May 2011 - ☩ Walking in Light with Christ - Faith, Computing, Diary ☩ Walking in Light with Christ

Archive for May, 2011

How to substitute default TinyMCE Joomla Content editor with JCE Content Editor

Tuesday, May 31st, 2011

This content editor is really awesome compared to the default editor TinyMCE. If you want to have an options rich content editor for Joomla, then this is the one for you 🙂
download JCE Content Editor here

After installing the JCE Joomla content editor in order to enable it as a default editor you need to go to the following location:

Site -> Global Configuration -> Default WYSIWYG Editor

There place on Editor TinyMCE and change it with Editor – JCE

Now go to edit some article, and you will see the difference in the editor 🙂

7. Add gallery Joomla capabilities with sigplus (Image Gallery Plus) and Very Simple Image Gallery

sigplus Image Gallery Plus is a straightforward way to add image or photo galleries to a Joomla article with a simple syntax. It takes a matter of minutes to set up a gallery but those who are looking for a powerful gallery solution will not be disappointed either: sigplus is suitable for both beginner and advanced users.

Tags: beginner, capabilities, Configuration, content, content editor, default editor, download, EditorThere, gallery, Global, global configuration, Image, image gallery, JCE, location, location site, matter, matter of minutes, nbsp, order, photo, photo galleries, place, Plus, site, solution, syntax, TinyMCE, way, WYSIWYG
Posted in Joomla, Various, Web and CMS | 1 Comment »

Install and setup Google maps plugin to embed Google maps on Joomla 1.5

Tuesday, May 31st, 2011

It’s a wise idea that every website has a address location map on it’s website, for that reason Google maps is just great.
To install Google maps capability to joomla one can use a plugin called Google Maps .

You can straighly download Joomla’s Googlemap plugin from here

Afterwards use Extension Manager to install the plugin e.g. follow:

Extensions -> Install/Uninstall (Choose File)

and click on Upload File & Install button.

To further enable and configure the Joomla Googlemap plugin you will have to go to the location:

Extensions -> Plugin Manager

Therein you will have to find and enable the Google Maps plugin which is to be found in the column named Plugin Manager
On my Joomla installation the plugin was located in the second page with modules, so if you don’t find the module on the listing with modules on the first page, make sure you scroll to the bottom of the page and click on Next button.

Therein in the list you will most likely notice Google Maps use the Enable button to enable it.

Next step is to configure the plugin, to do so press on the plugin name Google Maps
All configuration necessery here is to place Googlemaps API Key in the respective field (you will see it among config options).

Issuing a new Google Maps api key takes just few seconds, if you already have a gmail account just go to http://code.google.com/apis/maps/signup.html and take few seconds to issue the key.

You will get the key right on your gmail account after being issued (to repeat myself issuing takes few seconds so no worrier here).

Once having the key place it in the Googlemaps API Key field and configuring Address (which is one of the list of many options the plugin provides) you will be done with configuration.

To display a google map the location you just configured go to the Article Manager , select the article where you want the google mapslocation picture of your address to appear and type in the Article something like:

{mosmap|text='Exact street address location'|zoom='15'|zoomType='Large'|zoomNew='0'}

After you saved the article a very nice Google map showing you the location’s streets will appear on your web page in the article link where placed.
You can further conifgure a number of things related to the google maps just embedded into joomla, one thing you might want to play with is the zoom level.You see in below’s code is equal to 15, e.g. zoom=’15’
Set it to another one if you want to regulate your googlemaps zoom level.
For more thoroughful options take a look at the extensive plugin documentation and play with the many settings

Tags: address location, amp, article manager, Button, capability, config, config options, download, Extension, Gmail, gmail account, google, google map, google maps, Googlemap, Googlemaps, Install, installation, key, key field, level, location, ManagerTherein, Maps, necessery, page, plugin, plugin name, reason, street, type, upload, wise idea, worrier
Posted in Joomla, Various, Web and CMS | 2 Comments »

How to fix “imapd-ssl: Maximum connection limit reached for ::ffff:xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx” imapd-ssl error

Saturday, May 28th, 2011

One of the mail server clients is running into issues with secured SSL IMAP connections ( he has to use a multiple email accounts on the same computer).
I was informed that part of the email addresses are working correctly, however the newly created ones were failing to authenticate even though all the Outlook Express email configuration was correct as well as the username and password typed in were a real existing credentials on the vpopmail server.

Initially I thought, something is wrong with his newly configured emails but it seems all the settings were perfectly correct!

After a lot of wondering what might be wrong I was dumb enough not to check my imap log files.

After checking in my /var/log/mail.log which is the default log file I’ve configured for vpopmail and some of my qmail server services, I found the following error repeating again and again:

imapd-ssl: Maximum connection limit reached for ::ffff:xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx" imapd-ssl error

where xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx was the email user computer IP address.

