Tricks Tips Tools | bitpost.com/news

Cyrus IMAP + Squirrelmail + Avelsieve working again!

Avelsieve is a really nicely done web interface for email rules. It is a plugin for Squirrelmail, a tried-and-true webmail client, that works with a cyrus IMAP server, another old dog that is a nightmare to install but gets the job done no matter what it is.

The system has been handling my email for years, but for the past few months, I haven’t been able to get Avelsieve to edit my email rules. It’s very picky about compatibility. Today I finally dug in and fixed that. Apparently cyrus updates broke avelsieve, but there’s a workaround. Turned out to be one line in the avelsieve config file, updated as follows:

# MDM Will this fix the problem of not decoding scripts?
# MDM YES!  IT DOES!  Thank goodness.
# see http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.mail.squirrelmail.plugins/14106
#$avelsieve_disabletls = false;
$avelsieve_disabletls = true;

Yay! My pretty and powerful email rules are back!

Comments (1) | Thursday, September 25, 2008 [ avelsieve * cyrus imap * squirrelmail * whitelist ]

squirrelmail 1.5.1 un-hard-masked, finally FAST!

I’ve been banging my head trying to figure out why Squirrelmail is dog-slow retrieving headers from my cyrus imap server on large mail folders. Squirrelmail 1.15 has been hard-masked for a WHILE, gentoo only likes 1.4. I un-hard-masked it (add it to package.unmask AND package.keywords), and it looks rough, but GREAT… FAST! Finally apparently using squatter indexes and/or imap SORT… javascript/ajaxy… will keep tweaking it…

Comments | Tuesday, September 23, 2008

Apache mod_deflate is stomping on SSI

I turned on mod_deflate, but I clobbered SSI, breaking boxcarkid.com.

Config files that still need tweaking:

/home/m/config/apache2/machine_globals.conf
/home/m/config/apache2/virtualhosts/boxcarkid.conf

Also upgraded my StartCom certificate, pretty easy! Thanks guys!

Comments | Friday, September 19, 2008 [ apache * mod_deflate * ssi ]

WordPress theme, css and plugins now compatible with IE7

What a horrible trial-and-error life web designers lead! After too much hair-pulling, this site now looks as it should on IE7. Issues:

IE7 does not like div tags between li tags – so I reworked everything to oblige
IE7 requires some hacking with padding and margin to get my rounded corners css to work

I hope I never have to touch it again (but I will).

This site now has pretty valid CSS and XHTML, and resizes pretty well too. Try it out with Ctrl+ to increase text size, Ctrl- to decrease. Change the resolution. Stretch it, pull it, bend it – better than Stretch Armstrong! (sorry, no green goo though…)

Comments | Saturday, August 30, 2008 [ css * liquid html * rounded corners * wordpress ]

Apache not happy, time for an [emerge world] bump

After bumping up 60+ packages (probably about half or a third the total), apache started spawning several processes, each taking 10-15% CPU, until my poor little server box was kswapd’ing its little guts out. It was heartwrenching seeing that red drive light on constantly. Poor little thing.

I did an emerge world and rebooted, and this baby is absolutely humming now. load average 0.00 :>

UPDATE: eventually Apache is still hogging things. Looks like gentoo changed the config settings for the Apache memory manager (MPM). There are several choices, looks like I want the “worker” variant. To get it, add APACHE_MPMS=”worker” to [/etc/conf.d/apache2], and update httpd.conf settings to specify performance settings. The defaults are here: [/etc/apache2/modules.d/00_mpm.conf]. I am attempting to adjust them to optimal values in my [machine_globals.conf] file.

The gory details follow. Sure it’s a lot of change, but once again, gentoo is the ultimate power tool. (continued…)