[Preston] Bad Debian day

[Dougie Nisbet]

1. I'm hoping to get along to the meeting tonight. Anyone like a lift from St 
Anne's area? I don't mind detouring (is that a word?) via Blackpool as long 
as it doesn't involve going much further than Squires Gate.

2. Any cheaper or freer parking that big one opposite the Grefriars? It 
swallowed a suspiciously large number of shiny coins the last time I used it. 
I'm not too familiar with Preston so I just used it as it's easy and it was 
mentioned on the map on the plug website.

3. I've got a few more CDs and their associated Linux mags that anyone's 
welcome to. I've got Mandrake 9.1 and 9.2 on cover CDs and the magazines that 
might suit someone wishing to do a clean install. 

4. I'm having a pretty yucky time on re-building and re-organising my servers. 
Specifically at the moment my problem is this: I've just rebuilt my main 
server which was previously running sarge/testing with some bits from 
unstable. What, you may be asking, was I thinking installing parts of 
unstable on my main server. Same question I asked myself, and since 
downgrading in Debian is a bit tricky I decided to spend a pleasant afternoon 
re-installing and getting a nice stable(ish) sarge install. (My plan is to 
keep it at 'stable' once sarge freezes which shouldn't be a million miles 
away). The pleasant afternoon's work has lasted nearly three days and I'm all 
tantrumed out. Things are nearly back to normal, but I have a problem that I 
can't work out. Does anyone else use IMAP to get mail from a linux PC? Mrs 
Dougie runs Windows 98SE on her PC, and uses The Bat! as her e-mail client. 
Before the upgrade she'd connect using IMAP4 in The Bat! to port 143 on the 
debian server and everything was hunky dory. But not now. Here's what I'm 
getting in /var/log/auth.log:

Feb  3 22:35:28 nick imapd[12714]: Login disabled user=roberta auth=roberta 
host=tbird3.homelan [192.168.1.3]
Feb  3 22:35:45 nick imapd[13152]: Login disabled user=roberta auth=roberta 
host=tbird3.homelan [192.168.1.3]
Feb  3 22:35:51 nick imapd[13152]: Login disabled user=roberta auth=roberta 
host=tbird3.homelan [192.168.1.3]

I have set a passwd on roberta's account and tested I can login or telnet to 
it. I've used apt-get install uw-imapd to install the imap stuff. From what 
I've read in the docs it might be something to do with encryption and clear 
text passwords. Whenever I see this stuff I flinch as encryption always does 
my head in (Debian forces you to use ssh instead of telnet for instances). I 
tried copying a load of stuff into /etc/ssl	(whatever that is) from my backup 
and crossed my fingers - that didn't help. I've compared my /etc/services 
and /etc/inetd.conf with my backup, tried different accounts, tried different 
connection methods/ports on the windows PC, with no success. I really don't 
have much of a clue what I'm doing here. It used to work, and now it doesn't. 
As far as I can tell the version of uw-imapd is the same as it was. Should I 
try connecting using POP3? I'm only using IMAP4 because that seemed to 'just 
work'. If anyone's any experience of setting this sort of thing up I'd 
welcome any tips.

5. One of the reasons I've been running my mail-server (nick) at testing/
unstable is because I run spamassassin on it, and the version I wanted to run 
(2.61) isn't available in stable. I've been looking for some time for some 
virus-scanning/spam checking combo that I can run. I've found that most 
anti-virus scanning is a bit bleeding edge and whenever I've had a go in 
setting it up it's been a headache. (amavis, mailscanner etc). I had 
mailscanner working once with f-prot but it was a bit of a hack, and when I 
tried to set it up again recently I ended up with a mail loop that left me 
dazed and confused. I've recently started using exiscan (which is nice) but 
for some reason it always has 17 processes running. It still feels a bit of a 
hack. So if anyone has any suggestions on good STABLE easy to maintain mail 
server/spam checking/virus checking combinations I'd be interested. I'm using 
exim/procmail/exiscan/spamassassin/clamav at the moment. Spamassassin is the 
only part of that that I feel ok about.

6. Inexplicable hardware failures. I rebuilt 'icarus' (my Crash 'n burn' 
server which despite its name until recently was rock steady running Debian 
'unstable'. Now it freezes whenever I try a new clean install. So, what's 
changed. The hard drives, mainly, but they were from other working machines 
so I thought they'd be ok. I get inexplicable freezing at various points into 
the install, nothing consistent. I've removed the SCSI card, the 2nd hard 
drive. I've tried setting the disk partition as EXT2 instead of EXT3, I've 
done bad-block checks agains the partition (yawn), and last night I left 
memtest86 running overnight to check the memory. All that's in the machine is 
a floppy drive, NIC, graphics card and the mobo/cpu/memory. and a 
soundblaster gold that's been in there for ever. I'm pretty much out of 
ideas. It's a PIII slot 1 440BX mobo that's been very very reliable over the 
years. I suppose I should now try removing the soundcard, but I doubt that's 
the problem. I was trying to put a 30GB/40GB hard drive combo in there as a 
system/backup pair, but currently I'm trying it with just the 30GB. It does 
point a bit at the hard drive doesn't it - I'll try swapping that. But as I 
say, the hardrive came out of another reliable machine. I'm pretty much out 
of ideas.

Must go. Still got some hair left that needs tearing out.

Dougie