Things look quiet here. But I've been doing a lot of blogging at
dan.langille.org because I prefer WordPress now.
Not all my posts there are FreeBSD related.
I am in the midst of migrating The FreeBSD Diary over to WordPress
(and you can read about that here).
Once the migration is completed, I'll move the FreeBSD posts into the
new FreeBSD Diary website.
Dynamic DNS problems prompt move to cucipop18 November 1999
This article documents the problems I was having with qpopper today. To
be fair, this isn't actually a qpopper problem; it was performing as
advertised. It was actually a dynamic DNS problem which affect qpopper
preformance.
My mail client was having trouble accessing the POP server on my FreeBSD box. A
long delay would occur between starting the connection and actually downloading the
messages. It was taking about 30 seconds for what was normally a 1 second job.
Unacceptable.
I tracked the problem down to my dynamic dns provider, www.yi.org but to be fair, it is a free service. They
had gone down. Coincidentally, I had only recently obtained a static IP. I was
already in the process of modifying my DNS to reflect this.
The install
Since I have the entire ports tree installed, all I needed
to do was:
cd /usr/ports/mail/cucipop
make
make install
I decided to run cucipop as a standalone daemon as opposed to starting it up
on demand. See man cucipop for more details.
On demand
According to the man pages, I can start cucipop from inetd, I need the following:
>
In order to start cucipop from within inetd(8), the fol-
lowing entry in inetd.conf(5) would be suitable:
pop3 stream tcp nowait root /usr/local/libexec/cucipop cucipop -Y
Standalone
I created the following file: /usr/local/etc/rc.d/cucipop.sh
And if you make a change to /etc/inetd.conf, don't forget to hup inetd:
killall -hup inetd
The results
It appears that cucipop does not do the same dns checks which qpopper
does. Checking my mailbox via POP now takes about 1 second (maybe less).
In
addition to changing POP servers, I also went from starting my POP daemon on demand (i.e. /etc/inetd.conf)
to running it standalone (/usr/local/etc/rc.d/cucipop.sh). Running
standalone is a good idea if you run a busy site (with lots of people checking their
mail). I can't see any problems running standalone on most boxes. I have an
old 486 with 16MB of memory. I don't anticipate any problems but will report them if
any arise.
