It’s all in a day’s work

My main home server is a measly pentium II class machine running (now) on Debian Etch. Not the fastest machine but it works, uses little power and is cheap while setup from left-overs. Among other things it serves me my email when not at home using RoundCube Webmail. With the low-end hardware I am using it is key to keep it as fast and lightweight as possible. The server is behind a DSL connection at home so compression comes in handy as well.
Read the rest of this entry »

For a while I was not able to print from Windows XP via Samba with my Brother HL 2030 laser printer which is connected to one of my servers. I’m running debian Etch there and had upgraded some packages, including samba. The printer was listed in my SWAT samba status, but on windows I couldn’t find it.

In the end it seems that I was missing one statement in my smb.conf:

[printers]
comment = All Printers
path = /var/spool/samba
create mask = 0700
guest ok = Yes
printable = Yes
read only = No


The odd thing is, that when I look at the documentation, setting printable = Yes should have been enough. At least, that’s how I read it. But I guess I’m wrong since the read only = No helps (although you can’t set this parameter for a printer share using SWAT).

Some time ago I had some problems sending mail to one of our clients, something with their primary mailserver not accepting connections and a non-existent secondary mailserver. So I wanted to enable authenticated mail sending on my own mailserver.

It was quite easy to get it working, after finding some articles which I could use. The biggest problem was the jail Postfix was in so it couldn’t talk with saslauthd direcly.

I added the following in my main.cf

#SMTP Auth
smtpd_sasl_auth_enable = yes
smtpd_sasl_security_options = noanonymous
smtpd_sasl_authenticated_header = yes
smtpd_sasl_path = smtpd
smtpd_sasl_local_domain =
broken_sasl_auth_clients = yes


smtpd_recipient_restrictions = permit_mynetworks, permit_sasl_authenticated, reject_unauth_destination, reject_unknown_recipient_domain

And I created directory sasl and placed a smtpd.conf in there containing:

pwcheck_method: saslauthd
mech_list: plain login


And I changed /etc/default/saslauthd to use the suggested option (suggested in comment in the file itself):

OPTIONS="-c -m /var/spool/postfix/var/run/saslauthd"

Used articles:

• The first article I found on the subject
• A mailinglist post describing a problem I encountered (I didn’t use the suggested solution)
• A good article on howtoforge describing the final solution I used

Update 2008-05-15:
Today I ran into a problem after I did a package upgrade. I got the warning:

SASL authentication failure: cannot connect to saslauthd server: Permission denied

Seems some permissions where incorrect. I did a:

sudo chgrp sasl /var/spool/postfix/var/run/saslauthd
sudo passwd postfix sasl
sudo /etc/init.d/postfix restart


and that solved it. Why I didn’t get this before I don’t know, but well, this fixed it. Thanks to Jimmy who blogged about Debian and SASL as well.