This issues was caused by one of my configuration settings in the imapd-ssl and imap config file:

/usr/lib/courier-imap/etc/imapd

In /usr/lib/courier-imap/etc/imapd there is a config segment called
Maximum number of connections to accept from the same IP address

Right below this commented text is the variable:

MAXPERIP=4

As you can see it seems I used some very low value for the maximum number of connections from one and the same IP address.
I suppose my logic to set such a low value was my desire to protect the IMAP server from Denial of Service attacks, however 4 is really too low and causes problem, thus to solve the mail connection issues for the user I raised the MAXPERIP value to 50:

MAXPERIP=50

Now to force the new imapd and imapd-ssl services to reload it’s config I did a restart of the courier-imap, like so:

debian:~# /etc/init.d/courier-imap restart

That’s all now the error is gone and the client could easily configure up to 50 mailbox accounts on his PC 🙂

Tags: address right, client, config, configuration settings, configure, connection, courier imap, credentials, default log, Denial, denial of service, denial of service attacks, email accounts, email addresses, errorwhere, Express, ffff, file, imap connections, imap server, init, lib, limit, mail connection, mail log, mail server, Maximum, maximum connection, maximum number, outlook, outlook express, password, quot, segment, server clients, server services, Service, something, ssl services, text, username, value
Posted in Linux, Qmail, System Administration | 2 Comments »

A severe modern day society problem – THE NO IDENTITY issue

Saturday, May 28th, 2011

I don’t know how many of you have realized but today our societies, especially in the Developed and the second world are suffering from a serious problem that not-many still realize.

I’m talking about the problem of NO IDENTITY !
In this dynamic world, where technological changes happens every second and we are required to change our lifes and behaviour too rapidly suddenly this problem is becoming to become a real society peril.

Let me explain what I mean. Everyday, more and more people are using the Internet and all kind of technological gadgets (IPhones, Ipads, Tablets, Notebooks, desktop computers, E-readers you name it).

While we do constantly and daily are forced to adopt and become part of this virtual realities, be it social networks like Facebook , Xing , micro blogging online services like Twitter or even a simple user blog, most of the times we interact with this puvlic services or technology, we are supposed to come with a new identity.

Each of this services urge us to have a new login account attached to some kind of a new virtual reality one has to build.

Therefore the fake online identities, we constantly build which often are established around our dreams and wanna bees (something we’re not in real life) is constantly growing for each of us in every single day.

Most of the middle or hardcore Internet users today has already built an imaginary online image of ourselfs (in this number including myself).

To give an example I’ll again take facebook, as it is one of the most heavily used online fake identity generators today.
If one enters facebook and finds, some of his old a real life buddies from the past and matches the online identity the person has built for himself with the person we used to know, very often the difference is quite shocking.

Online almost everybody want to look cool the coolest to attract other people to himself. As people online look and does “judge” on one’s self competencies, qualities and goodness simply based on the outlook of how one presents himself.

Suddenly from normal sane persons million of persons are getting into the “self-presenting” competition which is getting, more and more severe with every new person that gets into a certain online community.
Most people online today in building this multiple false images of themselves, try to present only the their good positive sides, while the bad sides are often left behind.

Of course the definition of what is good and what is bad is dictated by the opinion of the masses, as most people prefer to be like the rest in order to escape of the terrible reality of being isolated from the society mass.

With all said if we consider that today’s families are highly disfunctional and the people’s relations are already quite fake and people are building this multiple-fale faced images even in real life makes things even more tragic.

Now to put everything above in order, let me go back to the NO IDENTITY ISSUE and what I mean by that.
Let me settle it down, during our interatction with technology and the Internet, little by little as a consequence of being exposed to all this identities and to our multiple newly created virtual identities one starts to loose his own self-established identity and starts constantly looking to have newer and newer identities.

The tendency is instead of look in yourself and be what you’re, that you follow some fake vague virtual dreams of million of people online who try to share and expose mostly things which are not created just to catch the attention.

The whole things with technology and Internet and the heavy use of it as a logical consequence, learns people to put multiple masks and hide behind the masks their own natural-self.
The story of masks is so bad that nowdays, many people put the masks of themselves created in the virtual reality pleading that this is their new self.

Many people today act without having any core philosophy, rules or a stable reason to step into.
Money, human lust, wordly vanity and popularity are the main drives for the masses.

Our Christian faith who has sustained us through the centuries and helped us grow a sane societies is starting to get into the back-stage, moved by some openly anti-christian hollywood super stars.

I believe the story of NO-IDENTITY corresponds well with buddhistic ideas (highly embraced by modern societies).
This buddhistic ideas preach that one must loose his identity to join the state of Nirvana (yet another anti-chrisitian philisophy).
The story of NO-IDENTITY is a story of constant unceasing change and lookup for something that never can be found. It’s like a endless prizeless race.

If many of us take the time and ask themselves the question “Who am I?”, I’m quite sure rarely there will be persons able to answer.
As I mentioned facebook earlier I would also suggest you to read Why open social networks like facebook and twitter are big evil
as it also quite much relates to the whole problem of people little by little loosing their identity.
Today many businesses and companies are trying to preach some cohesion through a shared people identity. From a normal sane person perspective this kind of ideology is seriously flawed, it even contradicts basic science.

Yet there is hope, I believe many people will realize sooner or later that this fakeness and a fake face images that we build daily doesn’t lead us anywhere and will stop the ideotism of trying to pretend different on the net.

