Marcus Stade's questions

I've got the following set up:

LAN ->  DHCP / DNS / VPN server (OSX 10.6) -> Cisco ASA 5505 -> WAN

Connecting to the LAN via VPN works fine. I get all the details properly and I can ping any host on the internal network using their IP. However, I can't do any host lookups whatsoever. I've looked through the logs on and found this nugget in the firewall log:

3   Sep 08 2010 10:46:40    305006  10.0.0.197  65371           portmap translation creation failed for udp src inside:myhostname.local/53 dst inside:10.0.0.197/65371

Port 53 is DNS services, no? Because of that log entry, I'm thinking that the issue is with the firewall, not the server. Any ideas? Please keep in mind that I have very little knowledge and experience with this kind of firewall and the little experience I do have is with the ASDM GUI console, not the CLI console.

I have aliases set up in postfix, such as the following:

[email protected]:    [email protected], [email protected] ...

When an email is sent to [email protected], and any of the recipients in that alias is cc:ed which is quite common (ie: "Reply all"), the e-mail is delivered in duplicates. For instance, if an e-mail is sent to [email protected] and [email protected] is cc:ed, it'll get delivered twice. According to the Postfix FAQ, this is by design as Postfix sends e-mail in parallel without expanding the groups, which makes it faster than sendmail. Now that's all fine and dandy, but is it possible to configure Postfix to actually remove duplicate recipients before sending the e-mail?

I've found a lot of posts from people all over the net that has the same problem, but I have yet to find an answer. If this is not possible to do in Postfix, is it possible to do it somewhere on the way? I've tried educating my users, but it's rather futile I'm afraid...

I'm running postfix on Mac OS X Server 10.6, amavis is set as content_filter and dovecot is set as mailbox_command. I've tried setting up procmail as a content_filter for smtp delivery (as per the suggestion below), but I can't seem to get it right. For various reasons, I can't replace the standard OS X configuration, meaning postfix, amavis and dovecot stay put. I can however add to it if I wish.

When I try to remove a user in the Workgroup Manager on OS X Server 10.6.2, it looks as though the user is removed correctly at first. But when refreshing, the user pops right back into view without any error messages. I can change any attributes of the user, and my current workaround has simply been to disable the accounts that really should be removed.

The only log that seems to report anything at all when I do this is the LDAP Log, which makes sense, unfortunately it's a rather unhelpful message:

slapd[4937]: SASL [conn=22] Failure: GSSAPI Error: Unspecified GSS failure. Minor code may provide more information (Key table entry not found)

I googled the error but couldn't really find a solution. Has anyone else seen this before and if so, how did you solve it?

I'm having lot's of problems with one specific account that was configured before I got to administer this server. I'm thinking about removing and recreating the account, but I'm not sure how to do a backup of it's emails. That's really the only data that I need to save.

How should I proceed?

I'm developing a front end to our subversion setup using WebDAV, XSL stylesheets and some php scripts to interface the svn binary. I wrote a simple shell script that sets up a project based on our tech policy (pretty standard stuff). However, the script won't run properly when executed by the apache user _www (OS X server). It complain's about not getting a password for _www. We do authentication through open directory so there are no .htaccess files controlling the authentication.

Can I somehow grant access to _www without having to type a password so that my scripts can run non interactive?

Adding this to Limit didn't help (although, removing the Limit tag altogether from the conf obviously works!):

Require user  _www _www@MYSERVER

It should be noted that _www has recursive ownership rights to directory that holds my repositories.

I've been trying to figure out how to do simple e-mail distribution groups in OS X Server 10.6 now for a few hours and I can't seem to figure it out. Basically I want to be able to e-mail multiple people by e-mailing a group that they are a part of. Trying to e-mail the short name of the group doesn't work at all, infact, the SMTP server won't even try to send it.

I'm not interested in the mailing list management features, I just need very simple distribution groups. Is it possible to do this from the Server Admin or Workgroup Manager front ends or must I edit some configuration files? I don't mind editing text files and if push comes to shove... But unfortunately, my collegues don't fare too well with editing configuration files (hence the purchase of a OS X server) and so a GUI frontend solution is preferred. Any takers?