Much as I hate messing around with the core files of cPanel (or of any other installation in fact), the cPanel installation has a bug that, although not a showstopper, is rather annoying. It results in me getting an email every few hours full of lines like this:
Could not determine list owner for xxxxx
This is caused by the update_mailman_cache script checking the names of the Mailman mailing lists and finding them wrongly named. This is easily fixed and I’m writing this as much as a reminder for myself, as to help others with the problem. Read the rest of this entry »

I spent the evening looking for some online storage. I currently make use of spare disk space on the hosting servers (for client storage) and Amazon S3 for backups (using Duplicity). Amazon is great for having one, unlimited account where I can back almost anything up, but it’s not so useful for clients as they need to have a login to up- and down-load files. And using space on the hosting servers has got to be about the most expensive way of handling storage needs. Time to check out some alternatives… Read the rest of this entry »

Thunderbird is one excellent mail client and sometimes it would be useful to have, at least, a look up into a calendar or such like. Mostly I like programs to do one thing and do it well, so an email client would handle email and a calendar would handle dates and appointments. But Thunderbird does have a plugin that handles calendar functionality and makes use of the Sunbird calendars so giving the option of using Sunbird or of using Lightning. There is just one small problem: I run 64 bit Thunderbird on a 64 bit system, and Lightning is only packaged for 32 bit. Read the rest of this entry »

After recently transferring a bunch of mailing lists from Majordomo to Mailman, one of the features that was missed by the users was the ‘–LongSig’ feature of Majordomo. Very useful, but not available in Mailman. Using the ‘–LongSig’ tag in an email meant that anything after that was removed by Mailman and this especially useful if you work in a company that insists on putting 20 lines of boilerplate disclaimers at the end of every email sent. On a mailing list, this can annoy people. Read the rest of this entry »

I don’t usually cover software releases on the blog, but some software is so good and well made that when it reaches a final release stage I can’t help shouting YaHoo and cracking a bottle of champers! Timo Sirainen has been working on Dovecot for nearly five years and has taken a perfectionist attitude towards the way it works. He’s spent the last six months refusing to release a final version and we’ve all watched as the release candidate numbering has crept up to hit rc23. A couple of weeks ago he chose Friday 13th to do the final release, and it has happened. Read the rest of this entry »