Tags: bees, buddies, consequence, course, Desktop, desktop computers, dynamic world, everybody, fake identity, generators, goodness, hardcore, hardcore internet, identity, internet users, IPhones, login, mass, middle, new identity, notebooks, opinion, ourselfs, outlook, peril, person, single day, social networks, something, story, Tablets, technological changes, technological gadgets, technology, twitter, virtual realities, virtual reality, wanna, Xing
Posted in Everyday Life, Various | No Comments »

How to fix “The function split() is deprecated in PHP 5.3” on FreeBSD

Saturday, May 28th, 2011

If you’re installing some PHP based CMS/blog like (Joomla or WordPress) or some kind of template and suddenly you stumble on a error:

Deprecated: Function split() is deprecated in /usr/local/www/websitedomain/templates/youbizz/html/modules.php on line 78

In order to fix that the file which spits the error message, in my case modules.php needs to be modified and the split php function has to be substituted with explode on every occuring place.

I experienced this error on FreeBSD 7_2 with php version 5.3.5 installed from ports.
This simple fix works fine.

Tags: blog, cms, Deprecated, ERROR, error message, file, fine, fix, freebsd, function, kind, line, order, php 5, place, ports, template, usr, version, websitedomain, Wordpress, www, youbizz
Posted in FreeBSD, Joomla, System Administration, Wordpress | 4 Comments »

How to check full mail headers in Google’s Gmail, Yahoo Mail and Hotmail

Friday, May 27th, 2011

As an administrator of few company email delivery servers, I always had to debug problems related to emails unable to drop in Yahoo’s Mail and Gmail default mail Inbox

In that reason I always need to take a close look on Email headers to try to isolate email issues.
Most often the problems with messages unable to deliver in default in Inbox are with the 3 most popular mail services:

Gmail
Live Hotmail
Yahoo

Thus I decided to explain shortly here how one can check full email headers in Gmail and Yahoo public mail services in order to be able to later derive conclusions on what is wrong with his mail server outgoing messages.

1. How to view full email headers in Gmail

It’s pretty easy, though for some reason Google decided to place the button which shows the complete email message headers in a I would say not too user friendly location.

To view email headers, login to Gmail, click over some random email in Inbox or some of the other mail folders.
Once you can read the email and you see the Reply button located on the right,next to the Reply button there is the down triangle which while pressed will display a menu.

To view the full email headers one has to press over the Show original button presented in the menu. Below you see a sample screenshot on the menu with the Show Original button.

Show complete e-mail message headers and content in Gmail

2. How to view full email headers in Yahoo Mail Classic

I use Yahoo Mail Classic, as I like old stuff, Checking the full email headers there is a bit more intuitive than with Gmail.

To check email headers, just login to Yahoo mail, click over inbox, select an email message you would like to review as text.
Further on after the end of the email, you will see the Delete, Reply, Forward, Spam and Move buttons, right below this field of buttons there is the Full Headers blue text link with very small letters.

Here is a screenshot I’ve made of a sample opened mail. On the screenshot in right bottom you see the blue Full Headers button.

Yahoo Mail Cassic View Email Full Header

3. How to view full mail headers in Hotmail

In Hotmail checking the email, headers’s button position is very similar to Gmail’s, the only difference is the exact button which shows the Full Email header is named View Message source

In order to check Email headers in Hotmail, one has to click over a desired message, click once again on the down triangle near the Reply button and press over View Message source

Here is a screenshot showing the View Message source menu

Hotmail View Full email Headers

One small note to make here is that the View source headers buttons is currently not working on Epiphany browser running on Linux.
As always Microsoft are making stuff incompatible, if it’s not used with a Microsoft product ..

Tags: bit, Button, Cassic, content, default, default mail, Delete, delivery servers, difference, e mail, email, Forward, forward spam, Gmail, google, hotmail, location, login, mail folders, mail headers, mail inbox, mail message, mail server, mail services, menu, message headers, Microsoft, move buttons, old stuff, outgoing messages, public mail, reason, reply button, right, screenshot, show, stuff, text, yahoo mail
Posted in System Administration, Various | 3 Comments »

How to fix a broken QMAIL queue with queue-repair and qmhandle

Friday, May 27th, 2011

How qmail works, qmail queue picture :)

The aim of this small post is to give just a brief idea of how I fix my qmail server after breaking it or in case it is broken after mail bomb attacks, etc.

Most common cases when I break my qmail queue myself, are after I’m implementing some new patches and reinstall parts of the qmail server with a patched version of default qmail binaries.
On other occasions, I simply used the qmailctl to start or stop the server as a part of some routine tasks necessery for the administration of the qmail server.

Everybody who has already experience with qmail should have experienced, that qmail is very fragile and could break even with a simple changes, though if it works once it’s rock solid piece of mail servant.

Below I explain few ways I used through my days as a qmail sys admin to deal with broken or messed queues.

1. Fixing a broken qmail queue using automatic tools There are few handy tools which in most cases are able to solve issues with the queue, one very popular one isqueue-repair – check http://pyropus.ca/software/queue-repair/.
Installation of qmail-repair is dead easy, but it needs to be installed from source as no official debian package is available:

linux:/usr/local/src# wget http://pyropus.ca/software/queue-repair/queue-repair-0.9.0.tar.gz linux:/usr/local/src# tar -xzvvf queue-repair-0.9.0.tar.gzdrwxr-xr-x charlesc/qcc 0 2003-10-22 16:54 queue-repair-0.9.0/ -rw-r--r-- charlesc/qcc 268 2003-10-22 16:54 queue-repair-0.9.0/TODO -rw-r--r-- charlesc/qcc 1700 2003-10-22 16:54 queue-repair-0.9.0/CHANGELOG -rw-r--r-- charlesc/qcc 18007 2003-10-22 16:54 queue-repair-0.9.0/COPYING -rw-r--r-- charlesc/qcc 1098 2003-10-22 16:54 queue-repair-0.9.0/BLURB -rwxr-xr-x charlesc/qcc 26286 2003-10-22 16:54 queue-repair-0.9.0/queue_repair.py

To check if there are issues fixable within the qmail queue it’s as easy as:

linux:/usr/local/src# cd queue-repair-0.9.0 linux:/usr/local/src/queue-repair-0.9.0# ./queue-repair -t ... checking files... checking queue/mess files... checking split locations...

