Today was a good day. Not only did I win Solitaire on my iPod on a train down to Providence, I fixed a mailserver issue that I’ve been struggling with for a few weeks.

I’m slowly switching over to Slicehost for all my web hosting requirements, and setting up the server (I’m running Ubuntu Hardy) so that I can get rid of all the other hosting I use (I already got rid of crappy Dreamhost). I’ve been using Pair for the last ten years and have been really happy with them, but I’m a server junkie. VPS is just too tasty. Anyway, most server stuff is pretty straight forward to set up. Pickled Onion articles and a bunch of howtoforge docs will get you started from a fresh disk image in no time. One thing that tripped me up was setting up the mail server. I wanted the standard PostfixAdmin controlled virtual user setup using MySQL to manage the users. Following this and this got everything working, except SMTP would not authenticate properly when storing passwords encrypted in the database.

(more…)