[Discuss] Lessons learned tonight

[david at thekramers.net (David Kramer)]

1) Getting postfix/dovecot to do SSL/TLS and to share auth is a BITCH!
The docs at https://help.ubuntu.com/12.04/serverguide/postfix.html are
both insufficient and incongruous with the files acutally installed in
12.04.  Welcome to open source.

2) If you want to fool around with putting /etc in version control, do
it BEFORE you muck things up so you can use it to restore and diff. I've
thought about this before but never done it.

I'm very familiar with Subversion and mercurial, but decided on Git
because (1) you can't go on the internet on a non-porn site for 10
minutes before someone mentions it, and (2) It puts it's dot control
directory in one place, instead of putting one in every directory under
its control, so I felt it had a lower likelyhood of causing problems.
We'll see.

3) There are several descriptions out there on how you can get kubuntu
into text mode and only start X when you want it.  Most of them are
wrong.  (1) There is no option to do this from the login screen.  (2)
Removing kdm from /etc/init.d/, remarkably, does not prevent it from
running on startup, which is a clear violation on how upstart is
supposed to work.  (3) You can, however, let it start, then do "service
kdm stop".  Disappointing.

4) I am in very short order, happy with KDE.  I have configured it to do
everything that I want with no problem.  The only exception is some
equivalent to "gnome-do".

5) Once you get your SMTP system working, restore your spam filtering
system FAST.  About 10%  of my inbox was in Russian and Chinese, and
another 50% was selling me drugs or women, within a few hours.

6) Keeping my systems and backups simple really paid off, especially
twice-daily database dumps with a simple mysqldump means they can be
easily imported onto any system.  Backups in .tgz format simply work.

7) I *really* need to get back to a regular sleep schedule.  I've gotten
more than 3 hours sleep a night only three or four nights in the past
week and a half trying to get things working.  And the resulting errors
have been a big problem.