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Dynamic DNS problems prompt move to cucipop
18 November 1999
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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. see also: DNS - the dynamic way, installing qpopper (a POP server), and notes on qpopper. |
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The problem
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| 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. |
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The install
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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. |
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On demand
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| 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 |
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Standalone
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I created the following file: /usr/local/etc/rc.d/cucipop.sh#!/bin/sh [ -x /usr/local/libexec/cucipop ] && /usr/local/libexec/cucipop -Y && echo -n ' cucipop' And don't forget to make it executable: chmod 750 /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 |
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The results
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| 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. |
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