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Configure sendmail as an MTA relay on Slackware

My landlord recently changed to a different ISP that blocks all outgoing requests on port 25, except towards their own SMTP-server. After getting my hands dirty by plowing throgh the sendmail documentation, located here, I figured out that it wasn’t very difficult to configure sendmail to relay all outgoing e-mails towards this server, thus solving the entire problem.

If you want all outgoing mail to go to a central relay site, define SMART_HOST.

I started by checking the sendmail configuration file, /etc/mail/sendmail.cf, that strictly specified “DO NOT EDIT THIS FILE!  Only edit the source .mc file.“. Following this advice, I had to figure out where this .mc file was located.

I did a quick search for all files containing sendmail and cf on my local system, and discovered “/usr/share/sendmail/cf/cf/sendmail-slackware.mc“. That was indeed the correct file, and I simply added “define(`SMART_HOST’, `smtp.online.no’)“. To see the entire configuration file, expand the spoiler below.

Spoiler Inside: modified sendmail-slackware.mc SelectShow

Once that was done, I had to compile the configuration file with “m4 /usr/share/sendmail/cf/cf/my-sendmail.slackware.mc > /etc/mail/sendmail.cf“, and restart inetd and sendmail by running /etc/rc.d/rc.inetd restart && /etc/rc.d/rc.sendmail restart.

Problem solved, and I’m receiving my emails again!

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Using Dropbox on Slackware

This guide will show you how to install Droxbox on a system that doesn’t have Nautilus installed. This is especially useful to people who use Slackware, because GNOME is not installed by default. You still need a file manager though, so in this example, we’ll use Thunar.

In order to get Dropbox to work, we have to trick Dropbox into thinking that Nautilus is already installed. The easiest way to accomplish this, is by creating a script in /usr/bin called nautilus, which basically is a link to Thunar. To get started, download a precompiled binary from getdropbox.com. I used a binary compiled for Fedora 10 called nautilus-dropbox-0.6.1-1.fc10.i386.rpm.

$ wget http://linux.getdropbox.com/packages/nautilus-dropbox-0.6.1-1.fc10.i386.rpm

What we now are going to do is to run rpm2tgz on this package so that we can explode the package using explodepkg. We do so because we want to create a slackware-package, where we also include our little workaround. First, log in as root.

$ su -
$ mkdir /tmp/dropbox
$ mv nautilus-dropbox-0.6.1-1.fc10.i386.rpm /tmp/dropbox
$ rpm2tgz nautilus-dropbox-0.6.1-1.fc10.i386.rpm
$ explodepkg nautilus-dropbox-0.6.1-1.fc10.i386.tgz

Now, go to /tmp/dropbox/usr/bin, fire up your favorite text-editor and write the following:

#!/bin/bash
thunar $@
exit 0

When you’re done, save the file as “nautilus”. Now, go back to /tmp/dropbox, create a folder called install, touch a file called “slack-desc” and run makepkg to create a slackware-package.

$ mkdir install
$ touch install/slack-desc
$ makepkg dropbox-0.6.1-i386-1vh.tgz

The only thing that has to be done now, is to install the package.

$ installpkg dropbox-0.6.1-i386-1vh.tgz
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Special keys stops working while using VMware

Has it occured to you that when you’re using VMware Workstation or Server that CTRL, ALT and SHIFT stops working? When this first started happening to me, I just restarted X to fix the problem. As you probably know, this is not a good solution

If you however try executing setxkbmap once this problem occurs, you should gain control over the keys again. This did at least work for me 🙂