Christopher Haas has written what might be the best tutorial I’ve ever run across for linux. It’s accurate, complete, breaks things down into manageable steps, and explains what you’re doing while you do it. It also contains several “check” steps, where it shows you how to check your system logs to see if the previous steps went as planned.

This is what a tutorial should be!

Howto: ISP-style Email Server with Debian-Etch and Postfix 2.3

If you’re trying to get email up and running on your debian VPS, this is the place to start. It shows how to use postfix and dovecot, with secure login, spam and virus checkers. Everything you need for POP or IMAP.

Take note of the warning up front about the proper naming scheme for your host. Almost every VPS image that I’ve run across uses a default naming in /etc/hosts and /etc/hostname that is incorrect for proper configuration of postfix (or even apache!). This article explains why and what to do about it:

Naming Issues with Linux and xBSD

Happy installing of email!

The Setup

Ubuntu 7.04, Apache2.2, MySQL, PHP5, running on a VPS from slicehost.com. All installed from apt-get, all working fine. Gave MySQL root user a password, the login to MySQL from the command line works just fine.

Installed phpmyadmin from apt-get, everything’s cool, it sets up the appropriate symbolic links so that www.MYURL.com/phpmyadmin points the browser to the phpmyadmin login page.

The Problem

I go to www.MYURL.com/phpmyadmin, and I get the login page. I enter the MySQL user root + password. Sometimes it logs in. Sometimes it bounces me back to the login with no warning. Sometimes it redirects me to the login page and says “root”@”localhost” not permitted [password=YES]. Sometimes it’s the same warning, but with [password=NO], even though I have entered a password.

Sometimes, if I click login 3 or 4 times after it keeps redirecting me, I actually get let in to phpmyadmin. As soon as I do anything requiring privileges (create new user, create new database), I get bounced back to the login page again.

Troubleshooting

Here’s what I tried to fix it

1) Tried all browsers at my disposal (OSX: Firefox, Opera, Safari, Camino; Windows: IE6, IE7). Same problem with all.

2) Assumed it was a cookie issue. Dumped all cache and cookies on my browser, reset safari, relaunched apache2, tried again. Same problem.

3) Same as step 2, but also did a shutdown -r of the entire server, just in case. Old habits die hard.

3) Sacrificed male goat by the light of a full moon. Sticky fingers, but still no persistent login.

Nothing worked.

The Solution

Turns out, in order to run phpmyadmin with php5 on a 64bit ubuntu machine, you need to have a little package installed called php5-mcrypt. It’s not listed in the dependencies, so if you just use apt-get, it gets left behind.

sudo apt-get install php5-mcrypt


the conclusion

aaaarrrrrgh.

Let the record show that it was at this precise moment in time that I switched from Ubuntu to Debian for my server needs. If I wanted to shed this much stomach bile on figuring out required dependencies, I would strap on a pocket-protector and go join the gentoo geeks. At least then I know it’s up to me.

Enter the brand new hotness, VPS. Basically, you buy a slice of a server, and it runs under a virtualization host (Xen seems to be everybody’s girlfriend these days). You have a chunk of harddrive, you install your own operating system and build it out in whatever way you want. You get a guaranteed minimum amount of RAM at your disposal, with the ability to spike over that amount if no one else on the server is using it.

Perfect. It’s not shared hosting with 3000 porn sites, it’s shared hosting with 4, 8, or 16 people, depending on the size of the slice you buy. Nothing they do can jack up your mojo, and you get to setup the server in whatever way seems good to you.

There are a lot of new hosting companies offering this kind of setup – I went with slicehost because their website just screams, “screw fancy designs, we’re too busy chrooting your awesome up onto our technologies, yo!”

And that’s what I want in a hosting company.