FreeBSD

About age or tradition

Daring Fireball writes about the reasons people who, in spite of dissatisfaction with Windows, won't switch to Macintosh. The article debunks some omnipresent myths such as the idea that Macintosh is more "locked in" to Apple than the Wintel platform is to Microsoft. A footnote suggests the iPod effect may have to do with "young people who haven't yet matured to the age where they're overly fearful of veering from the familiar. "

Possibly. But I'm not buying wholesale. I think there is another big difference between the lack of maturity to place where the familiar is uncomfortable. Rather it seems that teens today have a greater comfort level with various types of technology. Much more than those of us passing the three-decade mark, those of the next generations encounter a lot more technology a lot sooner in life. Along with a greater familiarity comes a much greater comfort in figuring out how different technology works.

A second important shift that accompanies growing up with technology. In older present generations, computers and technology are something new to learn. So much time has been put into trying to learn a few months behind those who created the technology that we've managed to loose site of the fact that our kids and their kids will come to know computers more as we consider mechanical pencils and ball-point pens.

Moving mailman from one server to another

Yesterday brought the much anticipated (dreaded) task of moving mailman from one server to another. The move was necessary to retire a FreeBSD server and consolidate services on a Mac OS X 10.4 Server box. There are good documents on the web about setting up mailman on OS X 10.4 Client but not as many on the setup of a standard mailman install on the server platform.

The first question that may jump out at folks is why? Mac OS X 10.4 Server comes with Mailman already installed. Why not use it? The installation included in OS X is highly customized in order to work with Apple's server administration tools. Also in my case I was moving a Mailman 2.1.6 installation on FreeBSD and the OS X Server version is still 2.1.5 (though it has been nearly six months since the release of the security patches in 2.16). Looking at the documentation there is little suggestion changes would have prevented the newer files from working but as a Nevadan I prefer the house's odds to those of the gambler.

Mailman update from FreeBSD ports

This is one of those things I always seem to forget in terms of syntax. To do an update on Mailman running with the Postfix MTA on FreeBSD there is a configuration option necessary to set the mail GID properly.

The command is this:

% make MM_GROUPID=mailman

So the whole process looks something like

% mailmanctl stop
% make deinstall
% make MM_GROUPID=mailman
% make reinstall
% mailmanctl start

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