Mutt and nbSMTP

Not so long ago I installed in different locations a few PCs as servers.
I choose Ubuntu server edition 8.0.4 LTS (Long-Term Support) aka Hardy Heron, the latest LTS version available from Canonical.
I prefer the hard way, without the GUI. Sorry, I don't like Linux GUIs ;-)
That way I can control what is installed, and install just what is really useful for that particular machine, leaving precious resources to services that need them. There is also another advantage. Limiting possible security issues.
One of these servers, in particular, has to manage the nightly backup of another server, this time a Windows 2003, via rsync.
I created a bash script to do the job and scheduled it with crontab.
The script, during the process, creates a report that is saved as a zip archive when the work is finished.
I was wondering how could I get that file to check everything was fine, without remotely access the server.
The obvious response was. By e-mail.
I started hunting for information in search for the most elegant solution with the minimum impact on the system.

What I found, and I picked, to achieve my goal, are these two little gems.

Mutt "a small but very powerful text-based mail client for Unix operating systems" and No Brainer SMTP nbSMTP "a simple MTA to send your mails to another mail server via SMTP".

First step. Retrieve and install the two packages. In Ubunto the apt-get command is aimed at that.

sudo apt-get install mutt
sudo apt-get install nbsmtp

I created a user specific .muttrc containing these lines

# No need to keep copy of the outgoing messages
set copy=no
# Some changes to the message headers
set hdrs=yes
my_hdr From: Me the sender <me@mydomain.com>
# How to invoke nbsmtp
set sendmail="/usr/bin/nbsmtp -f me@mydomain.com -d mydomain.com -h my_isp_smtp_server.com"

and to complete the work, at the end of the bash script that is supposed to make the backup, I've added the line in charge of sending the message

mutt -s "Backup report" -a report.zip me@mydomain.com < messagebody.txt

"Backup report" - is the subject of the message (option -s)
report.zip - is the attachment (option -a)
me@mydomain.com - is the recipient
messagebody.txt - is the main body of the e-mail (read message from the file messagebody.txt)

The file messagebody.txt could be anything you want to insert as the body of the message being sent.

Last but not least :-) I've also inserted this line into crontab file

MAILTO=""

to avoid error warning in log file
nbSMTP does not support the -o arguments from sendmail, ignoring them

because every time a croned job is executed mail is sent to the owner of the crontab

Windows XP Display Properties

Generally due to a virus attack, sometimes some pages under Display Properties are no longer available.
Run Regedit and search for
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System\

Remove keys, if they are present

NoDispAppearancePage
NoDispBackgroundPage
NoDispScrSavPage
NoDispSettingsPage

Now the Display Properties should be OK.

If, also the Task Manager is grayed out, there is a chance to find this key too

DisableTaskMgr

that must be removed.

How to change default umask Leopard, Tiger and Panther

If, for some reason, you need to change the default umask (022) in Mac OS X Leopard the following article helps you in achieving that goal.

The article refers to Leopard server.
I tried it on Leopard workstation and seems to work just fine too.

The same can be done for Mac OS X Tiger in Terminal

sudo defaults write -g NSUmask -int value

as stated in Command Line 10.4 2nd edition manual

The above example applies on Mac OS X Panther too.

*** BE CAREFUL ***
These changes could possibly have nasty consequences on the normal behaviour of the system.

I don't want IPv6 in Ubuntu

By default all major distributions of Linux nowadays are IPv6 enabled.
That is true also for Ubuntu server v6.06.1 aka Dapper Drake.

Sometimes leaving IPv6 enabled can cause little annoyances.

Fire up your favourite text editor and sudo edit this file

/etc/modprobe.d/aliases

Replace the line alias net-pf-10 ipv6 with alias net-pf-10 off.

Restart the computer and check the result with this line

ip a | grep inet6

If nothing appears IPv6 has gone :-)

Read here the original article