The tool will walk through the mail sub-directories containing mail queued files in /var/qmail/queue and will list any issues found.
It’s recommended that the qmail server is stopped before any queue modify operations are issued on the server:

linux:/usr/local/src# qmailctl stop ...

Further on in order to solve any found issues with the queue, there is the “-r”/repair option:

linux:/usr/local/src/queue-repair-0.9.0# ./queue-repair -r ...

Another tool which comes handy whether a repair of a messed qmail queue is needed is qmhandle – http://sourceforge.net/projects/qmhandle/

The use of qmhandle is also pretty easy, all one has to do is to follow the usual classical steps of a download the source & compile:

linux:/usr/local/src# wget https://www.pc-freak.net/files/qmhandle-1.3.2.tar.gz linux:/usr/local/src# tar -zxvvf qmhandle-1.3.2 ... linux:/usr/local/src# cd qmhandle-1.3.2

Once again it’s necessery that the qmail server is stopped via its init script before qmHandle tool is used, e.g.:

linux:~# qmailctl stop ...

There is a difference between qmail queue repair tool and qmail handle , while qmail queue-repair tool is used to fix improper permissions of queued files with the qmail queue, qmhandle ‘s application is to completely delete the stored mail contents of a broken queue.

Deleting all the qmail queue content is in some cases the only option to fix the queue.
Often such a drastic measure is required after a heavy mail server overload, let’s say a result of spammers or caused by virus infected mail users which send a massive amounts of spam mails.

Thus at many cases when queue-repair was unable to solve a queue mess, I use qmhandble and sacrifice all the queued emails by completely wiping them out like so:

linux:/usr/local/src/qmhandle-1.3.2# ./qmhandle -D ...

Above command would eradicate all queued emails. Hopefully after the qmail server gets launched again with qmailctl start all the mail server operations should be back to normal.

Note that the use of qmhandle’s queue delete capabilities is pretty dangerous, if you forgot to stop the qmail server before issuing the above command!

Note that in order to use both qmHandle and queue-repair tools you will need to install python interpreter as both of the tools are written in python.

To check what is currently in the queue in Qmail, there are also native tools available, as you should probably know if you have dealt with qmail, e.g.:

debian:~# qmail-qstat debian:~# qmail-qstat messages in queue: 2 messages in queue but not yet preprocessed: 0

Often when there are problems with Qmail and more specificly with qmail server queue the qmail-qstat command does show messages in queue, however when an attempt to check what kind of messages are in the queue with qmail-qread no messages are shown, for instance below you see an example of that, even though qmail-qstat claims 2 messages are in the queue, qmail-qread is unable to list the messages:

debian:~# qmail-qread debian:~#

If all is fine with qmail queue above’s qmail-qread command should have returned something similar to:

debian:~# qmail-qread 26 May 2011 07:46:47 GMT #659982 3517 <hipo@www.pc-freak.net> remote somemail@gmail.nl 26 May 2011 07:46:47 GMT #659983 3517 <hipo@www.pc-freak.net>

2. Fixing qmail queue manually This is very dangerous initiative, so before you try anything, make sure that you know what you’re doing, the possibility that you make the situation worst if you attempt to tamper manually the qmail queue is quite high 🙂

However if you’re still convinced to try fixing it manually, take a look at /var/qmail/queue it’s very likely that there are permission issues with some of the queued files, in order to fix the situation it’s necessery that the following directories:

/var/qmail/queue/mess/ /var/qmail/queue/remote/ /var/qmail/queue/bounce /var/qmail/queue/info

gets explored with midnight commander / mc or some kind of convenient file explorer.

If there are queued files owned by users different from qmailq and user group qmail , for instance if owned by the root user, a simple chown qmailq:qmail to the wrong permissions file, should be able to resolve the issues.

Apart from all I explain above, there are many other ways suggested online on howto clean a qmail queue, one very popular one is using James’s qfixq shell script.

This script as of this very date is not working on Debian based systems, the script is dedicated initially to run on Fedora and Redhat based Linuces

Moreover myy experience with qfixq was never successful.

One very important note which is often a cause of many problems, is always make sure you stop and start the qmail server with an interval of at least of 10 seconds.

I’ve managed many servers which after an immediate (undelayed) qmailctl stop and qmailctl start was unable to run the whole engine of the qmail server (and either email sending or email receiving was not properly working) afterwards.

In that cases many weird behaviours are common, consider this seriously if you deal with the qmail-queue, it might happen that even if you have fixed your qmail queue, after a restart the qmail might breaks up.
I’ve experienced this kind of oddities numerous times, thus when I do changes to qmail I always make sure I restart the server a couple of times (at least 5 times 😉 ) always with a good delay between the HUPs.

