Recently at work we tried to deploy Laconi.ca which is a microblogging platform. We wanted to do this for 2 reasons. The first being the obvious, which is to be able to have a campus wide microblogging platform. The second, and what I think is the coolest, is that we wanted to use it to post our nagios alerts for our systems. Each monitored server will post its alerts to its own account on Laconi.ca and admins can subscribe themselves to whichever servers they see fit.
Now for the technical aspect of jumping the Postfix barrier to get the email submission to work. In the documentation for Laconi.ca it says to simply put the following into your /etc/aliases file
*:/path/to/maildaemon.php
| Well this is wrong for 2 reasons. First of all the syntax is incorrect. You need a | symbol before the script to say that you are piping the email to a command. The second reason which causes the most problems is the fact that /etc/aliases does not support the * wildcard on Ubuntu if at all. Its a security hole I guess. Here is how to work around this issue. |
edit/create /etc/postfix/virtual and make sure this line is in there
@
laconica
then run
sudo postmap /etc/postfix/virtual
to compile the file for postfix to use
Now edit /etc/aliases and put this line in there
laconica:
make sure that the maildaemon.php is executable
chmod 755
then run
sudo newaliases
now restart postfix just for a good time
sudo /etc/init.d/postfix restart
Alright you should be able to send emails to the random mail address that Laconi.ca assigns to the user accounts under their profiles. Don’t make the same mistake I did and try to send an email from a different address than the one you registered your account with though, it won’t work 