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I just finished setting up dovecot this morning to aggregate my various email boxes and make them available via a single server.  Dovecot seems to be a server from the new golden age of Unix services.  It’s easy to set up and has reasonable defaults for getting a server up-and-running without much effort.  Note that this is in contrast to sendmail configuration, which is as cryptic as could possibly be.

My ideal “unix service” - mail, web, ftp, etc - is a drop-in application that tries to work with your current configuration, rather than reinventing the wheel each time.  It should use PAM for authentication whenever possible, pick up system configuration from shared files and “just work” when you start it up.

So far, I’ve managed to get my home network up and running with the following services:

• Windows domain (via Samba)
• DHCP with static addresses assigned per MAC (via ISC’s dhcpd)
• DNS, including integrated dynamic-DNS with DHCP (via bind)
• Single-source, aggregating IMAP email server (via dovecot, fetchmail and procmail)
• Spam filtering and anti-virus protection for above (via spamassassin and clamav, respectively)
• Networked printing (via CUPS)

To run all of these services off Windows Server 2003 would cost me approx. CDN$1,200 for the basic serverlicense (and five CALs).  I’d also have to add in the basic Exchange package for another CDN$1,200.  Spam filtering might still be possible via spamassassin on Windows and I could probably use the free version of AVG anti-virus for email protection at the client level (versus the server).

Note that my current solution would likely scale up to a medium-sized, single-office solution by upgrading the hardware (no additional effort).  I’d probably be looking at more than CDN$10,000 in license fees to pull this off legally in Windows 2003.

Grand total amount of time to set all of this stuff up: six hours.  To do it again would probably take about two hours.

Are people finally waking up to Microsoft’s attempts to get their fingers in every pie?  A few months back, Microsoft managed to kill the IETF Marid working group’s attempts to build a common spam filtering framework by refusing to license their technology openly.  This leaves room for SPF to take over, already with the backing of a large number of mail server operators.

Just recently adoption of the WMV9 codec, slated for inclusion in the sequel techology to DVD, is hitting some roadblocks:

Multiple sources close to the SMPTE process told EE Times last week that Microsoft created the impression in the industry that its WMV9 codec had a leg up on H.264/MPEG-4 AVC in quality and licensing terms. But now that the WMV9-based VC-1 has been put to the test in the arduous SMPTE standardization process, VC-1 is “perceived as behind in quality and behind in licensing terms, compared to H.264/MPEG-4 AVC,” one source said.

Does this sound familiar?

While upgrading my Linksys router through the upgrade page, I somehow managed to kill the thing.  Having spoken with others that have tried to upgrade the firmware, I don’t seem to be alone.

Luckily, the Linksys-modified TFTP program saves the day.  It seems that the hobbled router comes up in a crippled mode on 192.168.1.1 with a password of “admin”.  Once you re-upload the firmware, it comes back up with the proper settings.

I think the trick is not using the HTML-version of the upgrade page.  Stick with TFTP!

Networked printing is really cool in Fedora!  You can configure CUPS to automatically browse the network and discover other printers by using the Printer Configuration tool and, under the “Sharing…” menu, choose “Automatically find remote shared queues”.

You can even use this to set up a remote print queue for Windows.  Install the generic Adobe postscript printer driver and point it to your CUPS printer share when it asks for the URL.  The CUPS URLs are generally of the form:  http://servername:631/printers/printer-name.

You’ll find the printer URL by browsing the CUPS webpages and selecting the printer under “manage printers”.

The cool thing about CUPS is that there are no specialized drivers to load under Windows.  You use the generic postscript driver and everything just works.

I decided to pave over my Windows 2000 box with a brand new install of Fedora Core 2.  The network install is awesome - burn the 4MB boot.iso to a CD, select “HTTP” install, point it any Fedora mirror and go!

It took about 30 minutes to get the installation completed on my old PII-400.  Your time may vary based on CPU hugeness and mirror fastness.

I’ve been using my Linksys firewall for managing internal DHCP, but it doesn’t really give you much flexibility to assign static IPs that I’d like.  I hope to get a quick and dirty DHCP server up and running with brand-new DHCP-managed static IP addresses for all of my networked devices (including my Xbox). 

It also gives me a chance to try my hand at setting up a full IMAP mail server at home.  I’ve been using hotwayd for snarfing messages from Hotmail and getting them remotely via POP3.  I’d prefer to have them sit in a common mailbox that I can read from either work or home.