I think I've finally calmed down.
Rough day at “The Office” (even if it was from home). SMTP (Simple Mail Transport Protocol) [1] authentication [2] problems, control panels [3] and horrible [4] documentation [5].
Let's see … can't uninstall the control panel probably because I modified it so that it would actually work with the Apache [6] installation, which means I couldn't reinstall it with the updated versions of Postfix and Dovecot since the system installed versions do not support SMTP (Simple Mail Transport Protocol) authentication (with Postfix providing the SMTP part, and Dovecot providing the authentication portion). Finally had to upgrade to the latest version, uninstall that, upgrade Postfix and Dovecot, reinstall Ravencore and still have it fail (although I figured out the immensely bizarre method Ravencore uses to store the Postfix configuaration file, and the cached copy of the Dovecot configuration file so at least using Ravencore won't break SMTP authentication).
Then there was getting Dovecot to authenticate not against /etc/passwd but another password file. Turns out you need to specify the file twice under different options:
>
```
auth default {
passdb passwd-file {
args = /etc/dovecot-passwd
}
userdb passwd-file {
args = /etc/dovecot-passwd
}
}
```
Yeah, I don't understand it either.
Postfix wasn't a problem—good documentation there. The only problem with it was Ravencore overwriting the configuration file with its own copy without the proper SMTP authentication settings. It was just a matter of tetting the proper settings into the bizarre format Ravencore uses to store the Postfix configuration (each line gets its own file—sigh).
Hours! (You paying attention, Smirk? Hours!)
Smirk just called to remind me that I was the one that picked Ravencore. So there you have it.