And as always with qmail prayer is always needed, this server is complex, you never know what will happen next 🙂

Tags: aim, automatic tools, binaries, BLURB-rwxr-xr-x, ca software, COPYING-rw-r--r-, debian package, default, download, everybody, handy tools, init, Linux, mail bomb, mess, necessery, new patches, occasions, option, package, piece, python, qcc, qmailctl, queue, queues, quot, repair, rock, routine tasks, script, servant, simple changes, software queue, tar gz, tool, wget, zxvvf
Posted in Linux, Qmail, System Administration | 3 Comments »

How to enable Domain Keys (DKIM) in Qmail toaster based mail server install on Debian Linux

Wednesday, May 25th, 2011

Qmail dkim domain keys logo

Recently the Emails sent by one of the Qmail mail servers running on a Debian host started suddenly delivering in Spam folder in both Gmail.com and yahoo.com public mail services.

This is pretty nasty as many of the websites which used the local qmail server to deliver emails concerning subscriptions and other kind of services provided by the websites started ending in Span and thus many of the users who used their Yahoo Mail account and Google Mail – gmail accounts was unable to read emails mailed by the various websites forms and scripts which were sending emails.
You can imagine the negative effect all this “minor” mail issues had on website visitors count and the overall websites functionality.
To come up with some kind of solution to this mail issues, I did quite a lot of research to understand if Yahoo and Google Mail services has some kind of mail server delist form or some reporting service where one can delist a specific mail server as a spammer one or get some kind of help, but unfortunately it seems neither google nor yahoo has any kind of web based way to remove hosts or ip addresses of legit mail servers who has mistakenly been recognized as spam servers.

During my efforts to find a solution to the situation I red a lot of posts and forums online as well as Google’s Bulk Sender Guidelines, none if it was too helpful though.

The QMAIL server had a proper:
1. MX Record 2. TXT SPF records 3. PTR Record 4. There are proper correct mail message headers 5. Proper mails charset and encoding 6. The mail server IP is not listed anywhere in any mail blacklists (e.g. www.mxtoolbox.com/blacklists.aspx / spamhaus.org) 7. A correct SMTP greeting which matched the mail server domain name

The only thing which was missing on the mail server (checked against Google’s Bulk Sender Guidelines) was a properly configured DKIM and Domainkeys.

Thus in order to get around the situation I went the way and configured the qmail server to include and send in the mail header also Domain Keys

In this article I will briefly explain step by step how I configured Domain keys (DKIM) signing of my mails:

There are few ways domain keys signing can be implemented with Qmail.

1. By patching qmail binaries to support domain keys signing

I wanted to omit any interventions concerning the well running qmail install so I decided not to go this way.
Plus there are plenty of add-ons for qmail and as I have no time to test them the idea not to temper the existing qmail installation looked wise to me.
2. Use a wrapprer script around qmail-remote that invokes externally domainkeys binaries

This kind of solution was fitting me better and therefore I took this route to enable my qmail DKIM signing.

There are few approaches one can take described online:

Use a perl script wrapper which does does the DKIM signing (http://manuel.mausz.at/coding/qmail-dkim/)

I tried using the qmail-dkim-0.2.pl wrapper script following the exact steps described to be fulfilled to enable my outgoing mails dkim signature, however for some reason after substituting the qmail-remote with qmail-dkim.pl and setting the proper permissions, my outgoing mails failed completely and each mail I sent was returned back by the qmail MAILER-DAEMON

Use a bash shell script wrapper in combination with libdomainkeys‘s with a Mail-DKIM-0.39 .

I gave a try to this approach and thanksfully it worked after a bit of struggle to tune it up.

Here is what exactly I had to do to in order to have the domain keys signing to work using the above described qmail-remote.sh shell script wrapper

1. Install openssl related required debian packages

debian:~# apt-get install openssl libcrypt-openssl-rsa-perl libcrypt-openssl-bignum-perl libmail-dkim-perl ...

2. Create necessery directories and RSA key pairs for DomainKeys

debian:~# mkdir -p /etc/domainkeys/mydomain.com debian:~# cd /etc/domainkeys/mydomain.com debian:/etc/domainkeys/mydomain.com# openssl genrsa -out rsa.private_default 768 debian:/etc/domainkeys/mydomain.com# openssl rsa -in rsa.private_default -out rsa.public_default -pubout -outform PEM debian:/etc/domainkeys/mydomain.com# ln -sf rsa.private_default default debian:/etc/domainkeys/mydomain.com# touch selector debian:/etc/domainkeys/mydomain.com# echo 'default' >> selector

Where mydomain.com is the mail domain I need the DKIM signatures for.

I have written a small shell script which automates the task of adding new domainkeys directories and generating the RSA keys with openssl, you can download my generate_qmail_domainkey_rsa automator script here

3. Set proper permissions and owner to /etc/domainkeys directory

debian:~# chmod -R 0600 /etc/domainkeys debian:~# chown -R qmailr:qmail /etc/domainkeys

4. Generate public domain key for DNS TXT records

debian:/etc/domainkeys/mydomain.com# grep -v ^- rsa.public_default | perl -e 'while(<>){chop;$l.=$_;}print "k=rsa; t=y; p=$l;n";'

“k=rsa; t=y; p=MHwwDQYJKoZIhvcNAQEBBQADawAwaAJhAMlDcYMrpWP9ouQOlFVtCHcFY
+gxrSQ6SegYeP4eeG7NECT/3jBqDtxANIVhaS9ASkEO4yNisGu4yX/DRclTm
nPWknoDtCDiD7IFEzT37qn1JLzcuknTncmFBFMDRUJq6wIDAQAB;”

The above key is used in next step 5 to set it as a TXT DNS record.

