sandip's blog

PHPlist using phpmailer, by default sets to send email with Content-Transfer-Encoding set to 8-bit. However, mail transport standards forbid lines longer than 998 characters and has to handle such non-compliant lines by breaking/folding them, or the next hop MTA (Mail Transfer Agent) might reject the message or truncate the lines.

The fix for the problem is to use "base64" or "quoted-printable" encoding, which will fold the lines in a way that can be undone by the recipient MUA (Mail User Agent).

If using phplist with phpmailer, the file to edit would be "admin/phpmailer/class.phpmailer.php", as below:

To manage/setup role based password authentication for postgresql database.

Modify "/var/lib/pgsql/data/pg_hba.conf" and include:

Save the below script and run:

You should now be able to connect using:

The below is specific to CentOS-5.4 and may work similarly with other distros.

• Additional packages required if not installed already:
  

  sendmail-cf
  m4
  make
  cyrus-sasl-plain

• Edit ”/etc/mail/sendmail.mc”:
  
  define(`SMART_HOST', `{smtprelay.domain.tld}')dnl
FEATURE(`authinfo',`hash -o /etc/mail/authinfo.db')dnl
• Create file ”/etc/mail/authinfo” with below contents and chmod 640:
  
  AuthInfo:smtprelay.domain.tld "U:{username}" "P:{password}" "M:PLAIN"
• Update the sendmail conf and db hashes:
  
  cd /etc/mail
make
• Restart sendmail for the new configs to pick up.
  
• Now mails sent to localhost is relayed via your SMTP provider.

A cron is run every 30 minutes to check on virus database updates via /etc/cron.d/drweb-update, which cause a slew of emails addressed to drweb and filling up mail queue, since drweb does not have a maildir.

To resolve, direct the output to /dev/null or to a log file instead... if you need to keep a watch on the updates.

Edit /etc/cron.d/drweb-update redirecting the output to a log file:

If you still want to deliver the output, this can be done by directing drweb mail to root via "/var/drweb/.qmail" or "/var/qmail/alias/.qmail-drweb" with "&root".

Recently, I noticed that the postgresql database partition had been filled up. The general advice is to export data, drop and recreate database and import the data back in, since this would save a lot of time and also reduce the database size comparatively.

Reference: optimize postgresql database size.

Not too sure, if I wanted to go the dump and restore route, so decided to vacuum and reindex instead.

To my surprise, I did regain about 70% of space running the full vacuum and reindexing the database.

• Full vacuum reduced the database size from 8GB to 4GB.
  
  vacuumdb -afzv | tee /tmp/vacuumdb.log
• Reindex then reduced further to 2.5GB.
  
  reindexdb -a | tee /tmp/reindexdb.log
• Total of 5.5GB space reduced with a full vacuum and reindex of the database.
  
• Check the vacuumdb.log for database optimization notices.
  
• It is also advised to reindex prior to vacuuming to further save on vacuum time.

PhpMyAdmin Error:

There are various reasons for this error. Several things to check are:

1. Edit config.inc.php file, and specify '127.0.0.1' (instead of any other value like 'localhost) for the $cfg['Servers'][$i]['host'] setting as follows:
   $cfg['Servers'][$i]['host'] = '127.0.0.1';

2. Check my.cnf file for the following entries:
   [mysqld]
socket=/tmp/mysql.sock
old-passwords

[client]
socket=/tmp/mysql.sock

   Only add the 'old-passwords' mentioned above if you are using an older version of PHP (PHP4).

3. Make sure that you do not have any older versions of MySQL installed that are conflicting.
   
4. Edit config.inc.php file, and specify the MySQL socket location (as seen in the above [mysqld] socket setting):

   For example, if your MySQL socket is /tmp/mysql.sock, find the line in config.inc.php that has the $cfg['Servers'][$i]['socket'] setting and change it to:
   

   $cfg['Servers'][$i]['socket'] = '/tmp/mysql.sock';

5. Set the connection mode to socket by changing $cfg['Servers'][$i]['connect_type'] to:
   
   $cfg['Servers'][$i]['connect_type'] = 'socket';

   If there is no such setting, simply add in the above line and re-try.

6. Add this entry to php.ini file (again changing the '/tmp/mysql.sock' to your actual socket location) and restart Apache:

   mysql.default_socket = "/tmp/mysql.sock"

7. Edit the config.inc.php using the phpmyadmin /setup configuration page:

   In the setup screen, select the end-of-line character to be '\r' if you have a Macintosh, or '\n' for a Linux machine.

8. Disable SELinux if you are using it, and re-try. If it works, SELinux is the issue.
   
9. Run the following at your mysql prompt (using the standard mysql client):
   
   mysql> SELECT USER,HOST FROM mysql.user;

   Next, identify the user your are using for phpMyAdmin, and then run:
   

   mysql> SHOW GRANTS FOR 'user'@'host';

   Ensure that this userid has appropriate access rights.

UUID mounts in fstab is very useful if you have external usb hdd that is often connected and disconnected.

To find out the UUID of a disk drive, you can use the simple `ls` command as below:

Additionally below commands can also be used:

This is dues to bug in the default installation of qmail in handling local mails... such as mails to root@localhost where the qmail-local binary is not set with the right owner and permissions, as such mails are not able to be written to the spool located at "/usr/local/psa/handlers/spool".

The error in "/usr/local/psa/var/log/maillog" looks like below:

To resolve, change the owner and permission of /var/qmail/bin/qmail-local to reflect the same as qmail-remote.

Restart qmail:

This is useful when migrating servers and you want to reduce the DNS time to live for all domains.

Change the TTL on all domains to 5 mins (300 seconds) in the psa database.

Then update the zone files via:

Verify with:

Below is a clean method of updating, instead of doing a straight `yum update` which I have often done in the past and broken OS.