The qmail-updater service is actually very easy to install. The instructions given by John Simpson on his site are very easy to follow. The problem is the services won't work once you have all the right pieces in place. For convenience, I have transposed John Simpson's documentation to this documentation with his permission and also a special thanks to Jason King for the modified documentation he wrote specifically for FreeBSD.

For convenience, I have transposed John Simpson's documentation to this documentation with his permission and also a special thanks to Jason King for the modified documentation he wrote specifically for FreeBSD.

Let's get things started:

One of the first things we need to do is fetch the tarball which contains the vpopmail skel(eton) files. Why do we need this you say? In layman's terms, rather than having vpopmail make a basic Maildir with new, cur and tmp in it, we are going to replace that with a completely customized Maildir. The next few commands will fetch the tarball, extract it in the correct place and then chown and chmod it.

# cd ~vpopmail
# tar zxvf ~root/qmail/skel4.tgz
# chown -R vpopmail:vchkpw skel/
# chmod -R 700 skel/

We now need to change where vpopmail is located in FreeBSD. The location where ports will try to install it is /usr/local/vpopmail so we're going to delete that folder and symlink it to ~vpopmail. Please change the section /home/vpopmail below if you have changed the default location of the vpopmail home directory. If you didn't or you're not sure it will be ok to proceed with the command below. Otherwise edit to taste :-)

# cd /usr/local
# ln -s /home/vpopmail /usr/local/vpopmail

You will need to set the service up to run under daemontools. This process is very painless. Just copy
and paste commands into the command line and everything will be fine. (Steps copied from jms1.net)

# cd /var/qmail/supervise
# mkdir -m 1755 qmail-updater
# mkdir -m 755 qmail-updater/log
# mkdir /var/log/qmail/qmail-updater
# cd qmail-updater/log
# cp ~root/qmail/service-any-log-run run
# chmod 755 run
# vi run

Change this line (2nd from the bottom) in the run file:

multilog t n1024 s1048576 ./main

To this:

multilog t n1024 s1048576 /var/log/qmail/qmail-updater

# cd /var/qmail/supervise/qmail-updater
# cp ~root/qmail/pipe-watcher .
# cp ~root/qmail/update-qmail .
# cp ~root/qmail/service-qmail-updater-run run
# chmod 755 pipe-watcher update-qmail run

The pipe-watcher script has some variables you can adjust for your own purposes. I found no reason to change anything on my installation so you can keep them the way they are if you wish.

The last step is to simply link the qmail-updater directory in the /service directory so daemontools can run it.

# ln -s /var/qmail/supervise/qmail-updater /service/

Wait a few seconds then run:

# svstat /service/qmail-updater /service/qmail-updater/log

You should see output similar to the following:

/service/qmail-updater: up (pid 5087) 6 seconds
/service/qmail-updater/log: up (pid 5087) 6 seconds

After you've finished linking the service into daemontools, you're done. The service is running and you are ready to test it.

The qmail-updater service works by watching a file for data, once the service sees data on that file, it runs a script which updates the validrcptto database. To test you will need to open two sessions into your server so you can watch a log file and perform an action on a file at the same time. Next, We need to install fakeroot and then go to the vpopmail port and then enable onchange and logging and then install vpopmail!

# cd /usr/ports/security/fakeroot
# make install clean
# cd /usr/ports/mail/vpopmail
# make CONFIGURE_ARGS="--enable-logging=p --enable-onchange-script"

When the options box pops up make sure the following boxes are checked:

AUTH_LOG
DOCS
FILE_LOCKING
MD5_PASSWORDS
ONCHANGE_SCRIPT
ROAMING
SEEKABLE
USERS_BIG_DIR
CDB

Now lets install the vpopmail port:

# make install clean

If that runs without errors, vpopmail is configured and installed. At this point I would add a domain and make sure it adds it okay.

Your users will be very happy they will have the ability to turn on or off their spam protection, change their passwords and all kinds of other fun stuff.

Now that you have the qmail-updater service running, that means you should be able to add a user through qmailadmin or even the command line and the validrcptto database should updated automagically right? Nope, not yet. You don't have anyway of automatically writing data to that watched file yet. That is where the onchange script comes into play. Vpopmail is the program you use to add/del users and domains, but vpopmail doesn't have a hook in that qmail-updater service you just installed so adding a user doesn't write data to that watched file yet. Plus, if you don't have the version of vpopmail that knows to invoke the "onchange" script, it still will not work.

What you here is what we need to do to invoke the onchange script

# cd ~vpopmail/etc
# cp ~root/qmail/onchange-skel onchange

This is the script that vpopmail will execute when a user/domain has been added/deleted from the system. Once you have created this file set the permissions on it:

# chown vpopmail:vchkpw ~vpopmail/etc/onchange
# chmod 750 ~vpopmail/etc/onchange
# chmod +x ~vpopmail/etc/onchange

This last command gives execute permissions to everyone on the file because I've not found a way to get this to work through qmailadmin otherwise.

Now that your onchange script is in place, go ahead and tail the qmail-updater log file again and open up another session to your server:

# tail -f /var/log/qmail/qmail-updater/current | tai64nlocal

Now try adding a domain through the command line and watch your log file to see if stuff appears in it:

# cd ~vpopmail/bin
# ./vadddomain domain.com password

If the log file fills up with stuff after you add this domain, congratulations, you are all done with the qmail-updater process. You may also keep the log session open and try to add a user with qmailadmin just to make sure, but it should work fine from there so long as the permission have been set.

If the log file doesn't move, that means your version of vpopmail does not have the onchange patch in it. Read more about the onchange patch at John Simpsons website at http://qmail.jms1.net/patches/vpopmail.shtml#onchange .

We need to now make a slight modification to the vchkpw file to make SMTP with SSL work correctly:

# cd ~vpopmail/bin
# chmod 6711 vchkpw
# chown vpopmail:vchkpw vchkpw

If you would like to specify a default username modify or create /var/qmail/control/defaultdomain and /home/vpopmail/etc/defaultdomain to specify your default domain. This will allow your users to just use their username to login rather than their entire email address.

• vinnie@freebsdrocks.net



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