Category: Geek Stuff

My Qmail installation guide

A fresh Qmail installation on FreeBSD is something that i have to deal once a couple of years. It´s just one of those things that i could well live without, but the time will come again and usually i can’t remember of half of my previous installation…. this is my personal installation guide to do it faster and with less effort.

Why Qmail? Why FreeBSD? Well, if you come all the way into this dark corner of the Internet, you should know the answer to both… so moving on, this is a massive, uber-geek, fully comprehensive and detailed installation guide, so it takes time and some brain damage.

CAUTION: proceed at your own risk

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PHP Email validation function

My PHP email validation function nowadays is:

function isEmail($value, $network_validation = true) {

    // Create the syntactical validation regular expression
    // (broken in 2 lines for better readability)
    $regexp = "/^([_a-z0-9-]+)(\.[_a-z0-9-]+)*@".
              "([a-z0-9-]+)(\.[a-z0-9-]+)*(\.[a-z]{2,4})$/i";

    // Validate the syntax
    if(preg_match($regexp, $value)) {
        if (! $network_validation)
            return true;
  	 
        $tmp = explode('@', $value);
        $username  = $tmp[0];
        $domaintld = $tmp[1];
 
        // Validate the domain
        if (getmxrr($domaintld, $mxrecords) || checkdnsrr($domaintld, 'A'))
            return true;
    }
    return false;
}

This is for my own reference, maybe this is all messed up, so use it at your own risk.

Generate a self signed ssl certificate

To generate a self signed certificate without a password just need to issue 3 commands:

openssl genrsa -out server.key 1024
openssl req -new -key server.key -out server.csr
openssl x509 -req -days 365 -in server.csr -signkey server.key -out server.crt

server.key -> key
server.csr => certificate signing request
server.crt => certificate

If you want to have a password protected key file just add in the first command the des3 switch:

openssl genrsa -des3 -out server.key 1024

But remember that to use it, you will be prompted with the password challenge (not a very good ideia on an Apache restart…).

Qmail + Vpopmail – Rebuild maildirsize file

Let’s say some program or script that doesn’t support maildirquota was poking around with a user maildir and you need to recalculate the user maildirsize file (recalculate the quota), you just need to:

cd /home/vpopmail/domains/domain.com/user/Maildir
rm maildirsize
vuserinfo -Q user@domain.com

and, voilá a new and accurate maildirsize file!

EDIT

I did a very simple script that rebuilds the quotas system wide (yes.. it’s PHP, not in real man C or some other fashion language, but it works for me)

$vpopmail_bin = '/home/vpopmail/bin/';

$domains = dir('/home/vpopmail/domains');
while (false !== ($domain = $domains->read())) {
  if ($domain != '.' && $domain != '..' && is_dir($domains->path.'/'.$domain)) {
    $users = dir($domains->path.'/'.$domain);
    while (false !== ($user = $users->read())) {
      if ($user != '.' && $user != '..' && is_dir($users->path.'/'.$user)) {
        if (file_exists($users->path.'/'.$user.'/Maildir/maildirsize')) {
          unlink($users->path.'/'.$user.'/Maildir/maildirsize');
          exec($vpopmail_bin.'vuserinfo -Q '.$user.'@'.$domain);
        }
      }
    }
  }
}

DJB tinydns (djbdns)

FreeBSD comes with the venerable BIND (the Berkeley Internet Name Daemon) both for resolving hostnames and to publish own domain addresses (dns server). I don’t like it a bit…. it’s not fond to the Unix ways and principles at all, it’s big and monolithic, strange configuration file, bad security holes history, etc…

So, with a new box, comes the need to replace bind with djbdns. This is my howto on doing this in FreeBSD. Viewer discretion is advised as the level of geekness can leave brain damage…

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