I’ve used something like falko’s howto on Virtual Users And Domains With Postfix, Courier, MySQL And SquirrelMail (Ubuntu 10.10) in order to get a mail server with those features working on Debian Squeeze.

Then I wanted to add mailman in order to operate mailing lists.

The closest howto for achieving this is the one by Rich Brown, How to add Mailman mailing lists to Postfix under Ubuntu Linux when using virtual domains + virtual users.

I’m going to try to recount what I had to do to go from a working mail server with virtual users and domains (having completed a howtoforge.com howto) to get to that same setup to run mailman. Perhaps some of this was unnecessary, duplicative, or even wrong. But, the mailing lists are working now, so that’s something.

List domain preparation

If the domain that will host the lists is not already served by your setup, be sure you:

• use phpmyadmin to create the domain example.com in the domains field. NOT lists.example.com!, and
• add lists.example.com to your dns entry for example.com,

Mailman

As root:

# aptitude install mailman
# newlist mailman
# vi /etc/aliases

And add the following to /etc/aliases:

## mailman mailing list mailman:              "|/var/lib/mailman/mail/mailman post mailman" mailman-admin:        "|/var/lib/mailman/mail/mailman admin mailman" mailman-bounces:      "|/var/lib/mailman/mail/mailman bounces mailman" mailman-confirm:      "|/var/lib/mailman/mail/mailman confirm mailman" mailman-join:         "|/var/lib/mailman/mail/mailman join mailman" mailman-leave:        "|/var/lib/mailman/mail/mailman leave mailman" mailman-owner:        "|/var/lib/mailman/mail/mailman owner mailman" mailman-request:      "|/var/lib/mailman/mail/mailman request mailman" mailman-subscribe:    "|/var/lib/mailman/mail/mailman subscribe mailman" mailman-unsubscribe:  "|/var/lib/mailman/mail/mailman unsubscribe mailman"

# vi /etc/mailman/mm_cfg.py

and uncomment and/or appropriately edit the following lines:

DEFAULT_EMAIL_HOST = 'lists.example.com' ... DEFAULT_URL_HOST   = 'lists.example.com' ... MTA=None   # Misnomer, suppresses alias output on newlist ... GLOBAL_PIPELINE.insert(1, 'SpamAssassin')

Apache2

create a new file: /etc/apache2/mods-available/mailman.conf that looks like this:

ScriptAlias /mailman/ /usr/lib/cgi-bin/mailman/ ScriptAlias /cgi-bin/mailman/ /usr/lib/cgi-bin/mailman/  <Directory /usr/lib/cgi-bin/mailman/>    AllowOverride None    Options ExecCGI    Order allow,deny    Allow from all </Directory>  Alias /pipermail/ /var/lib/mailman/archives/public/ <Directory /var/lib/mailman/archives/public>    Options Indexes MultiViews FollowSymLinks    AllowOverride None    Order allow,deny    Allow from all </Directory>  Alias /archives/ /var/lib/mailman/archives/public/ <Directory /var/lib/mailman/archives/public>    Options Indexes MultiViews FollowSymLinks    AllowOverride None    Order allow,deny    Allow from all </Directory>

Now add a symlink to this file so Apache will use your new Mailman aliases the next time it starts:

# cd /etc/apache2/mods-enabled
# ln -s /etc/apache2/mods-available/mailman.conf mailman.conf

Postfix

Create a new file, /etc/postfix/transport, which contains one line:

lists.example.com     mailman:

Then as root:

# cd /etc/postfix
# postmap transport

Finally edit /etc/postfix/main.cf – add these four lines to the end of the file:
relay_domains = lists.example.com
transport_maps = hash:/etc/postfix/transport
mailman_destination_recipient_limit = 1
unknown_local_recipient_reject_code = 550

Use phpmyadmin to add some aliases in the forwardings field:

 mailman@example.com mailman@lists.example.com mailman-admin@example.com mailman-admin@lists.example.com mailman-bounces@example.com mailman-bounces@lists.example.com mailman-confirm@example.com mailman-confirm@lists.example.com mailman-join@example.com mailman-join@lists.example.com mailman-leave@example.com mailman-leave@lists.example.com mailman-owner@example.com mailman-owner@lists.example.com mailman-request@example.com mailman-request@lists.example.com mailman-subscribe@example.com mailman-subscribe@lists.example.com mailman-unsubscribe@example.com mailman-unsubscribe@lists.example.com 

Finishing up

# newaliases
# service apache2 restart
# postfix reload
# service mailman start

After some combination of the above and hopefully not forgetting anything–note my uncertainty there–mailing lists just started working! Go to: http://lists.example.com/mailman/admin/ and get started creating a test list to confirm everything is working.

