| The Ultimate Business Machine Technology, business And, not least, about by: Bernard Teo
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The Ultimate Business Machine - ArchivesList of Categories : Database * Technology * Commentary * Singapore * Travel * Mon 04 Feb 2008 MailServe for Leopard 3.0.4Category : Technology/MailServe3dot0dot4.txt As promised, I've released MailServe for Leopard 3.0.4, with the Mail Queue feature from Tiger re-instated.
It should have been easy, right, just getting the features from MailServe for Tiger over to Leopard? It's not so easy. The one thing that MailServe for Leopard has, that the one on Tiger doesn't, is the ability to allow the mail server to be administered from a non-admin account, so long as you can provide an administrator's credentials. I used Apple's security framework to do that. Among its benefits is that, next time, I could plug in an alternative method to do the authentication, e.g., via a smart card or any of the emerging biometric methods, and all other things in the code should still work. And I'm one step closer to being able to support remote administration of the server. Plus, I don't need to store the password. I don't want to have anything to do with people's password. I just pass it on to the authentication mechanism. But one thing that Apple's recommended method of implementing the security framework also does is that it interferes with the workings of Postfix's postsuper command, which is needed to delete messages in a queue. I just can't run the postsuper command now. But I'm loathed to lose all the benefits that I've gained so far. So, what to do? That was why I couldn't do this feature the last time round. I didn't have the time, in all the mad rush to get MailServe for Leopard out to all the guys who needed the mail server running again within a day of Leopard being released. Even now, it took me three, four days to figure out a way. So how did I do it? I answer with a laugh that comes from deep in the belly. A laughter born of pain. To all the people who're "not so jazzed up" about having to pay for MailServe for Leopard again, since there are "no new features", I can now afford a wry smile. If only it were that easy... I can move on to the new features now. |
Mac@Work
Services running on this server, a Mac Mini running Mac OS X 10.9.2 Mavericks:
all set up using MailServe, WebMon, DNS Enabler, DNS Agent, VPN Enabler, Liya and our SQL installers, all on Mavericks. |
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