Qmail / FreeBSD / vqadmin problem

[Madhusudan Singh]

On Thursday 10 March 2005 05:57, Peter Risdon wrote: 

> On Thu, 2005-03-10 at 00:12 -0500, Madhusudan Singh wrote:
> > Hi
> >
> > I am new to both FreeBSD and qmail. However, I am definitely not new to
> > unix/linux (2 years of HP-UX and 7 years of Linux experience). I am using
> > a pf firewall on a machine that will host a webserver as well as my
> > mailserver.
> >
> > I am interested in setting up IMAP access to email for my users (do not
> > care for POP3 access). However, I found installation instructions on
> > qmailrocks.org and followed them to the letter (note to the author
> > - /usr/home/vpopmail does not exist - I had to create it by hand - maybe
> > the first shell script on step 2 needs some editing ?), until I installed
> > vqadmin and setup the passwd and placed .htpasswd in
> > /usr/local/www/cgi-bin, restarted apache (built from ports), and tried to
> > login through the cgi interface from another machine. Ports www, 8080 and
> > https are open in /etc/pf.conf. But I keep getting "Waiting for <FQDN>"
> > and never can authenticate with the right password.
>
> A couple of possibilities.
>
> The default installation of vpopmail puts the vpopmail directory
> in /usr/local and if you want to use /usr/home you have to supply the
> correct argument to vpopmail when you build it.
>
> >From /usr/ports/mail/vpopmail/Makefile:
>
> [...]
> # User-configurable variables
> #
> # Define these to change from the default behaviour
> #
> [...]
> # PREFIX        - installation area for vpopmail (see comment below)
> [...]
> # Uncomment this, or set PREFIX to /home if you have an existing
> # vpopmail install with the vpopmail users' home directory set to
> # /home/vpopmail - package rules dictate we default
> to /usr/local/vpopmail
> #
> #PREFIX?=       /home
>
> Note that this will, in my experience, create some odd directory trees
> in /usr/home (such as /usr/home/lib and /usr/home/libexec) which can
> safely be deleted subsequently. I don't use vqadmin, but this would need
> to know where to find the vpopmail binaries, and I can't see any make
> options that might define this, so that might be a major stumbling
> block. A possible cause of the behaviour you report would be that
> vqadmin is trying to run vpopmail binaries with inappropriate paths, or
> to read directory structures in the wrong place.
>
> One workaround, if your real vpopmail directory is in /usr/local and you
> do need it to be in /usr/home is to symlink /usr/local/vpopmail
> to /usr/home/vpopmail.
>
> Incidentally, the FreeBSD installation of qmail recommends
> using /var/service and much of the qmail documentation assumes the
> existence of /service. My own approach to this is to use /var/service
> but then symlink it to /service so that anything that assumes the
> existence of this directory will work.
>
> However, neither vpopmail not vqadmin would give you an imap server, and
> you don't say whether you have installed one separately. You do need to
> and a commonly used option in this case would be courier-imap because
> it's written by the same folk who brought us vpopmail, and integrates
> well with this and qmail. It isn't the only choice, of course, and
> you're generally best advised to use something you're familiar with.
>
> > The question is :
> >
> > What am I possibly doing wrong ? A port that is not open, or is it some
> > other problem that a FreeBSD / Qmail newbie might have missed ?
>
> It's generally best to use default installation locations with ports,
> especially when you're installing a few that will work with each other.
>
> Then, before testing a cgi interface like vqadmin, make sure everything
> works. Test qmail, (telnet) test imap, test vpopmail with a domain and a
> user or two on the command line. If these things aren't working
> properly, then vqadmin won't either.
>
> www.lifewithqmail.org is probably the most authoritative site to use as
> a reference, together with inter7's website and http://cr.yp.to for some
> perhaps slightly terse but very good initial docs.
>
> If you need more help, maybe say whether you have installed an imap
> server, and whether the underlying technologies - qmail, vpopmail, imap
> - are working.
>
> Peter.

Thanks for your informative response. I apologize if I did not stress this 
point enough in my initial email. I was following instructions on 
freebsd.qmailrocks.org to the *letter* and building from source as is 
strongly recommended there.

The install is currently in an interrupted state. Setting up IMAP *would have 
been* one of the next steps.

I am right now at the following step :

http://freebsd.qmailrocks.org/vqadmin.htm

For an overview of the entire installation, please see :

http://freebsd.qmailrocks.org/install.htm