Good, Bad or Human?

Well, this could be called a post after ages, considering that most of previous posts have just been ‘news reports’. I have been wanting to make a post since long, but I probably lost it. I really am unable to write anything that I find worth posting [It does raise questions about the existence of this blog. I'm writing this, to answer that question to myself.]

This post is provoked by an act of sharing, an act of kindness, an act of goodness, that surprised me. This post isn’t about the act itself, but it’s about me being surprised. Why on earth should I (or anybody) be surprised, when someone is just being human? Aren’t human beings meant to be and feel human?

I wonder why people say, “this is a bad, bad world.” I find a lot of goodness and humanness around me. Unless I strain my memory really hard, I can only recall people who try to be as good and nice as they can be; People trying to be as human as possible. Either there’s something utterly wrong with my judgment of people or there’s something wrong with the general feeling that the world is a bad, bad place.

There’s one other possibility that just strikes me – I am so nice to people that, everyone else tries to be nice with me. I don’t think I am such a big deviation from the average. I’m just another goat, in the great herd.

And another one, I’m in a really special place, presently. I have been only to the special places. I have visited only the places that are at an extreme, far away from the ‘average’ place in the world. But, given I’m just another goat in the great herd, this is very unlikely. I am probably grazing at a random spot on the great grasslands.

Since these are ruled out, it boils down to either a wrong judgment or a wrong general feeling.

Coming to my judgment, I wouldn’t call myself an Oracle or the wise one, but I’m no dumb ass either. Well, taking the statistical route, the number of times I’ve had any real “nasty” surprises in dealing with people has been much lesser than the number of times things turned out nearly as expected. My judgment could, therefore, possibly given some credibility.

So, that leaves me with just one possibility. The idea that the world is a bad, bad place is not entirely true, if not completely absurd and outright wrong. The world is really a nice place, with “human” beings inhabiting it. The nasty surprises that you get, really are the surprises and not the general rule.

Filed under: Ramblings , bad, good, human, life, world

Postfix + Mailman for Multiple Domains.

Well, there are a hazaar tutorials on setting up Postfix and Mailman for Debian for a single domain. There were a few for doing that for multiple domains also, but nothing comprehensive, if I could say so. This link is pretty comprehensive and details all the steps for setting up Postfix for a single domain.
Here is all you’ll want to know about setting up Virtual domains in Postfix.

You only need to make a few changes for adding a second (or more) domain. You just need to add the virtual_alias_domains and add virtual_alias_maps. Here is a glimpse of how my main.cf looks:

myhostname = mail.abc.in
mydomain = abc.in
mydestination = $myhostname, $mydomain, localhost.$mydomain
myorigin = /etc/mailname
virtual_alias_maps =
hash:/etc/postfix/virtual-xyz,
hash:/etc/postfix/virtual-abc,
hash:/var/lib/mailman/data/virtual-mailman
virtual_alias_domains = xyz.in, mail.xyz.in

virtual-xyz and virtual-abc contain the virtual aliases for each domain. Note that Postfix expects hash files and hence you need to run postmap /etc/postfix/virtual-abc each time the file is changed, to keep the hash file in sync with the text file that you edit. Also, you need to run postfix reload, each time you make changes to main.cf or master.cf

Fairly straight forward, right? But it took me quite sometime to get it all right, since this was the first time I was doing anything with Mail Transfer Agents or the like.

Now, onto Mailman. Well the Installation Manual of Mailman, literally has it all. Here is a look at how my mm_cfg.py looks:

DEFAULT_EMAIL_HOST = 'abc.in'
DEFAULT_URL_HOST = 'mail.abc.in'
add_virtualhost(DEFAULT_URL_HOST, DEFAULT_EMAIL_HOST)
POSTFIX_STYLE_VIRTUAL_DOMAINS=['xyz.in']
add_virtualhost('mail.xyz.in', 'xyz.in')
MTA='Postfix'

The only trouble was to get mailing lists with same names on both the domains (which I couldn’t get working). I experimented with multiple mailman instances but that won’t work because the MTA can’t differentiate between the two instances of mailman. The alternative is probably to have two instances of postfix running too. But that I felt was like going too far, and gave up. [What if we wanted to add another domain to the list?!]

Also, I had to make a few alterations to the Apache file to allow access to the mailman pages without breaking the Zope redirection that was already set-up.

[Thanks to Shantanu and Vattam (and all the hazaar people using Postfix and Mailman and cared to document things for the sake of others, and of course Google)]

Filed under: Libre, Ramblings , postfix, mailman, debian, virtual hosts