Installing vpopmail to a directory other than the default

I was setting up a FreeBSD machine with Matt's Mail Toaster today, and I couldn't seem to get vpopmail to install anywhere except for /usr/local/vpopmail, even though I specified in toaster-watcher.conf that the vpopmail directory should be /home/vpopmail. After some digging, I found that the vpopmail install checks the home directory of the vpopmail user in order to find out where it should install to. So, I did

chsh vpopmail

and changed the home directory to /home/vpopmail. To get it to work seamlessly, though, I also had to set PREFIX=/home before doing the vpopmail install, so the line was:

env PREFIX=/home toaster_setup.pl -s vpopmail

or, if you're using the ports on your own:
env PREFIX=/home make install

Capitalizing the first word of every sentence in PHP

Someone asked me tonight for a function that capitalized the first word of every sentence in PHP. I thought I could do it with a one line preg_replace, but it didn't want to let me call strtoupper or ucfirst on backreferenced variables for some reason. I didn't really look into it, but I wrote this function instead. It's not necessarily as efficient as I'd like it to be, but it works, and I thought someone might be able to use it.

$text = 'Here is a sentence. here is one not capitalized. and another';
$fixed_text = uc_sentence_start( $text );
echo $fixed_text;


function uc_sentence_start( $value ) {

preg_match_all( '/(\.\s*)([a-z])/m', $value, $matches, PREG_OFFSET_CAPTURE );

for ($i=0; $i< count($matches[0]); $i++) {

$match_pos = $matches[0][$i][1];
$dot_space = $matches[1][$i][0];
$char = $matches[2][$i][0];

$replacement = $dot_space . strtoupper( $char );

$value = substr_replace( $value, $replacement, $match_pos, strlen($replacement) );
}

return $value;
}

Mappoint North America can't run

Just something I've picked up along the way. If you're seeing the following message when trying to use the MapPoint VB control (MappointControl.ocx):

"MapPoint North America can't run because it is not registered on your system, or it can't be found. Install MapPoint North America and try again."

Try going to start -> run and typing (including quotes):

"C:\Program Files\Microsoft MapPoint\Mappoint.exe" /regserver

If you have Mappoint installed to a different location than the default, replace the location above with the correct path. However, make sure that while the path stays in quotes, the /regserver is outside the quotes and separated from the path with a space, as above.

Apache make_sock errors

While trying to resolve a latency issue today, I restarted apache and kept seeing these errors:

[Mon Nov 22 12:12:57 2004] [info] (2)No such file or directory: make_sock: for port 443, setsockopt: (SO_ACCEPTFILTER)
[Mon Nov 22 12:12:57 2004] [info] (2)No such file or directory: make_sock: for port 80, setsockopt: (SO_ACCEPTFILTER)

The port seemed to be bound but wouldn't accept any connections. After running "sockstat" a lot and scratching my head, something occurred to me. I normally have an ipfw throttle pipe running just to prevent an attack or sudden popularity increase in a website or image from sucking up thousands of dollars of bandwidth. I *thought* I had disabled it with "ipfw pipe flush" to troubleshoot the latency problem, but then I remembered that you need to issue two commands to fully clear the ipfw throttling rules:

ipfw pipe flush
ipfw flush

That solved the problem with Apache not accepting socket connections.

(As of this writing, the latency is still there, but I'm growing more and more certain that it's a problem somwhere upstream.)

Proftpd mySQL Authentication & Quotas on FreeBSD

Tonight I tried setting up Proftpd with mySQL authentication on a development box running FreeBSD 4.10. I got it to work using the steps below, but some security concerns arise from using mySQL user accounts without a system account behind them. Since this setup uses one FTP account to create user home directories and upload files, a compromise to this FTP user would cause the attacker to gain access to all FTP user home directories. I guess it just depends on how much you trust the DefaultRoot directive in Proftpd. I run Proftpd in its own chroot environment ( http://jim.centerfuse.net/projects/proftpd_chroot/ ) in addition to using DefaultRoot, so I'm used to feeling pretty safe with my Proftpd install. Anyway, here's how I did the install/configuration

1. install proftpd-mysql from the ports with WITH_QUOTA set:
cd /usr/ports/ftp/proftpd-mysql/
env WITH_QUOTA=yes make
env WITH_QUOTA=yes make install

2. Add the global proftpd user & Proftpd group to your system.
I used uid & gid 5500 simply because that's what was used at one of the sites I was referencing (listed below).

pw groupadd -n Proftpd -g 5500
pw useradd proftpd -u 5500 -g Proftpd -s /sbin/nologin -d /dev/null -c "Proftpd User"

3. Create the mySQL database

create database proftpd;
grant all on proftpd.* to 'proftpd'@'localhost' identified by 'password'

( change 'password' to something secret! )

4. Create the mySQL tables for the users & quota

create table proftpdUsers (

sqlUID int unsigned auto_increment not null,
userName varchar(30) not null unique,
passwd varchar(80) not null,
uid int unsigned not null unique,
gid int unsigned not null,
homedir tinytext,
shell tinytext,
primary key(sqlUID)

