Technology

Howdie, Eric and I had planned a loooooong time ago to have a hackathon this week-end. However, some asshole piece of shit ran into my car while it was parked, made it unable to take the road and flee without leaving a note. Long story made short, I had to be at the repair shop this week-end to be able to get my car before end of September.

It’s been over a month since my last post but I have an excuse: I was super busy, then I was super on vacation … but I’m back again ;-)

Yesterday, I came back from Budapest and was too tired to write anything, but here’s a quick summary of all the features that have been implemented with regard to OpenSMTPD by Eric, Charles and I.

Yesterday, after nearly missing my plane by 5 minutes, I finally managed to make it to Budapest for g2k12, the OpenBSD general hackathon. While this is not my first hackathon, this is the first general one with many hackers working on all kinds of subsystems ranging from ports to network and kernel. It’s fun to see many people focused on improving different areas which you use daily, sometimes without even noticing, and doing it with as much fun as you are having fixing your own area ;-)

It’s been a while since my last post about OpenSMTPD. I don’t know what Eric and Charles have been up to, I was quite busy with my daytime job and couldn’t really spend much time on the hobby ;-)

This is the first post of a series to illustrate and describe a “proof of concept” code by Charles, Eric and I. I will describe the features as they are implemented.

First of all, I’d like to “thank” The Spamhaus project which forced me into hacking this feature in a hurry. See, I rent a server at online.net which I use for OpenSMTPD live testing and to run some experimental code before it hits the OpenBSD tree.

When we first started working on OpenSMTPD, we planned for future features but we did not necessarily start integrating them right away as the goal was to bootstrap the project first with basic features.

Ok, I already posted about the new SQLite map_backend earlier today but it turns out that I’ve been very productive, and it was worth another post ;-)

During the r2k12 hackathon in Paris, Marc Espie committed SQLite to OpenBSD’s base system. This has the side effect that OpenSMTPD can start using it and while we agreed that we did not want it as a strong dependency, the various backends API allow us to make it a soft dependency that can be removed without breaking the daemon if someone really does not want SQLite linked.