This page is used to document any issues I ran into personally when following the tutorial available at purplehat.org.

First step is to build a new server. After running the net install version, and get a basic server up and running, I download the ports tree and install the following apps:

• /usr/ports/ports-mgmt/portupgrade
• /usr/ports/ports-mgmt/portmaster
• /usr/ports/security/aide

Portupgrade is a nice command to have around, and also installs portversion. Running portversion -v | grep '<' after updating your tree gives you a list of all updates that can be installed. Portmaster is my personal choice for updating all the ports. Aide is FreeBSD's equivalent to Linux's tripwire, and keeps track of any system files that get edited. Installing the above ports will also get Perl installed as a dependancy, so you get that out of the way right away. Of course any of these can be installed as packages, but force of habit has me compiling them, and I seem to have less issues then the old RPM days.

At this point, I followed the tutorial verbatim, and ran into only a couple of minor issues. The first issue was with FuzzyOCR. When I got to Maia, and running the configtest.pl and configtest.php scripts, one of them complained that gifinter was not installed. A quick look on Google showed that gifinter had been deprecated, and wasn't coming back any time soon. I then noted that the command convert with the -interlace attribute did the same thing, so I wrote a wrapper in perl, saved it as gifinter, and the configtests were happy.

The second issue I found was that after starting all the services, I still wasn't getting any inbound email. I was able to connect using a mail client through Dovecot, but something was amiss. After poking around and reading cryptic log messages, I was put into the right direction, and noted that even though starting maiad did not generate any errors, it wasn't running. Pumping up the log level on maiad to 5, and I was able to discover that maiad was complaining that 2 directories did not exist in /var/maiad (I believe the directories were /var & /tmp). Once the directories were created, and ownership and the permissions set properly, maiad started without any issues, and a quick ps -aux confirmed they were running.

I'm still having issues getting system email forwarded from the local root account to my Inbox, but I think it might be a byproduct of my running bind99 on the same server, and having some type of DNS issue. I will report back once I get it sorted.