Tag Archives: switch

Switch MTA on FreeBSD

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As you probably know FreeBSD comes with Sendmail installed as the default MTA. However this may be a bit overkill on a desktop installation where the most you might want is to relay mails to an external address. Luckily it is quite easy to change the default MTA as described in the handbook, see 28.4. Changing the Mail Transfer Agent.

On my Desktop I prefer to install nullmailer. This is a simple MTA replacement for hosts which only relay mails through a smart relay. GNUTLS (SSL) is not enabled by default in the nullmailer package on FreeBSD. So if you want SSL you have to compile the port. This is my case. Let’s install it:

cd /usr/ports/mail/nullmailer
make install clean
(...)
pkg lock nullmailer

The configuration happens in /usr/local/etc/nullmailer. This directory contains multiple files and each one of them focuses on a specific aspect of the configuration.

First we specify the remote SMTP through which our mail shall be relayed, this is the remotes file. This file contains a list of remote servers, the module used to send the message and command-line arguments for that module. Modules are located in /usr/local/libexec/nullmailer. The man page states that you can list available options using --help on each protocol module.

In most cases you want to use the smtp module which takes the following arguments (with SSL enabled):

  • port: SMTP port (25, 465, 587, …)
  • user: SMTP user
  • pass: SMTP password
  • auth-login: LOGIN authentication method (default to PLAIN)
  • ssl: Use SSL/TLS encryption
  • starttls: Use STARTTLS command to initiate encrypted connection
  • insecure: Accept invalid certificates (which I do not recommend)
  • x509certfile: Client certificate file
  • x509cafile: Certificate Authority trust file (default to /etc/ssl/cert.pem on FreeBSD)
  • x509crlfile: Certificate revocation list
  • x509fmtder: Switch from PEM to DER format for the certificates

Here is an example that would relay through relay.example.com:465 using SSL and LOGIN authentication:

relay.example.com smtp --port=465 --ssl --auth-login --user=some-user --pass=some-password

Since this file contains your SMTP password in cleartext, I advise you to:

chown nullmail:nullmail remotes
chmod 600 remotes

Next we edit the name that will be used to construct email addresses on this host. You configure this in the me file. Normally this should be the fully-qualified host name of the computer running nullmailer. This is really useful to distinguish, say root at machine-a from root at machine-b. However some mail providers refuse to relay mails from a different domain name than their own so it might be useful to change this in those cases (I am my own mail provider, so personally I don’t care and do what I want). You also need to configure defaultdomain to your domain name. That is your FQHN minus the hostname. If a mail is sent to an address that is not localhost and does not contain a domain name (no period in the hostname), this domainname will be appended to it.

After that we configure the mail to which all local mails are forwarded. You configure this address in the adminaddr file. And we also configure the file pausetime. This is the interval of time between two queue runs with a default value of 60 seconds. I prefer to set this to a higher value, like 15 minutes.

For more information about the configuration of nullmailer, see this article. Although related to Raspbian on a RPi, it remains mostly the same.

Now we need to replace the MTA on FreeBSD. First we configure the mailwrapper (see man mailwrapper) in /etc/mail/mailer.conf. Replace each line with their nullmailer equivalent, that is:

sendmail  /usr/local/libexec/nullmailer/sendmail
send-mail /usr/local/libexec/nullmailer/sendmail
mailq     /usr/local/libexec/nullmailer/mailq

Time to test. Disable sendmail, enable nullmailer and send a mail. Oh and by the way, tail -f /var/log/maillog in any case:

service sendmail stop
service nullmailer onestart
echo Hello from FreeBSD\! | mailx -s "test" root

If it works, you can now disable sendmail and enable nullmailer in /etc/rc.conf:

sendmail_enable="NONE"
nullmailer_enable="YES"

Hello FreeBSD!

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It’s been more than two weeks now that I switched from Linux to FreeBSD. There are multiple reasons behind this change and I will not dwell on all of them. If you read this blog (do you? :)), you probably know that I am a long time advocate of Debian. One particular thing that I like with Debian is that it doesn’t tie your hand with a large set of packages. It is an universal operating system that you can tailor to better suit your needs.

However, as time passes it became harder to modify anything. More and more I find myself patching programs that just want to do things on their own fancy way. More and more some random daemon just gets in my way because it supposedly covers all possible use cases. And recently I came under the impression that my system was just a bunch of layers of layers of various daemons doing their stuff somehow, somewhere, all of them trying to reinvent the wheel, with a twist.

Finally there is one important thing you should remember, Linux is not UNIX. Actually in the past few years, it started to diverge from this philosophy quite significantly. This article presents some differences between the UNIX and the Linux/FLOS model much better than I could do. And this is where we come to the root of my decision. While I can understand some of the benefits of the later approach, it dawns on me that as an user, I do not fit in FLOS and if I keep using Linux as a desktop, this life will be a hell of frustration and ranting without end. Note that this transition was long time foreseeable. I always spent a lot of time with BSDs. However these were casual and experimental setups and I didn’t do much more than porting stuff to it.

I could as well use this system on a daily basis. So I decided to take the leap and use FreeBSD on my laptop (ThinkPad X201). I first installed FreeBSD 10 (RELEASE), but it didn’t work as expected. In particular the Intel KMS driver did not work properly. Also xrandr did not work, and the performances were far lower than Linux. Needless to say, I was a bit downhearted. I expected so much from this first installation.

After an evening weighting the pros and cons, sadly contemplating the idea of returning to Linux, I decided to give it another try with FreeBSD 11 (CURRENT). Fortunately almost everything worked perfectly then. The Intel KMS driver works, although I don’t have access to the ttys (ttys and suspend now work on HEAD). Xrandr works perfectly which is imperative to give a presentation. The wireless card, sound card, fingerprint reader and ultra base also work with no apparent problem.

However I still have some problems with the function keys not detected on the external ThinkPad keyboard. Also xscreensaver does not always detect the finger print reader. Finally the secondary mouse and keyboard are not always properly detected by X. I guess this is probably a problem with HAL. But I did not look into it yet (ums_load="YES" in /boot/loader.conf).

I did several quick benchmarks to compare the performances with the Debian installation. I will post the results in a few days. I will also leverage the change to update some of my projects and also to clean my configurations a little bit. I already did so for Emacs and Awesome WM, though for now I’ve something else to do.