Archive for the ‘Documentation’ Category

Calculate statistics from your Qmail logfiles using Awstats

Monday, October 13th, 2008

Awstats is a commonly used program to calculate web statistics from your webserver logfiles. It can detect useragents, referers, unique visitors... But one of its another feature is to build usage reports from your mail server's logfiles, as seen on this demo. Here is how to quickly configure Awstats to take ...

How to bind your Qmail server to a specific IP address

Wednesday, August 27th, 2008

Just a little tip : By default, Qmail listens to all the available IP address on the machine (0.0.0.0). It is possible to change this behaviour to bind Qmail to a specific IP. We suppose that you are using Qmail from Dotdeb and launching it using the provided init script, /etc/init.d/qmail. Just ...

Using the Google Perftools to speed up your MySQL server

Monday, August 25th, 2008

The Google Perftools, especially tcmalloc (Thread Caching Malloc), can be very useful to speed up your applications, depending on your environment : TCMalloc is faster than the glibc 2.3 malloc (available as a separate library called ptmalloc2) and other mallocs that I have tested. ptmalloc2 takes approximately 300 nanoseconds to execute ...

Mirroring Dotdeb

Monday, August 25th, 2008

If Dotdeb is useful for you and if you want to mirror it, follow these steps : Ask me to grant you an access to the Rsync server by providing your public address. Add a cron job to periodically fetch the packages : rsync -a --delete rsync.dotdeb.org::packages/ /your/local/path/ (mirroring twice a day should be enough. More ...

Storing your PHP sessions using memcached

Monday, August 25th, 2008

Using PHP sessions can be a problem when your PHP applications are load-balanced on many web servers. You can store them on a NFS export or recode the session_set_save_handler using a SQL backend for example. But there is no solution more efficient, more scalable, more performant and easier to deploy than ...

How to enable greylisting on your Qmail server

Sunday, August 24th, 2008

Greylisting is very useful to avoid most of the incoming spam on your mail server. The Qmail packages shipped on Dotdeb have built-in MySQL-based greylisting. Here is how to enable it... Installation First of all, be sure to have Qmail installed from Dotdeb with a version number greater than 1.03-37.dotdeb.1. Then, since we'll ...

How to use PHP5 and PHP4 on the same Apache2 server

Sunday, August 24th, 2008

Since PHP4 is officially dead, it is now urgent to migrate your applications to PHP5, but it's not that easy and you'll have to test them before replacing PHP4 by PHP5 on your server. This article will help you to install both PHP4 and PHP5 on your box and swicth ...

How to enable the SMTP authentification on your Qmail server

Sunday, August 24th, 2008

The Qmail package from Dotdeb has been built with SMTP-auth features (but disabled by default). Here is the way to use them... Installation First of all, we suppose that : you installed the last Qmail and Vpopmail packages from Dotdeb you're launching them using the bundled init scripts (with tcpserver) Configuration To enable SMTP-auth, you just have ...