5. Create the DNS records in Name server

With BIND DNS server you need to place a records like:

_domainkey.example.com. IN TXT "k=rsa; t=y; o=-;" default._domainkey.example.com. IN TXT " p=MIGfMA0GCSqGSIb3DQEBAQUAA4GNADCBiQKBgQC2RkvFHbhqM/bVbb kBtZ1cZUSYcjC4q+PWjd1tFopT+HXXR9Ctx7FZ1guX5fGboiwYmhCYdVroI KRM3I48/YyQoXxtn3iYZ086v8BHaNtkcBMY+68JeEQ3K0WQkbqQXp/tsnLY SQW1yXiEo9CywxVdpwH+OY94HxK4fAbw6V11cwIDAQAB"

! The above p= key specified is the one generated in step 5.

6. Download and compile & install Mail-DKIM-0.39 ‘s perl extension

As of time of writting latest Mail-DKIM is ver. 0.39, however it’s a good idea to check and install the latest available version available on http://www.cpan.org

a) Download Mail-DKIM

debian:~# cd /usr/local/src debian:/usr/local/src# wget https://www.pc-freak.net/files/Mail-DKIM-0.39.tar.gz ... 2011-05-25 15:09:37 (264 KB/s) - `Mail-DKIM-0.39.tar.gz' saved [87375/87375] ... b) Compile & Install Mail-DKIM

debian:/usr/local/src# chown -R hipo:hipo Mail-DKIM-0.39 debian:/usr/local/src# cd Mail-DKIM-0.39

debian:/usr/local/src/Mail-DKIM-0.39# su hipo
debian:/usr/local/src/Mail-DKIM-0.39$ perl Makefile.PL
debian:/usr/local/src/Mail-DKIM-0.39$ make
…
debian:/usr/local/src/Mail-DKIM-0.39$ exit
debian:/usr/local/src/Mail-DKIM-0.39# make install
debian:/usr/local/src/Mail-DKIM-0.39# cd script
debian:/usr/local/src/Mail-DKIM-0.39/script# cp -rpf * /usr/local/bin; cd /usr/local/src

Note that the dkimsign.pl which is in the Mail-DKIM-0.39 is a very important tool used later by the qmail-remote wrapper script. This perl script is copied in the last command issued in above chunk of code.
In the up-command lines I use my unprivileged username hipo to compile, here use any non-root user is appropriate.
For instance it’s possible that the cpan user is used as a compile time user, I was lazy to configure CPAN thus I choose to use my normal unprivileged user.

c) configure rsa domain key paths in dkimsing.pl

Another thing to do here is to make sure the /usr/local/bin/dkimsign.pl which was just recently installed has a correct set location for it’s KeyFile variable.
This vailable is in the script is located online 64, I changed it to include my rsa domain key file, after I changed it, now it looks like so:

KeyFile => "/etc/domainkeys/mydomain.com/default"

7. Download and install libdomainkeys

a) Download libdomainkeys
For latest version of libdomainkeys make sure you check on http://domainkeys.sourceforge.net/

debian:/usr/local/src# wget https://www.pc-freak.net/files/libdomainkeys-0.69.tar.gz debian:/usr/local/src# tar -zxvvf libdomainkeys-0.69.tar.gz ... debian:/usr/local/src# chown -R hipo:hipo libdomainkeys-0.69 debian:/usr/local/src# cd libdomainkeys-0.69; su hipo

b) Compile and install libdomainkeys binaries

debian:/usr/local/src/libdomainkeys-0.69$ echo '-lresolv' > dns.lib debian:/usr/local/src/libdomainkeys-0.69$ make clean & & make debian:/usr/local/src/libdomainkeys-0.69$ exit debian:/usr/local/src/libdomainkeys-0.69# cp -rpf dktest dknewkey expected makeheader /usr/local/bin/

There is a note to make here, one of the programs part of libdomainkeys called dnstest is not compiled while doing make for unknown reasons?!
I was not able to compile manually dnstest either using gcc like so:

debian:/usr/local/src/libdomainkeys-0.69$ gcc -o dnstest dnstest.c dnstest.c: In function 'main': dnstest.c:11: warning: incompatible implicit declaration of built-in function 'strle' /tmp/ccH78KZ1.o: In function 'main': dnstest.c:(.text+0x2b): undefined reference to 'dns_text' collect2: ld returned 1 exit status

I have absolutely no clue why it fails o_O, but it doesn’t matter since I figured out that domainkeys header signature is properly set even without dnstest.

