targeted at power-users. Like the new Opera, it is based on Chromium, the open-source engine of Google Chrome, but unlike Opera, Vivaldi is trying to create a browsing experience like the old Opera browser did. I was happy to be invited to beta test it a couple of months before the release of the first technical preview, and while it still has some issues to work out, it is coming close to becoming my first choice in browsers (I just need to replace the e-mail client, IRC client and RSS aggregator part of Opera before letting it go completely).

Configurability, customizability and ease of use all in one.  There’s no contradiction in doing it all at once. And since it is based on the Chromium engine, sites that are coded to work with Google Chrome just work as expected.

If you haven’t already, you should give it a try!

Habits form quickly

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I bought myself a LG G Watch R smartwatch earlier this year. While some of its functionality has been disappointing (step counter not remembering steps, voice commands not working as expected), I have become used to having it on. Today, I switched back to my old Casio watch, which is not quite as smart, even if it does keep correct time by reading the Frankfurt time signal, and has a battery that lasts for years, not just hours (I have to charge the LG every night).

But it is interesting how fast habits form. After replacing the smartwatch with the old dumbwatch, the instinct when the phone buzzes from a message is to look at the watch face to see what it is, rather than at the phone itself.

BTW, since I really did like the Casio watch, this watch face in the Android Play store really won me over.

A new blog

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So, why should I start a new blog after closing my old one? That is a valid question, although this blog isn’t meant to be a continuation of my old personal blog. It is rather meant to continue my old technobabble blog that I used to have on the now defunct My Opera platform. I am not going to import the old posts here (they already have a home in my archive section), so instead I am making a fresh start.

No promises, but the intention is to post stuff about technology that interests me. There will not be much personal stuff here, that sort of stuff mostly ends up on Facebook nowadays anyway (“or Google+” I was about to write, but I seldom actually post anything on there, I mostly just monitor it), and in the blog I keep for my daughters (invitation-only, please e-mail me privately to get an account set up).

‘Nuff said for now. Until the first actual proper post shows up, here’s the last entry in the old blog.