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I’ve Got Mail! February 11, 2008

Posted by gnukathryn in Configuration, Fedora, Fundamentals, Nifty!, Terminal, Utilities.
2 comments

The capital letter in my user name was indeed throwing sendmail into fits. I could have created an entire new user. But hey, that’s a lot of work. I’d have to port my Firefox profile over and re-customize my desktop. Nah. Definitely not worth it just to be able to read local email.

I could have directly edited /etc/passwd using vipw at the command line. I’m not a big fan of vi. It scares the pants off me. I’ll stick to emacs, thanks. Heck, I find emacs extremely challenging on a good day. I’m all for the simple route of using kedit. So on the advice of mweltin who was hanging around #boinc, I ended up using usermod from the command line. The syntax was quite simple. usermod -l kathryn Kathryn. The only gotcha is that you can’t be logged into an account that you want to edit. So I logged out of Kathryn. Hmmm… well that dumped me to a text login screen. Oh well. I logged in as root, ran my usermod command and then rebooted from the command line. I have no idea how to get back into a graphical environment from a text prompt. But at least I learned how to reboot from the command line.

And…. BINGO!

[kathryn@Galaxy ~]$ mail
Mail version 8.1 6/6/93. Type ? for help.
“/var/spool/mail/kathryn”: 6 messages 6 new
>N 1 boinc@Galaxy.Fedora Mon Feb 11 19:42 17/582 “test”
N 2 MAILER-DAEMON@Galaxy Mon Feb 11 19:42 78/2716 “Warning: could not send message for past 4 hours”
N 3 MAILER-DAEMON@Galaxy Mon Feb 11 19:42 164/5257 “Warning: could not send message for past 4 hours”
N 4 root@Galaxy.Fedora Mon Feb 11 19:42 27/978 “Cron <root@Galaxy> run-parts /etc/cron.daily”
N 5 logwatch@Galaxy.Fedo Mon Feb 11 19:42 113/3519 “Logwatch for galaxy.fedora (Linux)”

Picky Picky February 9, 2008

Posted by gnukathryn in Fedora, Fundamentals, Utilities.
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I found an answer to my mail problems. Someone hit on my blog using sendmail “user unknown” errors 8.14.1 as a search term. I figured that this person was having problems similar to my own. So I put that same search in Google and found this thread.

It looks like having a user name with capital letters in it throws sendmail into a tizzy. This fits perfectly with what I observed on my own machine. I can receive mail sent to root or boinc, but I can’t receive mail sent to Kathryn.

So I guess I need to create a new user for myself called “kathryn”. I’m just not sure what to do with all the stuff that’s in “Kathryn”.

Oh well. At least the mystery has been solved.

Log rotation for BOINC December 30, 2007

Posted by gnukathryn in BOINC, Configuration, Utilities.
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If you’ve followed Eric’s instructions for installing BOINC as a daemon, then you may have found out that the messages you see in the message tab are captured in boinc.log. Any errors are captured in error.log. Here’s the problem. There’s no built in way to rotate those logs. So boinc.log and error.log keep growing and growing and… well you get the picture. And the last thing you want to do is run out of disk space. That’s never pretty. Never fear, there’s a handy dandy cron job that runs daily called logrotate. And it does exactly what it says it does. To rotate your BOINC logs you have to create a configuration file and place it in /etc/logrotate.d. The following is my configuration file. See man logrotate for full details on the options for the configuration file.

Just remember to use the correct path to the logs. Your’s may be in /home/boinc/ or some other location.

# Log Rotation for BOINC Daemon Logs
#
# See http://boinc.berkeley.edu/
# for more information about BOINC
#
# Daemon is stopped and then restarted
# after the logs are rotated.
#
# On restart, all results that checkpoint
# will fall back to the last one, if it exists.
# On restart, all results that did not checkpoint
# will start from the beginning.
#
# Author: Kathryn Marks
# kathryn.boinc@gmail.com
#
# Created: October 6, 2007
# Last Modified: December 28, 2007
#########################################

# Global Parameters

missingok
compress
delaycompress
notifempty
nomail

# Log Specific Parameters

# boinc.log
# Normal usage:
# Rotate weekly and keep about 2 months worth

/var/lib/boinc/boinc.log
{
weekly
rotate 8

create 664 boinc boinc
sharedscripts
prerotate
/etc/init.d/boinc stop
endscript
postrotate
/etc/init.d/boinc start
endscript
}

# error.log
# Normal usage:
# Rotate monthly and keep about 2 months worth

/var/lib/boinc/error.log
{
monthly
rotate 2

create 664 boinc boinc
sharedscripts
prerotate
/etc/init.d/boinc stop
endscript
postrotate
/etc/init.d/boinc start
endscript
}

## EOF ##