Postfix is such a joy chore pleasure pain in the ass to work with. Yes, my G5 arrived. It shipped a day after I posted my complaint (of course), and it arrived on the 27th. Haven’t really put it through its paces, yet, but I’ll get to it eventually.

Now that I’ve moved my old computer out of my bedroom and into the basement to perform the duties of a web and mail server, I’ve lost the luxury of having my mail client being on the same machine as my mail server, which means I have to learn some new administratory bits. My setup up ’til now was fairly simple. The most complex part probably being the virtual aliases/domains.

I’ve been using Postfix since the early days of OS X, when it didn’t come with 10.0 and I had to build it from source myself (or had sendmail active by default, I don’t remember). A couple of years ago, I hacked on the virtual domains. A year ago, I hacked on a catch-all virtual alias. This week, I hacked on a specific relay for my new G5. All without ever really knowing exactly what I was doing. Now, all things being equal, that wouldn’t be so bad, because I could always look back and see what I did.

However, all things aren’t equal. Apple has a tendency to add features to each iteration of their O/S (*gasp*), and, although I’m sure they try their darndest not to f!ck up one’s carefully laid out settings, they invariably always seem to f!ck up one’s carefully laid out settings in the process. The usual victims are the low-level non-GUI BSD-type stuff, like Apache, MySQL, Perl, PHP, Postfix, etc…, which are exactly the settings I have customized to my own liking. With every new version of the O/S, they add a different way to do something without trying to break backwards compatibility (or sometimes intentionally breaking it), which kind of takes some of the fun out of the whole hobbyist/tinkering mentality. With the help of Postfix Enabler, I finally made the changes that got everything working again. I also realized that Chicken of the VNC has this handy little feature that pasting shifted characters actually pastes their unshifted counterparts (so an underscore becomes a dash, a colon becomes a semi-colon, and a dollar sign becomes the number 4), which is really hard to tell (except for the 4) when text is at a really small size.

At least the one nice thing that came out of all of this, besides a working mail server again, was that I was finally able to get rid of the last remaining remnant of that disease known as Fink. Please, if you’re going to use Fink, realize that you’re never going to be able to reliably use anything else but Fink. It does not coexist happily with hand-built stuff.

The latest bully of the schoolyard is launchd, which definitely has some really nice features. I just wish they wouldn’t randomly break the StartupItems and the xinetd stuff I already had working. Launchd looks like a good system, Apple. Please stick with it for a while. I’d like to go on a vacation.

Let’s hope a year and a half from now, I won’t be writing a blog entry about how Leopard’s iServices are breaking my mail server yet again.