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Aaron Parecki

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  • Virtual Users with Postfix and MySQL

    December 25, 2006

    I recently discovered an excellent tutorial on setting up Postfix and Courier to use virtual users read from a MySQL database. This caught my attention because it is a much better setup than having real system users for all email addresses, as it allows much more flexibility. I finally set aside some time to set up a real mail server.

    I first went through the tutorial installing everything on a virtual server running on my pc. I used a VMware image of Fedora Core 5. You can find that and many other VMware images on VMware's appliance directory page.

    I ran through the tutorial, and got everything working relatively quickly. There was one thing I had to add that was not in the tutorial. That was this command:

    postconf -e 'mailbox_transport = virtual'
    

    After that, I was able to send and receive emails from my virtual server.

    I then went out and bought another VPS account with Tektonic, planning to have another quick and easy install of the mail software. After running through the tutorial twice, I was still unsuccessful. I kept getting an error in postfix's log:

    Dec 25 06:41:28 mail postfix/smtpd[27714]: fatal: no SASL authentication mechanisms
    Dec 25 06:41:29 mail postfix/master[15875]: warning: process /usr/libexec/postfix/smtpd pid 27714 exit status 1
    Dec 25 06:41:29 mail postfix/master[15875]: warning: /usr/libexec/postfix/smtpd: bad command startup -- throttling
    

    These three lines show up in my mail log repeatedly. When I try to initiate a connection to my mail server on port 25, there is no response from Postfix:

    telnet mail.parecki.com 25
    Trying mail.parecki.com...
    Connected to mail.parecki.com.
    Escape character is '^]'.
    

    It just hung after that.

    I eventually figured out that I was missing a critical package.

    yum install cyrus-sasl-plain
    

    After installing that package, everything works perfectly! I guess it already came installed on my VMware image for some reason.

    Thanks to Falko Timme for writing a great tutorial, and for responding to my forum posts asking for help!

    Mon, Dec 25, 2006 7:01am -08:00 #mail server #MySQL #postfix
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Hi, I'm Aaron Parecki, Director of Identity Standards at Okta, and co-founder of IndieWebCamp. I maintain oauth.net, write and consult about OAuth, and participate in the OAuth Working Group at the IETF. I also help people learn about video production and livestreaming. (detailed bio)

I've been tracking my location since 2008 and I wrote 100 songs in 100 days. I've spoken at conferences around the world about owning your data, OAuth, quantified self, and explained why R is a vowel. Read more.

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