Author: Barry O'Donovan

Introducing ViMbAdmin – Virtual Mailbox Administration

About two weeks ago, my company released an internal software project, ViMbAdmin, as open source under a GPL3 license. So far the reception has been great for a project we just put out there. We have over ten third party installs and are getting good feedback and activity on the Google Code platform where we host it.

ViMbAdmin (pronounced vim-be-admin) is essentially a modern replacement for PostfixAdmin – a web based interface which will allow you to manage virtual mailboxes, virtual domains and aliases.

We have a live demo which you can access here. You can also browse screenshots by clicking the image on this page.

ViMbAdmin was written in PHP using our own web application framework which includes the Zend Framework, the Doctrine ORM and the Smarty templating system with JQuery on the frontend.

The decision to use Smarty, Doctrine and Zend unfortunately adds a bit of overhead for someone installing the product as they will also need to locate these third party libraries. Fortunately:

  • many distributions include all three as packages now;
  • if you take the svn install option then they will be also installed from external svn sources.

ViMbAdmin can work as a slot in replacement for Postfix Admin with a few MySQL ALTER statements.

Features

  • Super admin(s) user level with full access;
  • Admin(s) user level with access only to assigned domains and their mailboxes and aliases;
  • Super admins can create and modify super admins and admins;
  • JQuery Datatable throughout for quick in browser searching and pagination;
  • Create, modify and purge domains including limited the number of mailboxes and aliases a non-super admin can create per-domain;
  • Activate / deactivate admins, domains, mailboxes and aliases at the click of a button;
  • Full logging;
  • Facility for users (mailbox owners) to change their password;
  • Forgotten Password / Password Reset function for admins;
  • Very configurable including:
    • set default values for quotas, number of mailboxes and aliases for domain creation;
    • templated welcome and settings email for users;
    • either plain or MD5 mailbox password support.

We hope it’s of use to you!

Using Doctrine ORM with Zend Application

We’ve just published the first in a serious of hidden treasures articles from our ViMbAdmin application over on the company blog:

In this first of a serious of articles where we delve into some of the hidden treasures in our ViMbAdmin application, we look at how to integrate Doctrine ORM with Zend – and specifically Zend_Application and Zend_Controller.

As all the code is available with the GPL license online, I didn’t over explain the set-up but I’d love some feedback on whether I’ve been too obscure for the article to be useful at all.

Doctrine ORM – Find Many to Many Objects Without a Relationship

Hmmm, does the title of this post make sense? Probably not but it’s not an easy concept to squeeze into a few words.

Here’s the scenario, I have two tables A and B in Doctrine ORM with a many-to-many relationship defined in table AB.

Now, I want to find all objects in A that do not have a relationship with an object in B via AB.

Here’s what I have:

Doctrine_Query::create()
    ->from( 'A a' )
    ->leftJoin( 'A.AB ab' )
    ->where( 'ab.id IS NULL' )
    ->fetchArray()

This works but is it the best way?

 

Querying for DNS Glue Records (using dig)

On a project I’m working on, I need to establish if a domain has IPv6 glue records or not. If I had to do it on a once off, a whois lookup would answer that nicely:

$ /usr/bin/whois opensolutions.ie
<snip>
nserver:     dns1.dns.opensolutions.ie 87.232.1.40 2a01:268:4::40
nserver:     dns2.dns.opensolutions.ie 87.232.1.41 2a01:268:4::41
nserver:     dns3.dns.opensolutions.ie 87.232.16.61 2a01:268:3002::61

However, in this case, I will need to do it many times on many domains and do not need to have to worry about whois servers limiting the queries or parsing the output from different whois servers.

After some digging, it looks like the nameservers of TLDs return glue records in the additional section. Let’s look by example on opensolutions.ie. First, find the TLD servers for .ie:

$ dig NS ie
<snip>
;; ANSWER SECTION:
ie.                     172800  IN      NS      gns1.domainregistry.ie.
ie.                     172800  IN      NS      uucp-gw-1.pa.dec.com.
ie.                     172800  IN      NS      uucp-gw-2.pa.dec.com.
ie.                     172800  IN      NS      ns3.ns.esat.net.
ie.                     172800  IN      NS      banba.domainregistry.ie.
ie.                     172800  IN      NS      ice.netsource.ie.
ie.                     172800  IN      NS      gns2.domainregistry.ie.
ie.                     172800  IN      NS      ns-ie.nic.fr.
ie.                     172800  IN      NS      b.iedr.ie.

