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Weblog • Archive • Cutedge

by: Bernard Teo

Thu 24 Oct 2013

Mavericks Torture Tests

Category : Technology/MavericksTortureTest.txt

I’ve tested MailServe for Mavericks (and all the other Enablers) as much as I can before placing them on my web site for people to use.

MailServe is a pretty deep product, with plenty of components and moving parts underneath. I thought I’ve tested every feature and fixed all the things I could see that had been broken — different versions of Postfix requires different configuration parameters and Apple is in the habit of swapping out Unix level command line tools without warning.

But I’ll still get mail like this

and I’ll have to scramble to test everything again.

So, if things don’t look like they’ve changed, it doesn’t mean that nothing has changed. Sometimes a lot has changed, underneath.

For example, do people who’ve downloaded DNS Enabler for Mavericks realise that Apple has left out BIND and the named daemon in Mavericks? Never mind :) But, by knowing (just) enough to build my own binary, I could custom-build one now that will take advantage of the multiple CPUs in the Mac to process the incoming DNS queries in parallel. So going forward, having been forced to figure out how to build my own binary from source, it means I can go ahead, in spite of what Apple might want to do, to explore things like BIND10, the latest incarnation of the named server.

Posted at 8:11AM UTC | permalink

Wed 23 Oct 2013

Mavericks

Category : Technology/Mavericks.txt

I have new versions of MailServe, DNS Enabler, DNS Agent, and WebMon for Mavericks.

They can be found here: http://cutedgesystems.com

Pardon me if I take a break. I’m quite exhausted getting them out and tested. I’m still working on them. I wish sometimes that Apple will stop making so many changes so often, if only to get some breathing space to actually build on this fantastic platform.

I also have new versions of our very popular SQL database installers, for MySQL, PostgreSQL and MariaDB. They’re accessible also from the Cutedge home page today, together with a new update to Liya. Enjoy, while I take a break watching the Apple Keynote. :)

Posted at 2:23PM UTC | permalink

Thu 22 Aug 2013

BookNapper

Category : Technology/BookNapperPlusGoodReads.txt

I built this app called BookNapper so I can keep a list of books I want to read. Then when I'm in any one of the very excellent public libraries that we have here in Singapore, the app will tell me which of these books I want to read can be found there.

It's been working quite well and you can find it at the App Store. But what I want to do now is make it work with Goodreads, so the books that are napped goes into a Goodreads Currently-Reading shelf and eventually to a Read shelf.

This is what I'm working on now (besides all the Mavericks stuff, that is, which I find a pain. Can't Apple leave us alone for a while so we can catch up with the technology, rather than change things every year?).

Posted at 6:53AM UTC | permalink

Wed 02 Jan 2013

Luca in Chinese

Category : Technology/LucaInChinese.txt

Hai Hwee has been working on a Chinese-localised version of Luca:

That's how it will look like.

This version includes various bug fixes and speed improvements. It's a version we hope we'll be able to sell on the Mac App Store.

And then onwards to a version of Luca for the iPad.

Posted at 4:38AM UTC | permalink

Thu 29 Nov 2012

Bug Fixes for Liya and LDAP Enabler

Category : Technology/NugFixesForLiyaAndLDAPEnablerforML.txt

I've fixed some bugs for Liya and LDAP Enabler for Mountain Lion.

Liya is now at version 2.0.11 (while the Mac App Store version remains stuck at version 2.0.9). I've fixed Liya so it'll handle SQLite fields declared as Bool. Liya will treat it as an integer, and map it to the NSNumber Cocoa data type.

LDAP Enabler is now at 2.0.2. In version 2.0.1, the password was not set correctly when a user was first created. You had to do a Change & Save Password explicitly to set the password correctly. Version 2.0.2 fixes this bug.

Posted at 2:37PM UTC | permalink

New PostgreSQL 9.2.1 Installer

Category : Technology/PostgreSQL921.txt

I've built a new PostgreSQL 9.2.1 Installer. It's available here: PostgreSQL_Installer_For_MacOSX.zip

I've built it, this time, with these configuration parameters : '--with-pam' '--with-ldap' '--with-krb5' '--with-gssapi' '--with-bonjour' '--with-openssl' '--with-libxml' '--with-libxslt' '--with-perl' '--with-python' '--with-tcl'

And it should work on both Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion) and 10.8 (Mountain Lion).

I've tested that this latest build of Postgres can now authenticate against an LDAP database (set up by LDAP Enabler for Mountain Lion) via PAM.

I have still to make all this PAM/LDAP goodness work with just one click but at least the mechanisms work and I'll get there eventually. The idea is that you can set up a single logon mechanism via the LDAP database, and with that one userID/password combination, a user can get into the email, database and any other system. Next - I've got to make this work also with MySQL, which surprisingly, is harder to do than with Postgres.

One more thing - I've been troubled that with I've had to create a postgres user in order to run my previous installers. There's already a _postgres user built into every Lion and Mountain Lion system and I ought to be using it. So I've finally figured out how to make everything work with that built-in _postgres user. So, if you use this latest 9.2.1 Postgres Installer, you can safely delete the postgres user from your users' list in the Users & Groups Preference Pane, after you've run the installer and upgraded your current Postgres installation to 9.2.1.

