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.

Since switching to 6.9 I had some trouble using the integrated Refactoring utility. There error I got was: The Rename refactoring cannot be applied in this context.

The solution is a simple one, use the built in shortcut “Ctrl + R” (or “Cmd + R” on a Mac).

The other thing that bothered me is that when you select a method or class and use the context menu to navigate to the declaration of the method/class Netbeans doesn’t do a thing. To make this work the method/class name must not be selected (or you can use the + click shortcut).

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.

Paying subscribers to our site have an option of downloading PDF files of the magazine. With Lighttpd we were using mod_secdownload to provide this functionality without exposing the files to the public. We compiled Nginx with the secure_download_module and it kinda worked.

Files were downloading as expected but the file names where all messed up. Download links where generated for each user and they looked something like this: /pdf/645.pdf/097ac16cb19ff6c163d6f813fdd44b4d/4b283bfa and the browser saved the file to the users hard drive with the file name of 4b283bfa. Since the file name didn’t have an extension it was impossible for the OS to know that is has to use a PDF reader to open the file.

Finally we managed to force the file name to the browser (download client) with a configuration directive that looks something like this:

# PDF download
 location /pdf {
    secure_download on;
    secure_download_secret $request_addr;
    secure_download_path_mode file;
    root /path/to/dir/with/pdfs

    # Extract the name of the PDF
    if ($uri ~ "^/pdf/(.+\.pdf)$") {
        set $filename $1;
    }

    # Set appropriate headers
    add_header Content-Disposition "attachment; filename=$filename";
 }

And that’s all there is to it.

Since the creators of TinyMCE moved to Github it was a great opportunity to try and push these changes to the master branch. If you need this you can look at the changes that need to be made to the PSpellShell adapter or just clone my fork of the spellcheck plugin.

p.s. Have I mentioned how awesome Git and Github are?

You can find more info at the devzone.

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?

Hudson definitively won me over with its clean interface and easy to setup tasks. Even plugin installation is a breeze and you can even do it right out of the comfort of your browser.

I found a nice tutorial about setting up Hudson with PHP here but I had some question marks hovering over my head during the installation so I have decided to write a more detailed installation tutorial.

If you are running a Debian flavored distribution (yes I mean Ubuntu) take a look at the tutorial, you should have Hudson working with your PHP projects in no time.

Bonus points if you integrate your Hudson installation to act as your staging server.

Open up Terminal.app and enter “sudo su” and enter your password when asked (I guess you must be using an account with administrator privileges).

pear upgrade PEAR
pear channel-discover pear.phpunit.de
pear install --alldeps phpunit/PHPUnit

That’s it. phpunit binary should be in your path now.

p.s.

For some reason phpUnit that is being used by Zend Studios (6.1) does not have mbstring extension compiled and that makes it unusable for me. I guess there is a way to force PHP interpreter that is being used in the Zend Studio to run with the mbstring extension, but this is a faster approach. Hudson or phpUnderControl (whichever you like) will take care of the code coverage reports.