Cygon’s Blog

Did nobody notice that Internet Explorer 6 is seriously broken?

Ok, of course that was noticed. Let me reformulate: Did nobody notice that you cannot visit sites using htdigest standard authentication with Internet Explore 6 since Windows XP SP2 happened?

I seldomly bash Microsoft (I like .NET, much!) but this cannot be for real. Think about it. The de-facto standard browser is not able to visit password-protected SSL sites and nobody noticed it?

A little hack for the apache web server solves Microsoft’s problems where they aren’t supposed to be solved, by correcting the garbage sent my IE6 in the web server. Nice. I’m not sure whether I just drop support for Internet Explorer or enable this stupid hack. My only other option would be to revert back to basic authentication.

Well, in case you came to this place from google, the typical apache log shows “GET /index.php HTTP/1.1″ 400 293. The solution is here: http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/mod/mod_auth_digest.html#msie

Of course I knew it already when I uninstalled qmail and switched to courier. I am now in the process of killing courier and reinstalling qmail. It always goes like this. Sort of a natural law…

Well, Courier was nice, much nicer than qmail in fact. I could send and receive emails after maybe 2 hours. But then, for the better part of the last week, I struggled with getting smtp time rejection working. The typical linux shite happened. Change ten configuration files, each with its own description language that bears no logics. Read a hundred manpages where all too often one is contradictory to the other.
Since yesterday morning, 10 o’clock, Courier ran, accepted emails, successfully delivered them but none of them actually appeared in my mailbox. Given the fact that it just stopped putting them into my mailbox out of the blue (I was at work that morning, so I know for sure I didn’t touch that server), this is totally inacceptable.

I just hope qmail will eventually decide to do its bidding again. Otherwise, say hello to postfix my server

I intended to begin my blog with a happy announcement about something cool I discovered on the net or so. Call it a close miss, because, while playing with gentoo’s webapp-config yesterday, I needed to set the ‘vhosts’ USE variable to stop it from automatically installing all web applications to the default host. So I added ‘vhosts’ to my global USE flags…

…which somehow triggered a recompile of qmail. Nothing to worry about. At least not until today, when I noticed no less than six spam mails had creeped into my inbox. Checking the mail header, I noticed they had not been scanned by spamassassin at all. Still, nothing out of the ordinary, that had happened twice before. Reinstall simscan and be done with it.

Turns out I wasn’t. I never got qmail to work again. Everything is a blur from there, but out of frustration, I ended up reinstalling qmail from scratch. Of course it got even worse. Now qmail temporarily rejects any and all incoming emails - permanently. Checked all logs to no avail.

I’m so totally fed up with the absurd amount of work qmail requires to understand the system and to track down errors. I was very fond of qmail once, but I guess it’s time for a change. I’m going to try courier. It has smtp time rejection built in and courier-imap never let me down.