Occasional Thoughts

Yesterday I upgraded my homeserver from SuSE 9.2 to SuSE 10.1. The update went much better than expected. Almost no problems, but with the mail server. I download the CDs of openSuSE from the internet. During upgrade I recognized that courier-imap is not included, as well as any other IMAP servers like cyrus. But after googling I found out that it is included on the retail DVD (here is a diff of the package lists). Hey SuSE! Got a good reason why such an essential package is missing on the internet versions? Well, I don't understand that.
The funny thing is, that while these packages are not included on the internet CD images, the packages are included in the yast installation repositories that is available from their FTP server. So simply add one of the Internet Installation Repositories from one of the mirrors to either YaST or as a Smart channel (Smart rocks!!!) and then start your favourtie package manager to install the missing packages. The other problem was more difficult to resolve. I did not receive any mails. A test mail from another account was replied from the Mail Delivery System:

I'm sorry to have to inform you that your message could not be delivered to one or more recipients. It's attached below. For further assistance, please send mail to If you do so, please include this problem report. You can delete your own text from the attached returned message. The Postfix program

(expanded from ): maildir delivery failed: link to /home/cschlipf/Maildir/new/1155720278.V303I2b9bM725647.server: Permission denied

I checked the permissions. The Maildir was only readable by the user, however this should be no problem since postfix is running as root. And it was no problem under SuSE 9.2. After a while googling it turned out that the problem was caused by App Armor, which was enabled by default. Unfortunately the folks at SuSE forgot to include a profile for postfix. So, if you get the same errors, add an AppArmor profile using YaST and permit postfix write access, so that it can write into your Maildirs. Other than that... Impressive upgrade. I skipped two releases. Some years ago, upgrading was a thrilling task from one release to the next. But today it's pretty easy with almost no problems. So, try to do an upgrade from Windows NT 3.5.1 to Windows XP, running various services like Email, Web server, Database, DNS, DHCP and more.