) ;

create table proftpdGroups (

sqlGID int unsigned auto_increment not null,
groupName varchar(30) not null unique,
gid int unsigned not null unique,
members tinytext,
primary key(sqlGID)
);

CREATE TABLE proftpdQuotaLimits (
name VARCHAR(30),
quota_type ENUM("user", "group", "class", "all") NOT NULL,
per_session ENUM("false", "true") NOT NULL,
limit_type ENUM("soft", "hard") NOT NULL,
bytes_in_avail FLOAT NOT NULL,
bytes_out_avail FLOAT NOT NULL,
bytes_xfer_avail FLOAT NOT NULL,
files_in_avail INT UNSIGNED NOT NULL,
files_out_avail INT UNSIGNED NOT NULL,
files_xfer_avail INT UNSIGNED NOT NULL
);


CREATE TABLE proftpdQuotaTallies (
name VARCHAR(30) NOT NULL,
quota_type ENUM("user", "group", "class", "all") NOT NULL,
bytes_in_used FLOAT NOT NULL,
bytes_out_used FLOAT NOT NULL,
bytes_xfer_used FLOAT NOT NULL,
files_in_used INT UNSIGNED NOT NULL,
files_out_used INT UNSIGNED NOT NULL,
files_xfer_used INT UNSIGNED NOT NULL
);

5. Add a test user to the proftpd database

(assumes /home/ftp is where you keep your ftp users. Otherwise, change the homedir location). This is certainly not a necessary step, but you should probably check to see if your configuration is working. You can delete this user later.

insert into proftpdUsers values ( 0, 'test', 'test', 5500, 5500, '/home/ftp/test', '/sbin/nologin' );

6. Set your proftpd configuration to use the mySQL authentication and quotas:
(NOTE: this is not a complete configuration file, it's basically just the default config file with mySQL auth & quotas added, but note that the User and Group directives are the user & group we added in step 2. )

MaxInstances 30

# Set the user and group under which the server will run.
User proftpd
Group Proftpd

# To cause every FTP user to be "jailed" (chrooted) into their home
# directory, uncomment this line.
DefaultRoot ~

# Normally, we want files to be overwriteable.
AllowOverwrite on

# Bar use of SITE CHMOD by default
<Limit SITE_CHMOD>
DenyAll
</Limit>

DenyAll

# The passwords in MySQL are encrypted using CRYPT
SQLAuthTypes Plaintext Crypt
SQLAuthenticate users* groups*

# used to connect to the database
# databasename@host database_user user_password
SQLConnectInfo proftpd@localhost proftpd yourdatabasepassword

# Here we tell ProFTPd the names of the database columns in the "usertable"
# we want it to interact with. Match the names with those in the db
SQLUserInfo proftpdUsers userName passwd uid gid homedir shell

# Here we tell ProFTPd the names of the database columns in the "grouptable"
# we want it to interact with. Again the names match with those in the db
SQLGroupInfo proftpdGroups groupName gid members

# set min UID and GID - otherwise these are 999 each
SQLMinID 5000

#============
# User quotas
# ===========
QuotaEngine on
QuotaDirectoryTally on
QuotaDisplayUnits Mb
QuotaShowQuotas on

# create a user's home directory on demand if it doesn't exist
SQLHomedirOnDemand on

SQLNamedQuery get-quota-limit SELECT "name, quota_type, per_session, limit_type, bytes_in_avail, bytes_out_avail, bytes_xfer_avail, files_in_avail, files_out_avail, files_xfer_avail FROM proftpdQuotaLimits WHERE name = '%{0}' AND quota_type = '%{1}'"

SQLNamedQuery get-quota-tally SELECT "name, quota_type, bytes_in_used, bytes_out_used, bytes_xfer_used, files_in_used, files_out_used, files_xfer_used FROM proftpdQuotaTallies WHERE name = '%{0}' AND quota_type = '%{1}'"

SQLNamedQuery update-quota-tally UPDATE "bytes_in_used = bytes_in_used + %{0}, bytes_out_used = bytes_out_used + %{1}, bytes_xfer_used = bytes_xfer_used + %{2}, files_in_used = files_in_used + %{3}, files_out_used = files_out_used + %{4}, files_xfer_used = files_xfer_used + %{5} WHERE name = '%{6}' AND quota_type = '%{7}'" proftpdQuotaTallies

SQLNamedQuery insert-quota-tally INSERT "%{0}, %{1}, %{2}, %{3}, %{4}, %{5}, %{6}, %{7}" proftpdQuotaTallies

QuotaLimitTable sql:/get-quota-limit
QuotaTallyTable sql:/get-quota-tally/update-quota-tally/insert-quota-tally


Thanks to the following sites for being great references, and providing most of the information in this post:
http://www.khoosys.net/single.htm?ipg=848
http://www.castaglia.org/proftpd/modules/mod_quotatab_sql.html