The setup: I run just under a dozen mailing lists for athas.org. The server they live on is the same one that this blog, and several other domains, are hosted on. Because I’m hosting several domains, and I don’t want email bleed (because they’re not all mine), I set things up more or less as described in this howto. So, my mailserver operates off the idea of virtual domains. There’s a special virtual domain, lists.athas.org — all emails sent to this domain are piped into mailman. It’s worked out pretty cleanly, and by doing it that way, my mailing lists are well-deliniated, and I don’t have to update aliases at the mail-server level every time I add or remove a mailing list.

The problem cropped up when I got an email from one of my list subscribers who was using yahoo mail. It turns out that he was getting bounces whenever he tried to respond to a mail from the list. So, I checked out my logs, and found his bounce in my postfix logs. Turns out that he was trying to send email to mochajava.athas.org instead of lists.athas.org. Mochajava is the “real” name of the server.

I had him forward me a copy of a mail from that list. Reply-To header set correctly. So, I know what the problem is: His mail user agent was sending an email to the wrong address. I just had no idea why. Looking through the headers, the only instance of “mochajava.athas.org” I found was in the Recieved headers.

It wasn’t until a couple of weeks later that I realized what it was. lists.athas.org was registered as a CNAME alias for mochajava.athas.org in my DNS setup. So, a ns-lookup gives back something like:

Non-authoritative answer:
Name: mochajava.athas.org
Address: 65.78.231.230
Aliases: lists.athas.org

So, I think what happened was this: Yahoo mail client does a DNS lookup to ensure that the domain in the reply-to actually exists — makes sense from a user-friendly sort of approach — and, upon seeing that the given domain is an alias, replaces the name wih the host’s cannonical name. Unfortunately, my mail server’s setup depended on the use of that alias to direct emails to the list server software …

The solution was simple: Change the DNS entry. Now, lists.athas.org, instead of being a CNAME alias, is a top-level A record. Everything works smoothly now, and replys to the list from my yahoo users actually get sent to the list.

Here’s hoping this helps someone spend less time scratching their heads than I had to…

At the moment, it looks like I’ve got over a gigs’ worth of pacakages to download … definately an overnight job. So, aptitude -d dist-upgrade it is…

So, a little over 1,100 packages takes about half an hour to install on my 2.something or other laptop. Not too shabby. It’s not a complete upgrade — there’s another handful of packages that had to be kept around through the first dist-upgrade. Next round looks like it’s going to take out sysvinit and replace it with upstart. Think I’m going to delay that one, as I need to head off for the moment … more later

Second round of dist-upgrades … This is interesting. The system automatically wants to install upstart … and forces the uninstallation of sysvinit, which dpkg doesn’t like. And because of the vaugeries of aptitude, I have to type “I understand that this is a very bad idea” not once, but twice, for the OS induced replacement of a critical package. Not that I wasn’t planning on doing that anyway, but, there might want to be some though given to that — it comes off a bit scary (well, replacing sysvinit should be scary, because without it, you got nothin’) and the upgrade is supposed to be “smooth” …

Despite the warnings, however, my machine rebooted quite happily. Which is good, because I hate having to dig up rescue CDs … So far, seems good. I like the new artwork. Edgy installs firefox2 beta, which means that most of the extensions I had installed won’t work … I hadn’t been too dependant on those, although I’ll definately miss the delicious plugin. Nothing earthshattering those, and those’ll come back in time.

I’m just starting to get my teeth into it, but I’ll keep updating this posting as I make new observations.

Biases: I’m a longtime Debian user, and have come to take the magic of apt for granted. I have, in the past, configured my system using automount and udev to deal with USB drives appearing and disappearing. I’m a command line junky, so I have very little use for Gnome and it’s ilk. I long ago decided that X11 is for web browsers, and getting lots of terminal windows on the same screen.

The good:

• As advertised, bootup times are much improved. And, since I’m currently running on a laptop, that’s important. The post-login, especially, noticably faster.
• The fonts are terrific. I noticed an immediate improvement in web pages through firefox (which is my primary non-terminal application).
• visually, the new theme is nice. There are a couple of small things I’m not quite so keen on, but it’s a good improvement in eye candy.
• apt-get install sun-jdk-java5. What else can I say?
• I’ve had at least one person shoulder-surfing at work remark with some surprise … desktop linux has come a looong way.

The bad:

• I can’t figure out how to configure the Network Manager that the upgrade page advertises. From what I can find, it’s pretty much supposed to work automagically. It finds none of my wireless networks, either at work or at home — and there’s pretty much a whole building’s worth of wireless networks at my apartment. I havn’t found any config files to edit, and near as I can tell, I have everything installed that it needs. It’s not a huge deal, but hey … this is a laptop. networks change, and it’d be nice not to have to throw a password to do so.
• It appears that there’s still no ruby gems installer in the base distribution. This is obstinantly due to some kind of packaging disagreement between the langague folks and the distribution … but, if it works with CPAN …

The Ugly:

• My laptop has media keys along the far right of the keyboard. They’re your standard “pause, foward, back” type keys … I havn’t figured out how to get ubuntu to recognize them.
• default desktop. This is more of a “I don’t like gnome” sort of complaint, but … I hate desktop icons. They’re not compatable with how I work, and they just get in the way. I havn’t figured out where I need to go to turn them off. In order to turn them off, you have to run gconf-editor (because the gnome people, for some reason, think a registry is a good idea. The mess in windows is apparently not enough of a deterrant) and disable the key /apps/nautilus/preferences/show_desktop.

Finally!

I’ve been running Debian for … oh, eight years or so, I think. Moved to debian during the libc6 update, because I didn’t want to upgrade my slackware system myself. Debian has, without a dobut, the best packaging system in the linux/unix world.

Of course, it also has some of the most opinionated, bigoted and stubborn people in the linux/unix world. And, by bigoted, I mean “against anything not Free”. The current fight is with the Free Software Foundation (!) over the GNU Free Documentation License. Debian seems to belive that it’s not free enough, and is currently removing whole swaths of manuals and documentation because of it.

This approach has actually been remarkably effective in the past — Debian is primarily responsible for changing KDE’s licence back in the late 90’s because they refused to distribute it.

So, in some sense, it’s not surprising to see that they were working on a mutually agreeable license with Sun. On the other hand, Java has been shipped under the same license for most of it’s 10 year history — ever since JDK2 came out, really. It’s surprising to see that inertia shift directions.

It’ll certainly make the packaging and distribution of java-based applications much easier. This goes in the “win” column.