Posted at 8:58AM UTC | permalink

Tue 20 Nov 2012

MailServe for Mountain Lion ver 6.0.6

Category : Technology/MailServeForMountainLion606.txt

SMTP authentication via the sasldb password mechanism stopped working at some point in Mountain Lion.

I just released version 6.0.6 of MailServe to fix this problem.

It feels like deja vu. I had exactly this same problem when Apple upgraded the OS many years before : see http://www.cutedgesystems.com/weblog/index.php?entry=/Technology/panthersmtp-auth.txt. I solved the problem this time in exactly the same way - picking up the missing binaries from the previous OS, which, in our case now, is Lion. But for the long term, I must figure out how to build the sasl binaries myself. But that's hard.

Posted at 5:05PM UTC | permalink

LDAP with JPEG Photos

Category : Technology/LDAPEnablerForMountainLion201.txt

I've finally figured out how to get the LDAP Server to accept JPEG photos (tagged by the jpegPhoto attribute). Yay!

You will never understand how long I struggled, how much pain I had to endure :-)

And, more importantly, I've figured out how to get these photos to show up in the Contacts app when the LDAP record is displayed :

And LDAP Enabler works with all the drag and drop goodness we expect from the Mac, when you're matching photos to people.

LDAP only supports (only?) the JPEG format. So drag and drop files with a .jpeg or .jpg extension.

LDAP Enabler for Moumtain Lion 2.0.1 is available for download now.

Posted at 1:57AM UTC | permalink

Thu 15 Nov 2012

Liya 2.0.10 for Mountain Lion

Category : Technology/Liya2dot0dot10.txt

I've also quietly released a new version (2.0.10) of Liya for Mountain Lion.

Tabular data from Liya can be dragged and dropped onto a spreadsheet like Numbers but the number of columns brought over was always one short because of a stupid bug. This has been fixed in version 2.0.10.

So let's see how long this will take to show up on the Mac App Store.

Posted at 2:51PM UTC | permalink

MailServe 6.0.5 and LDAP Enabler 2.0 for Mountain Lion Released

Category : Technology/MailServeDovecotLDAP.txt

I've released a new version of MailServe that will allow Postfix and Dovecot to authenticate against the passwords stored in an LDAP Server set up by LDAP Enabler.

This is what LDAP Enabler for Mountain Lion looks like :

And this is how it works with MailServe to allow Dovecot and Postfix to authenticate against LDAP :

In the coming months, I'll work at making the integration between MailServe and LDAP Enabler even tighter, in terms of the ease with which user records can be created and passwords set.

I've also used the chance to clean up the code related to the use of MailServe's Access field, which controls which IP addresses, domain names, and email addresses can be allowed to send mail to or through the server. Prior to this latest version, the Access field didn't work too well. Now it's a lot more accurate in implementing what the user's intentions are, as stated in the Access field.

So, MailServe for Mountain Lion 6.0.5 and LDAP Enabler 2.0, available now.

Posted at 2:46PM UTC | permalink

Thu 01 Nov 2012

MailServe and LDAP

Category : Technology/MailServeLDAP.txt

If you're waiting for news on the LDAP front, I've got news for you. I've managed to get the mail server authenticating against the LDAP Server database.

Basically, what I have is Dovecot authenticating against the passwords stored in the LDAP Server, rather than the built-in OS X accounts' password system. And then I get Postfix to use the LDAP authentication so set up, for its own SMTP authentication. And it works, with or without SSL.

I did so many things and tried so many variations, so now I have to take a step back and figure out just what I did to make this work. Then I will make new versions of MailServe and the LDAP Enabler that will do all this for the user with just one click on their respective Enablers.

Actually I might have gotten most of this working in Chengdu last week, so it was a pretty productive week, even though I was traipsing around Chengdu.

I think what I didn't realise, until I got back to Singapore, was that the PAM module for LDAP that I was using, pam_ldap.so, needs to be built again for the x86_64 processor that is the default in Mountain Lion. I was using a pam_ldap.so that was a fat PPC/i386 binary - absolutely useless on Mountain Lion - and that explains the crashes whenever PAM was called which was whenever a user tries to authenticate against the LDAP Server. I banged my head against the wall so many times in Chengdu. It only cleared when I got back to Singapore, and then it became crystal clear what the problem was. It's a mystery how the mind works.

Posted at 11:10AM UTC | permalink

Tue 23 Oct 2012

LDAP Enabler for Mountain Lion

Category : Technology/LDEForML.txt

Here I am, sitting in a backpackers' hostel in Chengdu, China, and I've just built a working version of LDAP Enabler for Mountain Lion.

Now that I have an LDAP Server running on my Mountain Lion MacBook Air, I can now move on to the next phase—getting a version of MailServe to work that will authenticate the mail server against an LDAP Server.

Posted at 2:56PM UTC | permalink