If you ever wanted to build a mail server but all the tutorials and howtos on the internet where too vague or old, this is a book for you.  It will guide you through the setup of a complete email server on a latest Debian 6.0 (Squeeze) distribution. I tried to go beyond just listing steps needed to get a working email server online. Hopefully this book explains a little bit more about the why and not just how.

As everything else in life, this book is a work in progress and I would really appreciate all the feedback I could get. Both positive and negative. I have tried to give credit, where credit is due, but there is always a chance I missed to attribute somebody for the work they did. Don’t hesitate to point that out.

The book was written in Docbook 5.0 format and when my free time allows it I will try to explain a little bit more about the whole process because finding tried and tested information about myriad of choices and tools in the Docbook publishing chain proved to be a not so easy task.

I hope you will enjoy reading Building a mail server on Debian 6.0.

We have integrated our Adsense code into the postbit vBulletin template after the last post on the page using this syntax:

<if condition="$post['islastshown']">
     Adsense code here.
</if>

The problem happend because Quick Reply uses asynchronous javascript to submit the reply and render the new reply at the and of the page. Since we are embedding the Adsense code if the post is “last shown” this renderd the Google Adsense code twice and FF “broke”.

The fix is quite simple, you just have to check if the post is being sent as a response to the asynchronous request, so the new and working code looks like this:

<if condition="$post['islastshown'] AND !$GLOBALS['vbulletin']->GPC['ajax']">
    Adsense code here.
</if>

Of course this is not the only case which causes vBulletin forum to render a blank page. For a list of other possible reasons take a look at this chapter in the  official documentation.

If you are interested you can also take a look at this exhaustive list of conditionals which you can use in your vBulletin templates.

We hooked a legacy URI “plugin” in our error controller so that checking for old URIs does not interfere with the loading times of our system unless really necessary and created 301 (permanent) redirects to our new URI scheme patted ourselves on the back an forgot all about it until recently.

While checking the access logs for some unusual traffic spikes we where getting we noticed that Google stills checks our old category URIs and follows the redirects that we have created. The most unusual things was that the URIs where checked very often. Links to our news category pages where crawled by Google a couple of times a minute during the course of couple of days. To add to the confusion the categories that are most often crawled our the ones that list articles from our print issue which get updated once a week, the ones that are updated many times a day get crawled at a regular pace.

Any ideas what could cause something like this?