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… and publishing this article using iPhone's WordPress application! Pretty cool huh:)

I was trying to build ImageMagick on my server today (ooops, forgot to built it when installing everything else the day I got my new Mac at work). Actually the compilation process is pretty easy but this time it gave my some unpleasant minutes.

The problem was that I was getting
checking if JPEG package is complete... no -- some components failed test error when running ImageMagick's configure.

Tried to reinstall jpeglib, 2 times hehe :) With no resolution. Then decided to check the Internet and found an advice to check the config.log file.

Checked it and found one interesting thing in the part where availability of jpeglib was checked. The error was that libjpeg.a library was outdated with suggestion to run ranlib on it.

And that was exactly what I have done:

#ranlib /usr/local/lib/libjpeg.a


And the problem was solved.
If you're still here with me, it means you have a future as a unix system admin, whatever it means to you :)

Today I faced a problem when I have a smtp-auth sendmail server configured to accept connections using password authentication, and everything was configured just fine in sendmail, that is, I had all required libs installed and the following strings on sendmail config (you can find more info anywhere on the web):

define(`confAUTH_MECHANISMS', `LOGIN PLAIN DIGEST-MD5 CRAM-MD5')dnl
TRUST_AUTH_MECH(`LOGIN PLAIN DIGEST-MD5 CRAM-MD5')dnl

But although the configuration was correct, I couldn't connect to mail server, getting password incorrect message. Well after some googling I found out that one simple daemon should be running for sendmail to be able to process login. The daemon is: saslauthd. And for some reason it was not launched at startup. After I have launched it, the server immediately accepted my authentication and I was able to send mail again.

On RedHad Linux you can launch the daemon by typing the following:
/etc/init.d/saslauthd start

The solution is actually pretty easy, but not so clear just because the required stuff is not actually thought of as a part of sendmail system. But it actually is.