Let me mark here that echo ‘-lresolv’ > dns.lib you see in above code chunk is absolutely necessery in order to be able to compile libdomainkeys on Debian based distributions. If the ‘-lresolv > dns.lib’ is omitted the libdomainkeys build fails with error:

gcc -DBIND_8_COMPAT -O2 -o dktest dktest.o -L. -ldomainkeys -lcrypto `cat dns.lib` `cat socket.lib` ./libdomainkeys.a(dns_txt.o): In function `dns_text': dns_txt.c:(.text+0x2d): undefined reference to `__res_query' dns_txt.c:(.text+0xc4): undefined reference to `__dn_expand' dns_txt.c:(.text+0x184): undefined reference to `__dn_expand' collect2: ld returned 1 exit status make: *** [dktest] Error 1

8. Install libdkim (source of the libdkimtest binary later used by qmail-remote wrapper script)

debian:/usr/local/src# su hipo debian:/usr/local/src$ wget https://www.pc-freak.net/files/qmail/libdkim-1.0.19.zip debian:/usr/local/src$ wget https://www.pc-freak.net/files/qmail/libdkim-1.0.19-linux.patch debian:/usr/local/src$ wget https://www.pc-freak.net/files/qmail/libdkim-1.0.19-extra-options.patch debian:/usr/local/src$ unzip libdkim-1.0.19.zip debian:/usr/local/src$ cd libdkim/src debian:/usr/local/src/libdkim/src$ patch -p2 < ../../libdkim-1.0.19-linux.patch debian:/usr/local/src/libdkim/src$ patch -p2 < ../../libdkim-1.0.19-extra-options.patch debian:/usr/local/src/libdkim/src$ make && exit debian:/usr/local/src/libdkim/src# make install

The above install will install libdkimtest binary, used by the wrapper script to do the actual DKIM-Signature, the binary gets installed in /usr/local/bin/libdkimtest.
Here is a link to patched version of libdkim 1.0.19 , to use it instead of patching as described above download the archive untar and do a make clean && make && install

9. Download qmail-remote.wrapper (qmail-remote wrapper shell script) and set it to wrap qmail-remote

a) Copy original qmail-remote to qmail-remote.orig

debian:~# cd /var/qmail/bin debian:/var/qmail/bin# cp -rpf qmail-remote qmail-remote.orig

b) Download qmail-remote.wrapper script

Here is the qmail-remote.sh wrapper script that worked for me
Originally the wrapper script is taken from http://www.memoryhole.net/qmail/, big thanks to Russ Nelson for writting the awesome wrapper script.

debian:~# cd /var/qmail/bin/ debian:/var/qmail/bin# wget https://www.pc-freak.net/files/qmail-remote.wrapper Saving to: `qmail-remote.wrapper'

100%[============================>] 1,164 –.-K/s in 0s

2011-05-25 15:46:54 (142 MB/s) – `qmail-remote.wrapper’ saved [1164/1164]

c) Set proper permissions to the qmail-remote.wrapper script

The permissions of qmail-remote should look like so:

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root qmail 1164 2011-05-25 11:05 /var/qmail/bin/qmail-remote*

To set this permissions I used:

debian:/var/qmail/bin# chmod 755 qmail-remote.wrapper debian:/var/qmail/bin# chown qmailq:qmail qmail-remote.wrapper

d) Create /var/domainkeys directory (necessery for proper qmail remote wrapper script operations)

debian:~# mkdir /var/domainkeys debian:~# chown -R qmailr:qmail /var/domainkeys debian:~# chmod 700 -R /var/domainkeys

e) Substitute original qmail-remote binary with the wrapper script:

debian:~# qmailctl stop Stopping qmail... qmail-send qmail-smtpd debian:/var/qmail/bin# cp -rpf qmail-remote.wrapper qmail-remote debian:/var/qmail/bin# qmailctl start Starting qmail

10. Send test email to @gmail.com or @yahoo.com to test if DKIM-Signature is included in the mail header

I used my installed webmail interface squirrelmail and send a test email to my home mail server and as well as to yahoo.com

The headers of the email looked fine, here is how my DKIM signed mail headers looked like:

From - Thu May 26 15:31:37 2011 X-Account-Key: account11 X-UIDL: 1306413169.97071.pcfreak,S=1244 X-Mozilla-Status: 0001 X-Mozilla-Status2: 00000000 X-Mozilla-Keys:

Return-Path: <root@mail.mydomain.com> Delivered-To: hipo@www.pc-freak.net Received: (qmail 97068 invoked by uid 1048); 26 May 2011 12:32:49 -0000 Received: from mail.mydomain.com (83.170.100.100) by mail.www.pc-freak.net with SMTP; 26 May 2011 12:32:49 -0000 Comment: DomainKeys? See http://domainkeys.sourceforge.net/ DomainKey-Signature: a=rsa-sha1; q=dns; c=nofws; s=default; d=mydomain.com;

b=ZnTDdUexnt8fmuHbVNXIC+JDvNLYO1zjzlI3PODe3e1oMS5dRHzVGujrS1
Yk0qqs2oW7DseZg/iHE9KOLZBeInksOnsmLsDBq1Lvzfv2xejikR52LBg6a/uK
ewECJy4jQA4cwMJ/qUxmK8EDwbgj7jqCVB95FK3Z5EdR4HoaqGQ=;