Now query one of these for the nameservers for opensolutions.ie:

$ dig NS opensolutions.ie @banba.domainregistry.ie.
<snip>
;; AUTHORITY SECTION:
opensolutions.ie.       172800  IN      NS      dns3.dns.opensolutions.ie.
opensolutions.ie.       172800  IN      NS      dns2.dns.opensolutions.ie.
opensolutions.ie.       172800  IN      NS      dns1.dns.opensolutions.ie.

;; ADDITIONAL SECTION:
dns1.dns.opensolutions.ie. 172800 IN    A       87.232.1.40
dns1.dns.opensolutions.ie. 172800 IN    AAAA    2a01:268:4::40
dns2.dns.opensolutions.ie. 172800 IN    A       87.232.1.41
dns2.dns.opensolutions.ie. 172800 IN    AAAA    2a01:268:4::41
dns3.dns.opensolutions.ie. 172800 IN    A       87.232.16.61
dns3.dns.opensolutions.ie. 172800 IN    AAAA    2a01:268:3002::61

As you can see, the authority section contains the nameservers for opensolutions.ie which are all on the opensolutions.ie domain. We then find the glue records for these nameservers in the additional section.

GIMP: Change Background from Black / White to Transparent

This is one that I find myself Googling for regularly but spend time wading through poor results and solutions:

http://brainsongimp.blogspot.com/2008/03/black-and-white-jpg-to-transparent-png.html

Changing a User’s UID on Apple XServe / Snow Leopard

Due to exporting NFS file systems from Linux boxes to an XServe, I had need to match the new users’ UID on the XServe to the Linux UIDs. Unfortunately this was not so obvious.

There’s a good how-to here:

http://www.inteller.net/notes/change-user-id-on-snow-leopard

Fix for Silly Annoying FreeBSD PHP Ports Errors

The following occurs quite regularly on FreeBSD:

Cannot find autoconf. Please check your autoconf installation and the
$PHP_AUTOCONF environment variable. Then, rerun this script.

and when fixed, it’s followed up by:

Cannot find autoheader. Please check your autoconf installation and the
$PHP_AUTOHEADER environment variable. Then, rerun this script.

The fix is to set those environment variables (as appropriate for the autoconf and autoheader version numbers – the below is my example on FreeBSD 8.1):

export PHP_AUTOCONF=/usr/local/bin/autoconf-2.68
export PHP_AUTOHEADER=/usr/local/bin/autoheader-2.68

in bash of the following in tcsh: 

setenv PHP_AUTOCONF autoconf-2.68
setenv PHP_AUTOHEADER autoheader-2.68

Irish Radio Stations on Linux

UPDATED VERSION AVAILABLE: https://www.barryodonovan.com/index.php/2013/02/12/irish-radio-stations-on-linux-2013

I’m a bit of a newstalk junky and like to have the radio on in the back ground. It’s quite painful jumping between websites and even more painful getting them all to work under Linux so I have some simple Bash aliases for VLC and RTE Radio 1, Today FM and Newstalk:

alias 2fm='cvlc http://dynamic.rte.ie/av/live/radio/2fm.asx'
alias newstalk='cvlc http://newstalk.fmstreams.com:8008/listen.pls'
alias rteradio1='cvlc http://dynamic.rte.ie/av/live/radio/radio1.asx'
alias todayfm='cvlc http://audiostore.todayfm.com/audio/todayfmIRL_64K.asx'

UPDATED 2011-02-07: 2FM added.

Good Experience with the CSO and Revenue

I complained about bad experiences with FAS on this blog lately (it actually got worse than that lately) so I thought I’d mention two good experiences.

I was doing a bit of research for a potential project at work and I needed some statistics on businesses in Ireland. I went to the CSO’s online information request and got a response a couple of hours later. They didn’t have the information I needed but suggested a contact in the Revenue Commissioners.

I mailed Revenue then and got a very helpful call back this morning (less the three working hours later) with the information I asked for as well as some additional information to help me better understand the information behind the figures.