Friday, April 29, 2005

GPRS vs dial-up

Some back-of-the-envelope calculations about GPRS and analogue dial-up sparked by Russell ...

posted by guy at: 16:22 SAST | path: /general | permanent link

Monday, April 25, 2005

Thawte Notaries

A while ago I mentioned that three of us in the Systems section at Rhodes were enrolling as notaries in the Thawte Web of Trust. Well it's taken some doing but we're finally there.

We're now in a position to validate people's identities. Anyone at Rhodes is welcome to bring along their ID document and their Thawte ID and have it validated so that they can get e-mail certificates with their name on them.

posted by guy at: 15:53 SAST | path: /systems | permanent link

Saturday, April 16, 2005

Married

So now I'm married :-) to my best friend, Mici :-) There are photos and all.

And those of you who keep track of these things will know this is the second time I've broken my rule about not posting personal info to this blog. Both worthy occasions, both related to Mici because she's just so wonderful :-) I'll keep quiet now.

posted by guy at: 16:45 SAST | path: /general | permanent link

Wednesday, April 06, 2005

QMQP and SMTP

RUCUS is a big Qmail shop. They run Qmail as a mail server on one of their machines, and make use of QMQP to queue mail from their other machines. This avoids the need for a full-blown mail server package on all except the actual mail server and works very well when the QMQP server is running.

Unfortunately it's been helluva unstable recently and has been crashing a lot. This is irritating because you can't send mail from any of the machines (you've lost the benefit of a local queue). So what we need is another QMQP server to act as a backup in case the main one dies. A normal mini-qmail install supports this, but unfortunately there isn't a convenient place to house the backup QMQP server.

All this got me wondering whether one could do QMQP -> SMTP protocol translation and use a standard SMTP server instead. The backup MX server, for instance, which runs Exim and doesn't know diddly-squat about QMQP. Google didn't seem to think so, which bugged me.

So being JAPH I decided that I'd make one. It wasn't too difficult. It just required getting your head around netstrings and realising that Text::Netstring wasn't going to do what I needed it to do.

Believing this might be useful to someone else, the source code is available. It isn't terribly complicated and relies on the tcpserver from DJB's ucspi-tcp package to do networking. I think it honours the QMQP protocol fairly well.

So now I can run a QMQP to SMTP gateway on the QMQP client machine and use it to fall over when the QMQP server fails. It sort of defeats the idea of mini-qmail, but might help minimise the effects of a server crashing.

YMMV and all that.

posted by guy at: 12:27 SAST | path: /systems | permanent link