Noryungi's Journal: When in doubt, copy Slackware

The task: install ASAP a small mail server on a VMWare Virtual machine running SuSE Linux Enterprise 10 SP1. It's urgent.

One of my user soon goes to a client site to make a demo of our latest product. That product is supposed to offer several reporting options, one of which is email. So, the physical machine, running Windows XP, is supposed to receive email from the SuSE virtual machine.

The only problem is, SuSE is an over-engineered, byzantine piece of @&**!! And its default (POP/IMAP) server is Cyrus, which I have come to hate with a vengeance (the SMTP server is Postfix, and I have no problem with it). Basically, I spent an entire day fiddling with the Cyrus configuration, and not getting anywhere. That thing just sat there and did not do anything. After a while, I felt like jumping naked in a huge pile of thumstacks rather than deal with Cyrus ever again.

Usually, under SuSE, you are supposed to go through YaST (Yet another Stoopid -- and Stoopidly capitalized -- Tool) to install and configure everything... Except for Cyrus, which is NOT managed by YaST. Great. See, people, that's how you do it: "German engineering" at its best.

Did I mention this was supposed to be urgent? Like, it had to be done yesterday?

I was hoping Google would be able to help me. Nope. No relevant information, except some poor schmucks who have the same problem that I have. This is urgent. The user is almost breathing down my neck, starting to panic about his oh-so-important demo.

Then it hits me: what I'll call from now on "The Slackware Rule": "When in doubt, see how Slackware does it, and copy that" .

So, a POP mail server. Slackware uses a package of POPA3D as its default POP server.

This is the description of popa3d from Solar Designer, its programmer: "popa3d is a tiny POP3 daemon designed with security as the primary goal."... Hmmmm... Tiny, secure. What's not to like?

Downloading and compiling popa3d 1.0.2 under SuSE is done in a few minutes. The instructions contained in the "INSTALL" file are clear and simple. In a nutshell, you are supposed to edit the Makefile (only to uncomment a Linux-related line) and "params.h" (I configured the SuSE mail spool directory and the stand-alone daemon mode), compile and install.

I also had to create a small script in /etc/init.d to make sure popa3d was launched each time the machine was restarted. The default Postfix configuration, which uses /var/spool/mail/ worked perfectly with popa3d, without any modifications. And, the best part: popa3d does not require any configuration file! Now, that's what I call tiny, and convenient!

About 30 minutes of work later, my user reported that email was now working between Outlook and the virtual machine. Mission accomplished! One less problem to deal with.

The moral of the story is:

1. SuSE is a piece of &@^**++!!
2. Slackware ROCKS! If you want another proof of this, using Slackware from the very beginning helped me compile requested software on UNIXes as different as AIX, Solaris and others. Slackware is the Linux distro that will teach you.
3. popa3d ROCKS!
4. When in doubt, see how Slackware does it, and copy that.

I feel like I can relax now, knowing that horrendous Cyrus thingie is behind me. Friday night, here I come!