Contrary to what some people would have everyone believe, Microsoft don’t screw up very often. However, when they do screw up, they seem to screw up with style.
This Christmas I was off work from 18th Dec to 28th Dec inclusive – quite a long time and also a bargain, at only 5 days of annual leave for a total of 11 days off work. It was nice to be away from a computer screen, only returning to check email and play a few games. Anyway, I digress.
If you’re running an email server on your Slug, where accurate server time is vital, or you simply want the Slug’s system time to be accurate, you need to make a few changes.
When it comes out of the factory the Slug has an inherrent bug which causes the internal clock to lose time; apparently Linksys tried to fix this problem by adjusting the time regularly (using cron) but it seems the time is adjusted in the wrong direction – thus, the error is doubled. This problem is fixed in Unslung 2.6 and higher anyway (Unslung 2.10 is the latest release as at Jan 2009), so we can remove the relevant crontab entry.
If you installed openssh (which is highly recommended, rather than using telnet to connect to your Slug), you already have openssl installed. It can’t hurt to check though (openssl is a prerequisite for this guide):
ipkg install openssl
I’m using Postfix as the mail transport agent (MTA) and Dovecot as the mail delivery agent (MDA), and the mail server will serve just one domain (for now). The domain will be served as a virtual host. This means that the mail users don’t need their own login account on the server, and additional domains can be served in future with minimal changes.
Many thanks go to Raymond Mentjens for his help in fixing a few (actually, quite a few) errors, and for all his feedback while he followed this article. He has also created his own guides in Dutch – so if you read Dutch better than English, you may want to take a look at his site.
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