Having, in the past, spent many frustrating hours trying to get some wireless card or some other piece of hardware to work with some binary firmware that cannot be examined or improved but is simply foisted on you, I’m really thankful to the team that is doing this work. Congratulations to them!

I’ve already successfully installed Squeeze numerous times with the Debian 6.0 beta installers. Give it a try!

1. Allow each team captain three opportunities over the course of the entire match to request an instant replay where any of the following are at issue:
• A goal was denied due to a penalty of any sort. (Think U.S. v. Slovenia.)
• The captain believes that a call or failure to call a handball, diving, or offsides was improper.
• A corner kick is denied where the captain believes the defender last touched the ball.
• A player is given a red card and the captain believes it was unfounded.
• The captain believes the ball did or did not cross the plane of the goal line and was improperly called.

The replay officials would require clear and convincing evidence of an error to reverse a call.

2. Have the clock kept by official timekeepers on the sideline with control of any scoreboard clocks. They stop the clock every time the ball crosses the plane of the sidelines and any time the official’s whistle blows and start the clock when the ball is back in play. This eliminates unpredictable stoppage time at the end of matches and also would probably allow the halfs to be shortened to 35 or 40 minutes while yielding the same amount of actual play.
3. Allow unlimited substitutions.
4. Give an automatic red card to players penalized for diving. They are removed from the match immediately and the side must complete the match without a substitution.
5. Make the goal 22 cm higher and 44 cm wider. (This adds one diameter of the ball on every side, which ought to lead to more scoring.)

Bonus idea: Forbid artificial noisemakers of any sort in the stadiums.

There you have it. Five simple suggestions that would, I think, greatly improve international soccer and which would resolve many of the greatest complaints among those who are interested in soccer, but not yet committed fans.

Install rsnapshot on both the remote machine and the backup server:

apt-get install rsnapshot

Save yourself a copy of the default config file if you ever need it:

cp /etc/rsnapshot.conf /etc/rsnapshot.conf.default

On the backup server I create an rsnapshot user:

groupadd -g 3500 rsnapshot
useradd -u 3500 -s /bin/false -d /home/rsnapshot -m -c "rsnapshot" -g rsnapshot rsnapshot

Then prepare the backup server to be able to automatically access the production server using ssh keys:

cd /home/rsnapshot
su -m rsnapshot

With the previous command you become the user rsnapshot on the shell. You could confirm this with:

whoami

The next few commands must be run as user rsnapshot!

Create the keys:

ssh-keygen -t rsa

Hit enter on all prompts. It is important that you do not enter a passphrase otherwise the backup will not work without human interaction, so again hit enter. In the end two files are created: /home/rsnapshot/.ssh/id_rsa and /home/rsnapshot/.ssh/id_rsa.pub.

Now copy over the public key you just created to your production server:

ssh-copy-id -i /home/rsnapshot/.ssh/id_rsa.pub root@yourdomainname.example.com

If your production server to be backed up happens to run Ubuntu, as one of mine did, then you should login to the production server and then do away with it’s silly refusal to have a password for root with:

sudo passwd root

and then you’ll have no trouble with the prior step which copies the public key of the user rsnapshot to the file /root/.ssh/authorized_keys on the production server yourdomainname.example.com.

You can confirm that this worked with:

ssh root@yourdomainname.example.com

That should have logged you in as root on your production server without requiring you to enter a password. Now, on the one hand, this is exactly what we were trying to do, but on the other hand, we don’t want to leave it like this or anyone who gets access to the rsnapshot user on your backup server could be root on your production server. Not good. So next we fix that by taking a look at /root/.ssh/authorized_keys. It should look similar to this:

ssh-rsa AAAAB3NzaC1yc2EAAAABIwAAAQEA[...]/zkctw== rsnapshot@backupservername

Now prepend from="1.2.3.4",command="/root/validate-rsync" just before “ssh-rsa” separated only by a single space, all on a single line like so:

from="1.2.3.4",command="/root/validate-rsync" ssh-rsa AAAAB[...]/zkctw== rsnapshot@backupservername

where “1.2.3.4″ is your backup server’s numeric IP address. This change means that user rsnapshot can only login from your backup server’s IP address and can only run a single command, “validate-rsync”. We must now create the file /root/validate-rsync with the following content:

#!/bin/sh

case "$SSH_ORIGINAL_COMMAND" in
*\&*)
echo "Rejected"
;;
*\(*)
echo "Rejected"
;;
*\{*)
echo "Rejected"
;;
*\;*)
echo "Rejected"
;;
*\<*)
echo "Rejected"
;;
*\`*)
echo "Rejected"
;;
*\|*)
echo "Rejected"
;;
rsync\ --server*)
$SSH_ORIGINAL_COMMAND
;;
*)
echo "Rejected"
;;
esac

Special thanks to Troy Johnson for this script. Now make the script executable:

chmod u+x validate-rsync

You should now be setup on the production server and can logout and go back to your rsnapshot user on the backup server. Become root on the backup server so you can edit the rsnapshot configuration file, /etc/rsnapshot.conf which you can learn more about at this rsnapshot HOWTO. The main thing to know about this config file is that everything that looks like a space probably should be a TAB instead.

#I suggest the following changes: snapshot_root /home/rsnapshot/.snapshots/ logfile       /home/rsnapshot/rsnapshot.log # user rsnapshot can't write to /var lockfile      /home/rsnapshot/rsnapshot.pid # user rsnapshot can't write to /var ssh_args      -o BatchMode=yes  #Uncomment the following: cmd_cp        /bin/cp cmd_ssh       /usr/bin/ssh cmd_du        /usr/bin/du interval      monthly 3  #Choose some directories to exclude: exclude       /home/user/JunkThatIDontWant exclude       /cdrom exclude       /proc exclude       /sys exclude       /tmp  #And choose some directories to backup: backup        root@yourdomainname.example.com:/home/user/ yourdomainname.example.com/ backup        root@yourdomainname.example.com:/etc yourdomainname.example.com/ backup        root@yourdomainname.example.com:/var yourdomainname.example.com/ backup        root@yourdomainname.example.com:/usr/local yourdomainname.example.com/

Now you probably put some spaces where there were supposed to be tabs, so check your config file's syntax with this test:

rsnapshot configtest

Once it comes back with "Syntax OK" you are ready to try your first hourly snapshot. Become the rsnapshot user and give it a try with:

cd /home/rsnapshot
su -m rsnapshot
rsnapshot -V hourly

This will give verbose output so you can see that something is really happening. Once you get an hourly snapshot or two to complete successfully, you should automate this with cron. As the rsnapshot user, type:

crontab -e

and choose your schedule, something like:

0 */4 * * * /usr/bin/rsnapshot hourly 50 2 * * * /usr/bin/rsnapshot daily 40 2 * * 6 /usr/bin/rsnapshot weekly 30 2 1 * * /usr/bin/rsnapshot monthly

which would do 6 hourly backups a day (once every 4 hours, at 0,4,8,12,16,20)
1 daily backup every day, at 2:50AM
1 weekly backup every week, at 2:40AM, on Saturdays (6th day of week)
1 monthly backup every month, at 2:30AM on the 1st day of the month.

And there you have it! You have automated remote backups of your production server using rsnapshot.

top -b -n 1 | awk '{if (NR <=7) print; else if ($8 == "D") {print; count++} } END {print "Total status D: "count}'

top - 11:53:48 up 5 days, 18:47,  1 user,  load average: 3.00, 3.00, 3.00 Tasks: 132 total,   1 running, 131 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie Cpu(s):  0.2%us, 12.3%sy,  3.8%ni, 83.3%id,  0.2%wa,  0.0%hi,  0.0%si,  0.0%st Mem:   2075620k total,  1773432k used,   302188k free,   395648k buffers Swap:  2650684k total,      716k used,  2649968k free,  1165208k cached    PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND  8548 root      20   0  2296  684  576 D    0  0.0   0:00.00 find  8675 root      20   0  2296  684  576 D    0  0.0   0:00.00 find 32070 root      20   0  2296  688  576 D    0  0.0   0:00.00 find Total status D: 3 tempe:~# killall -9 find 

After that, the load average immediately began dropping back to normal.