After studying for my exams last night I decided to set my self some tasks for the next day. The first tool I tried using was Google’s Calendar service. It did almost everything I needed (provide me a calendar & tasks manager) except I was not able to hook into my tasks in Thunderbird. I’ve been toying around with installing a Calendar Server for awhile now as I’ve used countless providers, each one falling short of the mark.

I ended up doing a bit of research and had a choice between these three services:

• Darwin Calendar Server
• DaviCal
• Bedework

I chose Apple’s (ohwow) open source option ‘Darwin Calendar Server’. This seemed the best choice as it is lightweight and does exactly what I need. The other options required Java and a SQL database; of which I didn’t want to stress my server with.

I followed this rough guide and the install was quick and painless. The only dependency was on the file system itself which was easily rectified by remounting it with an extra parameter.

The configuration portion did have me stumped. The default config-file has the SSL arguments commented out. Apple in their infinite ‘against the grain’ wisdom decided that a comment characters should be this “-> & <-”.  After uncommenting and starting the server; listening on the right ports, I’m now able to access my tasks & calendar from work and home.

I’d recommend this solution to anyone with an Internet connected server in need of a CalDAV server. It doesn’t have the fancy front end like other offerings but it gets the job done efficiently.

For the past two days I’ve tirelessly configured Packetscape for e-Mail services. I admit I was conceited coming into it, I figured any HOWTO guide sourced via google would be sufficient instructions, alas I was wrong.

Through a few failed initial attempts and a few orphaned packages I stumbled upon this tutorial referenced from the http://postfix.org site. The guide was a step by step, from base to finish, install of: Postfix, Dovecot & Roundcube on a Debian (squeeze/lenny) system.

The tutorial was quite intuitive and mostly easy to follow. I did however, run into a few snags, particularly during the Dovecot configuration portion. Either my brain wasn’t switched on or the documentation was too ambiguous.  During this section the author instructs the administrator to modify the file with a few directives (sic) allowing the daemon to interface with Postfix. I made the changes to the config file and restarted the Dovecote daemon. Every time I would get a syntactical error. Plagued by this issue I trawled the Googles looking for a solution, each one I found, more obscure and non-related than the last.
I managed to get it working eventually. I copy and pasted exactly the commented out config-directives in the guide underneath each other and edited the values accordingly.

If any of you reading are embarking on this voyage I would give this advice:

• Read the comments section from the tutorial website: There was one particular comment which noted that the Roundcube package the author recommended will never work with this particular system configuration. I had to run an apt-get install roundcube-mysql command to get the right one.
• Use Notepad++ or similar IDE: This tool was awesome for troubleshooting the erroneous syslog messages as they referenced line numbers that were malfunctioning; of which Notepad++ keeps track of.
• Copy & Paste: Copying and pasting the relevent config sections within the default config file made sure that the syntax was parsed properly.

All up the experience was an eye opener, I learnt a lot about Unix mail services, reading documentation and perseverance.