406 Not Acceptable

Actually make that I hate both Solaris 9 and Oracle 9. If you ever get asked to set these buggers up on a machine just say no. It probably is a whole lot easier using the current versions! (Or get Oracle to do it for you!)

I had to get this working environment up on an old system at work (programmers get to do hardware, yay!) Running on some old SPARC boxes with not-so-healthy drives and broken backups. Sat back and watched Solaris 9 take about half a day to install! Then the nightmare began…

Next you run into issues with your standard Solaris SPARC machine being headless and Oracle deciding to require a GUI and X windows when all you would do is click ‘ok’ four or five times. So off you go setting up the server to allow remote X connections, only Solaris is bolted down in a number of places to stop this happening (think security.) SSH -x may do some things but not all you need on Solaris!

In case your getting the handy “timeout locking .Xauthority” message, as root you need to copy the /.Xauthority file into the users home directory. Then give ownership using chown to the user. You may need to set up the user’s home directory, have a look at the contents of /etc/passwd to see where the user’s home directory is located. This should reside in /export/home/username/

Then when you actually get xclock and friends running you hit another wall. Oracle needs to link a bunch of files, but Solaris 9 does not come with the required tools! Being an old system you do not get a nice apitude style installer for simple dependencies; you have to go dig around for them yourselves. In case you’re wondering where to go, they’ve been hidden on the second of three install CDs.. Then Oracle will probably crash out for another reason and you’ll be left wanting to grab the nearest gun/axe/chainsaw and finish off the decrepid system yourself.

The Dreamhost support wiki seems to be lacking in information on general connectivity with Linux (especially for Evolution!) I would guess this is due to the lack of Dreamhost users that use a Linux variant such as Ubuntu, plus those that do will know what they are doing. I’ll be demonstrating the IMAP settings needed for email to work in Evolution, Ubuntu’s default email client, if you are using Thunderbird the settings are exactly the same as those in Windows.

Setting up the SSH FTP on Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon couldn’t be easier; however, you need to know a small amount on the setup of Unix servers. Otherwise you’ll end up in the root of the filesystem and on the Dreamhost server, for security reasons, you can’t seem to access the ‘home’ directory from root as a normal user. I am sure it won’t take you long to understand why.

Basically all you need to do is go to ‘Places’ then ‘Connect to Server’ in the main menu thingy. From here you can follow this picture:

You need to replace domainname and username with the domain you want to access and the ‘user’ that has access to the domain, not your panel login! Ubuntu will then ask you for the password for this folder, you will have to enter that users password. Once done the folder should open and you will be in your users home folder, there will be a folder for your domain which contains everything accessible from the web.

Setting up Evolution is somewhat more tricky, as their is a little more to do. For the basics you can use the Wizard and follow the guide for either Thunderbird or Outlook, using this picture to help you with the IMAP settings:

Obviously the protocol you want to use is IMAP, your user name will be user@domain.com, and the password will be the password you have set.

That was the ‘easier’ bit, it gets a little more difficult when setting up the SMTP settings.This part stumped me for some time, as I was able to receive emails but I could not them (I had to use the webmail to send email!) I thought that I had set up Firestarter (a firewall client for Linux that is not installed bu default) incorrectly and it was blocking my settings, but no I was just setting Evolution up wrong!

As Dreamhost use a non-standard port for SMTP (the default port is 25, but many ISPs have blocked port 25 to stop spammers.) So if you look at the picture, you can see how I set the port to use the one Dreamhost use. When it comes to the authentication type, just use the ‘check authentication types’ button, if you get an error message here you will not be able to send email as your settings for the SMTP server are incorrect. Remember it should be mail.domain.com just like your IMAP setting, expect you need to add :587 to set the port.

You can also set up the client to use encryption and more secure protocols for sending/recieving emails; however, I think that would be going just a bit to far. For now you should just enjoy the experience of sending and recieving emails through your own mail server (well Dreamhost’s, but with your own cool domain name.)