Stress and us

[Cross-posted on the FOSSEE Blog]
Don’t tell me I didn’t warn you, if you walk into our lab sometime and mistake it for a game zone in your neighbourhood. You are indeed in “the” lab. If you came looking for Prof. Prabhu you’ll have to return. You’ll only find PR vowing to see the end of baali, for having a nice time pawning him. You won’t find me around – I’m cloaked and busy creating havoc. Unless, of course, you are the seer KD. Watch your step extremely carefully or you won’t know when and how fuchmed’s GM hit you. And don’t dare venture anywhere near madrazr, jumping all around with a shockwave, unless you are capable enjoying some real nasty shocks. Well, the team is busy in one of it’s two SB sessions per day. SB (short for Stress Buster) sessions are intense 15 minute rounds of bzflag – 3D first person tank battle game.

Hope you didn’t start thinking, I’m just goofing off here, doing nothing at all. If it’s not already clear, SB sessions are exactly what they are called – Stress Busters. Just to refresh ourselves and get back to work, with greater force. What then, am I doing for the rest of my time?

Mainly I’ve been developing course content that we have been working on, called Software Tools, Techniques and Practices. I have been working on a session for elementary LaTeX and basic Linux tools. I’ve also been attending classes of Digital Control and trying to Python-ize the Matlab/Scilab code that the course uses.

But, that’s not all. I’ve helped a guy restore a Joomla site on Day-1. I screwed up a brand new installation of a server with some real skill; then expect to be screwed but get some encouragement with the words, “It was a good learning experience for us.” Seen a Debian server upgrade from Etch to Lenny in under 10 minutes. Installed an instance of twiki and struggled to configure it. Helped a Humanities Scholar with LaTeX. Attended a workshop on Instruction Design. Restored Qmail on an old Fedora 3 server. Goofed around in gimp, for a CD cover and a T-shirt design. Chipped in with bits, for mutating Ubuntu into “LivePython”. Did a bit of css and javascript tweaking… The list goes on!

Now, don’t you think we deserve the SB’s?

Filed under: College, Libre, Programming, Ramblings , bzflag, fossee, iitb, stress

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 , debian, mailman, postfix, virtual hosts