h=Received:Date:Message-ID:From:To:Subject;
DKIM-Signature: v=1; a=rsa-sha1; c=relaxed; d=mydomain.com; h=date
:message-id:from:to:subject; s=default; q=
/etc/domainkeys/mydomain.com/default;
bh=G32d6y8oiLehRzcuIWr9s
S+Jy+g=;
b=TPW5VXq3vlOUf1T7lfxQC00MN0kPJxaASE/gq7LbHyV1Gj/Xj+GLF
UN6hYVeKnsoKKeV108JVGcfvfTaLogsxGyS9XzUXKlLtESBj4wr/DAOQy
OcHCj75
bEOOd9nv+RehOYinXGmx0JUZpCNHGndNZ1AEabbVEiX/NQAL7iKDnE
=
Received: (qmail 28771 invoked by uid 0); 26 May 2011 12:31:30 -0000
Date: 26 May 2011 12:31:30 -0000
Message-ID: <20110526123130.28770.qmail@mail.mydomain.com>
From: root@mail.mydomain.com
To: hipo@www.pc-freak.net
Subject: testing 123

baklavavav
tatta

Notice the two lines in the above pasted header:

DomainKey-Signature: a=rsa-sha1; q=dns; c=nofws;
DKIM-Signature: v=1; a=rsa-sha1; c=relaxed; d=mydomain.com; h=date

This clearly shows that now both Domainkeys and DKIM are being applied to outgoing mail messages 🙂

However to be completely 100% sure the domainkeys and DKIM signing is correct, you should check the online websites which offer a mail domainkey check and DKIM signature check, an example for such a website that I used in order to test that my SSL RSA Domainkeys and DKIM correspond correctly to the ones specified in the DNS server is:
here

The idea for writting this small guide on configuring Domainkeys with Qmail and Linux is seriously inspired by Mariuz’s Blog post dkim wrapper that works using dk Hope this is helpful to somebody, it took me quite a while until I come up with the exact steps of a workable install of Domain Keys, there are so many tutorials and ways to implement this that at a certain point it’s a hell.
Like always with Qmail, even simple things are so complex, the only good thing about qmail is once you make it work well, it works forever … until the next time you will have to spend few days trying to figure it out 😉

I’m very much looking to hear if people followed the tutorial succesfully.

Any feedback concerning the article is mostly welcome!
Cheers!

Tags: briefly, Bulk, charset, com, correct mail, Date, DKIM-Signature, dnstest, domain, Domainkeys, Emails, exit, exitdebian, form, function, Gmail, google, header, help, host, ip addresses, libdkimtest, Linux, lot, mail issues, mail message, mail server, mail servers, mail services, message headers, mx record, mxtoolbox, nameThe, none, ptr, public mail, qmailctl, reporting service, root, script, server domain, server ip, signing, soccerfame, spamhaus, spammer, SPF, test, text, toaster, TXT, website visitors, wget, wrapper, yahoo mail account
Posted in Linux, System Administration | 21 Comments »

How to manually disable Windows Genuine Advantage on Windows XP SP2

Wednesday, May 25th, 2011

I have a pirate version of Windows XP Pro 2 installer CD which does automatically turn on Windows Genuine Advantage

This is kind of annoying as the computer gets really slow and the hard disk drive activite gets intensive as well as an annoying popup message that the Windows XP copy is not genuine does appear periodically

In order to get rid of the message I had to do the following steps:

1. Get into Windows Safe Mode without Networking

As most of the people knows this is achieved by pressing F8 keyboard key right before the Windows bootup screen appears.

After in Safe mode it’s necessery to,

2. Run Windows Command Line (cmd.exe)

To do so follow, the menus:

Windows (Start Menu) -> Run -> cmd.exe

3. In the command prompt window issue the commands:

C:Documents and SettingsUser> cd WindowsSystem32 C:WindowsSystem32> taskkill -IM wgatray.exe C:WindowsSystem32> del wgatray.exe C:WindowsSystem32> move wgalogon.dll wgalogon.dll.old C:WindowsSystem32> del wgalogon.dll.old

Something to mention is you have to be really quick, with deleting wgalogon.dll, cause wgatray.exe is scheduled to run every 1 / 2 seconds 🙂 It is a bit of situation of type “be quick or be dead” as Maiden used to sing 🙂
A Windows system restart and Hooray the Windows Genuine message is gone 🙂

Tags: activite, Advantage, c documents, command, Computer, Disk, documents and settings, drive, exec, hard disk drive, issue, keyboard, kind, menu, menus, necessery, Networking, oldA, oldC, order, pirate version, popup, popup message, Start, taskkill, User, version, wgalogon, wgatray, windows command, windows safe mode, windows system, windows xp, windows xp copy, windows xp sp2
Posted in Windows | 2 Comments »

How to fix “vbAccelerator SGrid II Control Runtime Error” popup window in Windows XP

Tuesday, May 24th, 2011

Windows XPI’m in a friend and he asked me to take a look at his Win PC.
When the Windows boots up a weird and annoying error message appears that reads:

vBAccelerator SGrid II Control Runtime Error

I figured out the SGrid II Control Runtime Error was a cause of a mis-working old Malware Bytes portable installation.

I’ve found online the following tool which fixes the stupid VBAccelerator SGrid II error

By simply downloading and starting the mbam-clean.exe binary after a computer restart the error gets fixed.

Tags: annoying error, boots, Bytes, cause, Computer, control, ERROR, error message, ErrorI, installation, look, Malware, message, message appears that, online, popup, Runtime, SGrid, tool, vbAccelerator, Win, window, Windows, windows xp, XPI
Posted in Windows | 1 Comment »

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Archive for May, 2011

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