Drew's Blog

I recently had the experience of setting up Postfix. It works really well, in my opinion; however, setting it up wasn’t the simplest for what I wanted. But, at least it was simpler than sendmail

Reading through several articles on the Internet, everyone was giving steps on how to setup postfix to handle e-mail for any FQDN (Fully-Qualified Domain Name). Well, we don’t want to be handling someone else’s e-mail, so we decided to set it up with authentication. All of the guides on setting up Postfix with SASL authentication are great and all; however, they don’t address the issue of, what if you want to receive mail as well. That’s a simple fix, but moreover, what if you have a service like mailman running? Mailman isn’t easily configured to authenticate against the SMTP server to send mail. So, the following are the configurations that I’ve come up with to solve all of these problems:

For the file /etc/postfix/main.cf

Now keep in mind, your values for some of the above WILL be different. This configuration is on a machine that’s running mailman as well (thus the /etc/mailman/aliases file).

And lastly, for SASL auth, edit the file: /usr/lib64/sasl2/smtpd.conf

Your lib64 directory may just be lib, depending on the architecture of your box. All of these edits were made a 64-bit Fedora 12 machine, but they should work for every machine.

And last note. After all of the edits have been made, make sure to restart postfix and restart saslauthd with the following:

/etc/init.d/postfix restart
/etc/init.d/saslauthd restart

For questions on what some of the postfix settings mean, you can check out one of the following:

postconf man-page by running “man postconf” or visit http://www.postfix.org/postconf.5.html

Postfix Documentation at: http://www.postfix.org/documentation.html

Postfix HowTo’s at: http://www.postfix.org/docs.html

Postfix is definition the easiest MTA I’ve ever had the pleasure of working with, as far as configuration goes. I hope this helps

I found this very useful article on running DBDesigner 4 on Fedora 8, here. I followed the directions and found it to work on Fedora 11 and Fedora 12. I’m sure it’ll work for just about any distro, so I’m just reposting the directions here as I find it to be a very useful program.

Do not use the original DBDesigner4 download available on the fabForce.net website. Instead download the dbdesigner-fork package from here:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/dbdesigner-fork/

Once you have unpacked it. Edit the bin/startdbd_using_kernel2.6 script and remove the assume kernel 2.4.1 text:

Original file contents: LD_ASSUME_KERNEL=2.4.1 LANG=en_US.ISO8859-1 LD_LIBRARY_PATH=./Linuxlib/ ./DBDesignerFork

Edited contents: LANG=en_US.ISO8859-1 LD_LIBRARY_PATH=./Linuxlib/ ./DBDesignerFork

Save it and run it. It should all work as expected on Linux Fedora 8 or indeed any other modern distribution like Ubuntu, etc.

If you get a message similar to this:

Error: rpmdb open failed

You can fix it by running the following 3 commands: